I’ll start this one last time.
Welcome to the second full month of baseball! The Dodgers are the first team to 20 wins, the Yankees have been given special dispensation to have doctors stationed on the field of play during games, the Nats are finding dramatic ways to underperform, and the Orioles continue to be the least surprising team in baseball.
Happy May!
[Previous thread here]
For those of you lamenting the death of small ball, a nice moment from last night’s Cards/Nats game:
With two outs and the bases loaded, Kolten Wong bunts in a run.
That was a beauty! The ball just died in the infield. I wonder how many rows back you could hear the third basement cry, “oh shit!”?
Cody Bellinger has apparently solved baseball.
In 31 games; .431, 14 home runs. Of course no human can keep it up, but how many guys in modern times have had a month like that?
He’s better than Christian Yelich so far and Yelich has been unbelievable.
Yankees got swept. Woot!
A 6-3 west coast road trip is pretty good though and it looks like no one went on the IL for 2 straight days.
The Diamondbacks looked pretty good. I can definitely see them finishing at .500 this year.
The Giants are undefeated in May!
If they just had a bit more offense, they could be a contender this year. i’mm not sure how that might happen, but I’not abandoning all hope just yet.
Damning with faint praise, indeed!
(They’ve been below .500 5 times in the last ten years, and of the other five, in two they were 81-81.)
The Reds are trying to crawl back into the light and get to .500. Losing that series to the Cardinals sucks donkey dorks, especially after that 12-1 opening game rout.
Castillo is emerging as a legit ace. His ERA is 1.45, second only to Davies in all of baseball and he’s got an eye popping 50 strikeouts across 43 innings pitched. WHIP is 0.99. Pretty damn good so far.
The Red Sox have righted the ship, and Michael Chavis may be the answer at 2B.
The conventional wisdom on pitching coaches is they usually don’t make too much difference overall. It is interesting Derek Johnson defected from the Brewers to the Reds this past offseason and the Reds’ team ERA+ is 50 points lower than the Brewers’, even with Davies performing this far over his head so far. The guy has some kind of Midas touch so far.
Corey Kluber will be out for a while with a fractured elbow after he gothit by a 102 mph line drive.
Scary.
Two - him and Yelich, this year. I’ve been seeing things on Twitter the last week or so with some crazy numbers showing this just doesn’t happen. It’s nuts - these are Barry Bonds numbers.
Did you have to bring up the 'roid monster. And Yelich’s average is 80 points behind Bellinger all he’s doing is keeping up with the long ball not all of the other stats.
i think the Dodgers are going to win the WS series this year unless they decide to take a dirt nap in August like the did a few years ago …
Nationals fire their pitching coach, way too many bullpen explosions this year.
Cubs blank the Cardinals 4-0 in Wrigley Field. Kyle Hendricks throws 81 pitches for the complete game shutout.
Gotta go with Harvey Haddix pitching a perfect game for 12 innings and losing.
And the Giants are still undefeated in May…after coming back from being down 8-0 in the third, to win 12-11 in 11 innings.