MLB: Post-Season 2019

The Game Room
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More HOF Pitcher teammates who went on to other teams:

Lefty Grove and Waite Hoyt were briefly teammates.

Cy Young and John Clarkson both played for the Cleveland Spiders.

Christy Mathewson and Rube Marquard were teammates on the Giants; yes, Mathewson did play for another team, the Reds, albeit briefly. Then Marquard was a teammate of Burleigh Grimes on Brooklyn, and they both later moved on.

The individual champ has to be Gaylord Perry. Perry and Juan Marichal were teammates in San Francisco. Both moved on from there. Perry then played with Bert Blyleven in Texas, from where both moved on, and Perry went to San Diego and pitched with Rollie Fingers, and they both moved on, and then Perry played with Goose Gossage in New York, and they both moved on from there, and then he briefly went back to Texas and played with Fergie Jenkins, and they both moved on from there, and then he pitched with Phil Niekro in Atlanta, and they both moved on from there. Honestly, I may be missing a Perry connection or two.

Niekro, incidentally, was a teammate of Warren Spahn in his first tour of duty with the Braves, and it may surprise you to know Spahn at the end of his career pitched for the Mets and Giants so that qualifies.

I’m sure there are more but I’m doing this by hand. When Roger Clemens is finally put in the Hall of Fame he will qualify here a few times; he pitched with Roy Halladay in Toronto, and they both moved on.

What will be cool is if Andy Pettite also gets in; he and Clemens would actually count twice. They were teammates in New York, both went to Houston, and both went back to New York and were briefly teammates again.

If Curt Schilling ever gets in, and eventually I think he will once the stink of Trumpism goes away, he’ll also qualify, with Randy Johnson.

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The Mariners (expansion team) haven’t even lost a World Series yet. 42 years (1977 through 2019). And I’d guess they have a few years more ahead of them.

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Ways to make the game more exciting (or less boring):

Move back the pitcher’s rubber back to 63.5 feet (the center of the diamond).
Use robo umpiring.
Each team has a 5 minutes timer that runs down throughout the game when the batter can be outside of the batter’s box. When the timer runs down to zero, the batter is out.
The pitcher has pitch clock per pitch to avoid putting a man on base.
Allow big barrel aluminum bats with bigger sweet spots.
Any unsuccessful pick-off attempt is a ball.
Reduce the ball requirement for a walk.
Allow batters to charge the mound on any called inside pitch, but the fight must take place on the dirt part of the mound only. If either play comes off the mound, that player is ejected from the game. Any players other than the batter and the pitcher that steps on the dirt part of the mound gets ejected (but the catcher (or any other player) can try to tackle the batter before he gets to the mound at which point the batter has to re-enter the batter’s box and may not charge the mound again that game unless he gets hit by the ball).

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In 2001 the Mariners won 116 regular season games, tying for most number of wins all time with the 1906 Cubs. Sadly they lost the ALCS. They haven’t even been to a single postseason game since. That’s the longest playoff drought of any team in any major US sports league. Statistically speaking, they’re the worst US sports team.

Go Mariners!!! :frowning:

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Another reason for the games taking so long is the way hitters approach at-bats. It seems like nothing happens until the count is 3-2 and the hitter has fouled off 5 pitches. In between, the batter has made 10 circular walking tours of foul territory and the pitcher’'s consulted the rosin bag for advice multiple times. More pace of play problems:

Foul balls: There were 14,000 more foul balls last season than there were 20 years ago.

Pitches per PA: The average is up to 3.93/PA, rising steadily from 3.74 20 years ago.

Pitchers per game: 4.41 up from 3.46 twenty years ago.

I couldn’t find total pitches per game, but you know that’s up too. Every aspect of the game is conspiring to add length.

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but, but, we’re “rebuilding.” Things are looking up.

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I was only counting teams that have moved. For teams that stayed in the same city, the Mariners are now tied (with the Astros) for the longest a team has gone from its foundation until its first series appearance. They just recently passed the St. Louis Browns, who went 41 years from the beginning of the World Series until their first pennant.

The Expos/Nationals (50 years) and Senators II/Rangers (49 years) went longer from their foundation until their first pennant but moved cities.

The longest a team has gone before winning its first Series is 77 years, for the Philadelphia Phillies.

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It’s funny, they’ve been “meh” for years and I keep saying they need to do what the Astros did and commit to a rebuild, starting with getting real prospects for the future.

They’re doing that now and I’m skeptical it will work. It’s because I’m a cynical asshole. :smiley:

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If you can find the average number of plate appearances per game, you can multiply it by pitches per PA to get the average number of pitches per game.

If, for instance, average PAs per side per game was constant at 40, then you’d get 15.2 more pitches per game now than 20 years ago.

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:smiley:

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One more post about the Nats victory before this thread fades away…
Charlie Slowes is the Nationals radio announcer, he has been doing this since day 1 in 2005.
He is very professional, low-key, and precise.
Here is his call for the last out of the Series… Enjoy!

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I honestly wonder how fast a turnaround is reasonably likely; what’s the quickest you can do this? The Mariners are a genuinely very bad team and don’t have any Juan Soto superprospects I’m aware of. They went 68-84 and they deserved to.

I don’t think they could win the World Series next year, could they? Nothing’s impossible but it seems super unlikely. Could they win it in 2021?

Of cpourse, the 1991 Braves went from worst to one hit from the World Series championship, and they were quite bad in 1990. The Twins that same year actually did go from worst to the title, but they weren’t really as bad.

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The Braves might have been ‘bad’ statistically in 1990, but they were clearly developing their young aces by that point. I grew up watching Braves baseball in the late 80s, early 90s and remember Smoltz, Glavine, and Avery. I think they had David Justice by that point. Others like Jeff Treadway, Otis Nixon, and Jeff Blauser - not great but part of the Dream Season of '91. IIRC, they were already developing from bad to a potential contender. Then the acquisitions: Terry Pendleton, Lonnie Smith, and Sid Bream in 1991.

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That was awesome!

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I listened to the radio instead of watching it so that I’d be hearing Charlie Slowes and Dave Jaegler instead of Buck and Smoltz. I preferred finding out what happened from Charlie to seeing it on tv with my own eyes.

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How does Joe Buck still have a job with guys like this out there?

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Have you seen this article that breaks down why that game was so long? Why did those World Series games last so long?
The TL;DR:

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4:03 did seem long for a 4-1 ballgame, but looking under the hood revealed 10 pitchers used and 22 runners stranded on the bases. Four hours of ball-scratching and frustration.

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My sons and I have been going to Nats games since the beginning, when they were 7 and 5. The youngest is in college 6 hours away, so he wasn’t physically present for the “October Miracle”. The oldest is in school nearby, so he was. This team even made my wife a fan.

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Walt Kelly, creator of gthe comic strip Pogo, predicted the Nationals’ WS victory 60 years ago.

Kelly’s character Seminole Sam, a fox who is also a con man, had a flock of gnats which he’d trained to spell out words and phrases above the heads of other characters. In 1959 Kelly did a sequence where the gnats narrated the success of the Washington Senators, then sometimes known as the Nats (only Kelly wrote the name as Gnats). The (G)nats beat out Detroit to win the AL pennant, then defeated the Cardinals to win the Series.

Here’s one of the strips, the only one I could find online from that sequence unfortunately:

The strips were collected in one of the books, but I don’t recall which one.