Masahiro Tanaka starts for the Yankees tonight, and it’s a good thing it’s not a day game. He’s only managed 12.1 innings in his four daytime starts, giving up 9 home runs.
Day games: 0-3, 17.51 ERA
Night games: 4-1, 2.51 ERA
I wonder if it means anything, or it’s just a fluke.
Interesting catch, there have been players that needed to get their eyes checked with a physical cause for such discrepancies but I swear it was usually the other way around.
No, what makes baseball baseball is the sport, where the pitcher and fielders try to get the batter out and the batters try to get on base and score runs.
Beanball wars and brawls are some kind of bullshit is what they are. They aren’t baseball. This “unwritten rule” stuff is complete horseshit, because the “unwritten rules” seem to change depending on who’s pissed off at who, a common trait of rules that aren’t written down.
Bryce Harper threw a helmet at a guy - you may all spare me the ridiculous excuses, it slipped but that was his intention, he was moving his throwing hand directly at Strickland - and should be suspended for a month, and the incident reported to the police to consider whether or not he should be arrested.
The jail sentence would make batters think twice about rushing the mound.
BTW, the DC area is really turning into a baseball town. We know we have Harper for maybe one more year before he moves to the Red Sox or Yankees or someplace where he has a better chance of winning a world series. Everyone is stepping up and suddenly we are 8.5 games ahead. All of a sudden even the soccer families are sounding like baseball fans. When we get drunk enough, someone might even sheepishly suggests we might goal the way. Its crazy, I know. But it feels good to do so much winning.
I don’t buy it. I was commenting to my wife the other day that, more than any other MLB city I’ve spent time in, DC seems to lack solid support for its baseball team beyond perhaps a casual interest. It’s so rare to even see anyone walking around with Nats gear on. Even during last year’s playoffs, I felt like few people were at least openly showing support for their team.
But they are obviously still soccer fans at heart.
Well to be fair, we have only had a baseball team since 2005. We had gone 30+ years without a baseball team by pretending that the Baltimore Orioles were actually a DC team.
Aside from the Redskins, I can’t think of a more popular team in the area. And frankly, I think the Redskins are losing ground.
Duh-DOH!!!
That’s frikking hilarious.
Frikking autocorrect.
A tip of the cap to Tyler Pill of the Mets, who had a fine outing in his first major league start (and should have won, if not for the bullpen).
Pill joins other aptly-named pitchers in baseball history, including Josh Outman, Chief Bender, Darcy Fast, John Strike, Bill Swift and of course, Dave Heaverlo.
Don’t forget Bill Hands and Rollie Fingers. And Bob Walk.
And Grant Balfour; along with Walk, the two guys whose names suggested that they were not going to be successful pitchers. 
Every team in the NL Central is playing basically .500 ball. Cubs fans in the facebook groups I’m in are screaming bloody murder and suggesting laughable trades. The Cubs should be able to start breaking away in the division in June, there are 7 games with the Marlins, and three of those are part of a ten game homestand to begin June. The weather in June should finally start warming up after a miserable May of cold, wind, and rain.
I guess I should check out some Colorado Rockies games, they’re 18-8 on the road as opposed to 15-13 at Coors.
Hawk Harrelson to retire after 2018 season.
Good riddance.
Just got home after watching the Padres complete a three-game sweep of the Cubs.
San Diego won 2-1 today, after an eighth-inning, 1-out triple by Franchy Cordero. Next batter up, Cordero beat the throw home on a fielders-choice grounder to second.
The game went by in a flash, 2h25m.
Definitely sounded like there were more Cubs fans than Padres fans in the stands for most of the game, although the hometown crowd got pretty loud after the Padres took the lead.
He gone!
Can someone please explain to me the reasoning behind who got the win in the Houston win tonight? (I mean, other than “wins are absurd measurements for individual players, let alone relievers”.)
You can’t give it to the starter, of course, since he didn’t go 5 innings. However, when Paulino came out of the game the Astros already held the lead (and wouldn’t be giving it up) so there was no one obvious to give it to. In that situation, you would ordinarily give it to the first relief pitcher into the game, but rule 10.17(c) says that scorers should not give the win to a reliever who is “ineffective in a brief appearance” if a later reliever is more effective.
The first reliever in was Hoyt, who gave up 2 earned runs in an inning and two thirds, which obviously isn’t all that effective. The next two guys each gave up a run also. The only reliever who didn’t give up a run was the last one, Feliz. Since you have to give it to someone, might as well give it to Feliz. Not that Feliz probably cares. I expect most scorers would have given it to Hoyt, reasoning that he wasn’t awful; but Feliz is a sensible enough choice.
At worst, he might have been trying to hit/slow down the first baseman who was charging Harper. His arm was just at the wrong angle if he was really aiming for Strickland. Its not like outfielders don’t know how to run and throw.
I would suggest a significant suspension (going into the next season if necessary) for the offending pitcher would stop beanball. These fights usually start with a pitcher hitting the batter. The batter isn’t engaging in self defense when they charge the mound. They are engaging in revenge as a form of deterrence.
Every once in a while you will see a runner get into it with a baseman or the catcher but this almost never comes to blows like intentionally hitting the batter.
I still don’t get why its ok for a pitcher to bean a player that hits home runs off of him. Isn’t that what he is supposed to do? Can a batter charge the mound if the pitcher strikes him out? I say throw the pitcher out of the game for half a season and see how many pitchers hit batters after a few pitchers lose half a season.
Washington attendance isn’t great, I think that’s fair to say. The team’s had some disappointing playoff experiences but it HAS made the playoffs three out of the last five years and yet is still kind of mid-pack in terms of how many people are showing up to watch.
I suppose one could theorize all day why this is, but I think the number one answer is obvious; the people in D.C. with money generally aren’t long term residents of the city, and the long term residents don’t have a great deal of money.
At the same time, since the arrival of the Nationals, Orioles attendance has suffered. The Orioles saw attendance drop about twenty percent starting the year after the Nats set up shop and it dropped below 2 million for the first time in 26 years the year National Park opened. Granted, it had been sliding for awhile because the Orioles were a tire fire of a team, but there was an obvious cliff caused by the Nationals. And since the Orioles became a good team again, attendance has in fact never returned to what it was, remaining mediocre through their recent run of success. I mean, this is a good team with some really exciting ballplayers, and last year they were 10th in the AL in attendance.
I don’t think there’s any serious argument against the nation that the Orioles and Nationals are splitting at least some of their market. Success breeds attendance, but if you look at 2016 AL attendance leaders it goes Toronto, New York, Los Angeles, Boston and Texas, in that order. (Boston would have been higher but Fenway Park doesn’t hold enough people to get any higher than it is.) I don’t think it a coincidence that those five teams are very large media markets. even accounting for the Yankees and Angels sharing their markets.
That doiesn’t mean moving the Expos to Washington was a mistake; the failure to build a real stadium in Montreal and the pownership fiasco made the situation simply untenable. It’s a fine market and a real owner who could get a real stadium built could draw good crowds, but that wasn’t happening, so they had to go somewhere, and it’s not like Washington is a Tampa Bay level fiasco.
Couldn’t find a separate thread about this, and probably should know this but am not sure that I do. When a player is suspended, is he banned from the clubhouse, or just the game? In other words, using Harper as an example, can he dress and watch from the bench, can he sit in the training room and watch in the clubhouse, is he confined to the team hotel, or does he have no choice but to go hang out with Katie Ledeckey and think about what he’s done?