From the video, the moron opened the beer first as well.
Don’t forget, free taco at Taco Bell today courtesy of Mookie Betts.
Mind if I change ‘moron’ and ‘stupid’ to ‘asshole’?
Moving along… the Dodgers and Kershaw extended their deadline to 1pm EST tomorrow. I think they’re trying to make it work out. It’d be nice to see Kershaw retire as a lifelong Dodger. And as a Giants fan, I really am being sincere about that.
Add “drunk kid” and you got it.
After losing two straight WS’s, all of that regular season winning and October failure, and all that practice being gracious in defeat, I’m wondering if the current Dodgers are the 90’s Braves all over again.
They feel like it to this Dodgers fan.
Even though the Giants lost the 2002 World Series (and oh, how painful game 6 was, only 8 outs from winning it all, but I digess), one knock on Barry Bonds to that point was his failure to perform in the postseason, but in that postseason he played great.
For Kershaw and the Dodgers, and for anybody, it is so difficult to win it all. But ever since 2012 when Magic (was a small part of a group that) bought the Dodgers, they’ve been building very, very well. From the ground up, their farm teams and organization, including Ned Colletti as a small part, they’re building the right way.
And as a Giants fan it scares the shit out of me.
The Dodgers will win. And soon. Stay the course. Trust in and support the system. Kershaw will get his championship wearing Dodger Blue. Like Lincecum did towards the end of his career. Will Walker Ferris Buehler be their Madison Bumgarner? He just might be. The Red Sox are fortunate they only saw him once.
Stay the course.
And, to that end, they just resigned Kershaw. Modest 3 yr package.
Bear in mind that during the season, he was pitching against every team in the league, including those who were really not very good. During the post-season, he was pitching against the best of the best. Looked at from that perspective, it would be expected that his ERA might be higher in the post-season.
Of course, there are those who rise to the occasion, such as David price, but Kershaw just wasn’t one of these.
Madison Bumgarner is a good example of one of “those who rise to the occasion” in the postseason. David Price, with his 5-9 record and 4.62 ERA, has been even worse than Kershaw when it counts.
I was referring to this post-season. I’d say his performance in the ALCS and WS qualifies as rising to the occasion. Winning 2 games in the World Series is a serious accomplishment.
But, I’ll grant you that prior to the ALCS this year, he hadn’t lived up to his potential.
Has anyone done any statistical tests to see whether such “rising to the occasion” can be explained just by normal statistical variation?
That’s an interesting question. I suspect that some of this may be attributable to normal statistical variation.
But there are also athletes who are more intensely competitive than most and perform on an even higher level when it really matters. Tom Brady is an example of this.
So it is probably some of both.
Tom Brady’s career playoff statistics are slightly worse than his regular season statistics. His winning percentage in the playoffs is worse than in the regular season, and in the Super Bowl, worse still.
That is of course what you would expect; in the playoffs, he is facing superior opposition. It does, however, suggest that he is not rising to the occasion to an extent he doesn’t already in the regular season.
It always really matters in the big leagues. If an athlete was prone to slacking off to a visible degree, he would have struggled to get that far in the first place.
It seems to me to be one of those articles of faith when it comes to baseball. Some people are completely convinced that they know who “has it” and who doesn’t when it comes to the playoffs. What makes the whole thing even sillier is that some people “don’t have it” until they do.
It’s completely non-falsifiable because if a guy does really well in the playoffs, he must “have it,” and if a guy does badly then he “doesn’t have it.” Except then, if a guy does badly for a while, and then does good, then it’s clear that he NOW “has it” even though he didn’t “have it” before.
It’s the same with the nebulous and fantastical claims about how some guys can only make it in small, low-pressure markets, while other guys are big-market, high-pressure guys. I’ve never seen a single piece of analysis to support that claim, and it always looks like nothing more than a sort of weird combination of hubris and confirmation bias, mainly indulged in by fans of two or three large-market teams who like to make claims about how only the top players can hack it in their big-time atmosphere.
It reminds me of the “wisdom” of football analysts who declare the strength of a team based on who they defeated. Let’s say a team gets a lot of yards rushing in a game, so you might say that team is good at rushing. But then someone might say that they aren’t that good at rushing after all because the other team gave up a lot of rushing yards.
The thing is that sports are very hard to evaluate objectively or definitively. A lot depends on luck and human nature. So people who are paid to be “experts” fall back on tautologies, and sports fans following those experts buy into them. And you end up with a bunch of nonsense treated as if it’s something meaningful.
Of course that pretty much describes all of professional sports, not just the endless discussions about it!
Karen Handel just conceded, giving GA06… Newt Gingrich’s seat… to the Dems.
Shit. Sorry about that!
I believe I’ve heard about studies of ‘clutch’ hitting that found no evidence that any MLB player is particularly better at it.
Which of course makes sense. One-run game bottom of the ninth seventh game of the WS is a high-pressure situation, but so is your first major league appearance, and practice in AA when an important team scout is watching, etc. People who wilt under pressure almost never make it to regular big-league rosters, let alone the playoffs.
Always been dubious when I see Batting average with RISP.
Is it luck or “Rising to the occasion?”