Yeah, from now on I’m just gonna believe everything I read on the internet instead.
Good call!
Let me see if I can dig up that link to the site that documents the progress of the lizard people and their takeover of the Vatican.
Move over Shohei Ohtani (at least till you can pitch again), make room for Michael Lorenzen of Cincinnati. Earlier this week he had a game in which he was the winning pitcher, hit a homer, and played the outfield–the first man to do all three in a game since the late great Babe Ruth. Today he pinch hit for an outfielder in the bottom of the ninth and delivered a double that scored the winning run. I just find this very cool.
(Another two-way player is Brendan McKay of the Rays. He played for my local minor league team a few years back. I go to about 5-6 games a year and keep score. I didn;t know anything about McKay at first, but somewhere along the line while looking back at my scorecards I noticed that the team had used a pitcher named McKay in a couple of these games and a first baseman/DH also named McKay in a couple of others, and then I realized that they had the same uniform number and the same first name…Oops.)
Red Sox have fired Dave Dombrowski: Red Sox fire Dombrowski one season after title
Less than one season after a WS title, in the middle of September? Bizarre. John Henry has form for awkward management exits over the last 15 years, often abrupt and with hard feelings and later revealed to have involved poor or absent communication. Wondering what the story is this time.
Surprisingly decent player to get caught by testing. But yeah, 10 cent head.
In other news, the Astros beat the Mariners 21-1. Cole went 8, gave up one hit, a homer naturally this year, and struck out double digits.
He’s going to get a stupid amount of money in free agency.
EDIT: And Astros prospect Kyle Tucker is finally showing why he was so highly regarded, having lifted his OPS over .900. Decent squad. I need to go buy some furniture at Gallery while Mattress Mac is still offering to pay off the cost if the Astros win the WS. He did it in 2017, and I forget how much it cost him.
Thought he was a very highly regarded coach? Is it because of the relatively meh Boston season?
He was the President of the Red Sox that always seemed to try to gather the team’s glory to him and now may have finally paid for that by taking the fall for a lack of a solid bullpen.
The Palka thing is just so weird. He hit 27 homers last year. He also struck out over a third of the time he went to the plate so he’s not Wade Boggs, but going 1 for 53 is almost impossible for an adult male who knows how to swing a baseball bat.
In AAA this year Palka hit .273 with 27 more homers. That isn’t something an incompetent hitter does.
Astros follow up that 21-1 game with 11 runs in the first two innings against Oakland, making it 32 runs in 9 innings, since they didn’t score in the first and didn’t bat in the ninth against Seattle.
(32 runs in 9 innings over multiple games is not a record - Texas scored 30 in the last 6 innings against Baltimore, August 22, 2007 in the first game of a double-header, then scored 3 in the second inning of the next game for 33 over 9 innings.)
The Rangers also outscored Baltimore 33-0 over that span, so the Astros’ 32-1 advantage over those innings also isn’t a record.
It’s sounding like there were interpersonal issues (most of the people under him didn’t like him and there was a lack of collaborative atmosphere, allegedly) and lack of a coherent strategy. Naturally, because it’s the Red Sox, multiple articles smearing Dombrowski and hinting at everything he was doing wrong and why we should approve of this move have miraculously appeared shortly after his ouster. But there’s probably at least some truth in them.
I hope they conduct a full search for his replacement this time instead of just handing the job to the most obvious internal candidate. Ben Cherington was a good guy but he was really good at one thing (minor leagues) and not so good, it turned out, at the other areas of the job description. He ended up promoted one level beyond his competence after falling into it by default. If the Red Sox decide that Eddie Romero is the best candidate after a full search, then great, but there needs to be a process.
Javy Baez has a hairline fracture in his left thumb. Addison Russell was hit in the face with a pitch the other day, and is on concussion protocols.
So the Cubs have called up their #1 prospect and 2018 first round draft pick Nico Hoerner. Starting at SS, hitting 6th. He’s 1 for 1 with a bloop single. Making some decent plays in the field, too.
Any relation to Joe Hoerner?
Good that David Ortiz got to put his uniform on and throw out the first pitch last night. Yanks won the last 3 games of the series and knock the Red Sox out of the division race. Good day overall.
Not that I’m aware of.
We can’t know the truth, but I don’t see the problem with this move in general; the timing is odd, but Dombrowski was brought in to turn a team with a lot of farm system into an MLB winner, and that’s what he did. Now the team is in the opposite position; they’re very top heavy and burdened with some bad contracts, so they need to move in a different direction.
I am not the first person to observe this, but generally speaking, managers and GMs tend to be most successful in their first few years on a particular job. After that their approach changes the team’s weaknesses and strengths and they’re often not suited to fixing it as a new guy would be.
I wish whoever keeps Jon Daniels on the Rangers payroll would read this. “Not suited to fixing it” is a wild understatement.
There is another kind of management, one suited to keeping a team relatively competitive on a tight budget year after year after year, but never actually good enough to win it all. That approach is sustainable.