Help me I am dying.
My council meetings went well tho. Now I can rest up til Saturday.
The Yanks to the ALCS! Cole pitched great tonight. They won the series without Judge doing much on offense. Weaver slammed the door in the 9th.
Man, great series. Literally could have gone either way. Yanks score 14 runs, the Royals 12. Guys like Pham, Gurriel and Massey really impressed. On the Yankees side, Gleyber, Stanton, Holmes and Weaver really delivered.
This isn’t one of those Yankees teams that make me think World Series, but anything can happen. On to the ALCS!
And, big surprise, the Padres choke.
Padres scored 21 runs in the first 20 innings of the series…then 0 runs in the next 24 afterwards.
that series the choke could have gone either way…Now on to stomping the Mets… which seeing how the record is 4-2 in our favor this season shouldn’t be hard but they’re the Dodgers so …
Cleveland comes back to win the final two games and defeats Detroit in five.
Guardians vs Yankees in the ALCS. Should be a good one.
This current play off format started in 2022. In the first two years the bye teams went 1-7 and there was a lot of whining that there was something wrong and changes needed to be considered. This year the bye teams went 3-1 and maybe everything is fine.
This is not the same Mets team they played in May. Everyone stepped up in June.
My poor Tigers.
Young team, can’t wait for next season.
well you can hope anyways 
Half the team are rookies. We can upgrade at first and third base. Another reclamation arm or two, and it looks nice.
What do you do with Javy Baez? The more I look back on the trade that took him out of Chicago, the more I realize exactly how brilliant Theo Epstein was for getting rid of him and Kris Bryant.
Both of those two players have absolutely tanked since leaving the Cubs.
If I’m reading correctly, he still has 3 years left on a huge contract. And his offensive numbers have progressively declined since joining the Tigers. Troy Sweeney, who replaced Baez after Baez went on the IL, wasn’t a whole lot better offensively.
I think you have to stick with Baez, at least for another year. Can Detroit afford to release him?
You almost can’t afford not to at this point.
Its a billionaire owner. Your job is to cut checks and deal with the financial shit. Pay Javy, let him go move to whatever team he wants or eat his contract and trade him at the deadline. I prefer the latter, as you can get something for him.
The “worth” of money, when billionaires are writing the checks, in a league that has no salary cap, is zero. Do what you’ve got to do to make a better squad, damn the costs.
With his current stats, few teams will want him, particularly if they have to absorb all or most of his salary.
Exactly. Unless he suddenly turns things around next year (at which point, the Tigers might not want to trade him anyway), it’s hard to picture much of a trade market for a guy whose bWAR the past two seasons has been 0.6 and -1.1…especially not at the trade deadline, when “buyers” are looking for a player who can help them win now.
The 2016 Cubs are almost certainly going to be the 4th or 5th World Series winner to never have a Hall of Famer on their roster. The others would be:
1981 Dodgers: Whole bunch of Hall of Very Good guys like Cey, Garvey, Lopes, and Fernando, tho the best bet there may be Reggie Smith (who was a bench player by then). Dusty Baker will get in as a manager I am sure, but that won’t count.
1997 Marlins: Mainly depends on how history views and revises Gary Sheffield’s reputation. [Kevin Brown too] Otherwise more HoVG guys like Moises Alou. Devon White, & Bobby Bonilla.
2002 Angels: Kevin Appier only has 169 wins, so his 55 WAR likely won’t do the trick. K-Rod is a longshot for a closer I’d say (7.8% on the most recent ballot). Lineup was mostly just Hall of Merely Goods, with Tim Salmon the best (40 WAR).
2015 Royals: Alex Gordon won’t get in, and he’s by far the best bet here; just wow in terms of how unimpressive this roster looks now.
2016 Cubs: Has Ben Zobrist (who also played on the 2015 Royals, with 44 WAR total), but this is just wow in terms of how many of their young stars just fell apart as they moved into the 2020’s. I also can’t believe it’s been 8 years… Aroldis Chapman’s had his cup of coffee here, but we all know about his negatives (and he is no longer closing for anyone). Jon Lester is their best bet, tho he would have been 3rd-5th after they hoisted the hardware.
Looking at more recent winners, solid bets exist for everyone from 2017 thru 2022, but not sure the 2023 Rangers will have anyone ( Marcus Semien has 45 WAR but a .255 career batting average, and had a pretty ordinary 2024 so he may be on his way out long before he can get his counting stats up, and a large part of his value is from his defense).
MAYBE Salvador Perez, if he has 2 or 3 more good offensive years. But he’s 34, and certainly on the downhill slope of his career. If Jorge Posada isn’t in the Hall, then Salvy shouldn’t be either.
And I say this as a Huge fan of both the Royals and Perez.
Looking at his Baseball Reference page, and in particular, the Hall of Fame Statistics and Similarity Scores sections, it does seem like he’d come up well short, unless he still has a couple of very good seasons left in the tank.
Right now, the three players whose careers have looked the most similar to Perez are Brian McCann, Javy Lopez, and Posada, and they aren’t in (or likely to make it in), either.