This is Preller’s second 30-day suspension as a baseball executive. Which is impressive, because aside from that Cardinals employee who’s doing prison time for hacking the Astros’ computers, I can’t think of anyone who’s been penalized like this even once, let alone twice. You have to think this severely damages his ability to work with other teams. Nobody will trust him.
Still cannot believe they let Jed Hoyer (and Jason McLeod) walk out the door for nothing. So dumb.
Royals did get five runs in the ninth. This was an Oakland record for the most runs they’ve ever scored in a four game series.
Love that dirty water!
Baltimore has the sixth best offense in a fifteen team league. That’s a bit far from being monstrous. Seattle has scored more runs. The Orioles hit many home runs but they hit a lot of solo shots because they aren’t very good at doing anything else; they’re just so-so at getting on base and are the slowest team I have ever seen in my life.
I’m not sure the bullpen is all that brilliant either. Britton’s been amazing and Brach too, but everyone else is just okay.
Showalter, though, I’ll give you. Somehow he’s kept 'em in contention. It’s still a horse race but mad props to a guy who can have this team two games out on September 16.
You can watch for a swing with the same cameras/sensors that are watching the pitch. For example, it could be defined as “If the bat is in the strike zone during the pitch, it’s a swing.”
Assuming mistakes happen at random (which is only approximately correct) this is true.
But the game’s integrity is diminished regardless - which degrades the experience of all fans, including those whose team got the benefit of a bad call.
You’re not kidding. I think i could run faster than most of those guys.
They have a total of 17 stolen bases, in a league where the next-lowest is 44, and the leader has 116. Their stolen base success rate is about 60%, meaning that they probably shouldn’t be trying to steal at all. The AL success rate is about 70%.
I know stolen bases is often about timing, not just speed, but the lack of speed on the Orioles is evident to anyone who watches them on a regular basis. They’re slow at going from first to third, and from home plate to first.
No, it’s not true, Randomness is not the same as evenness. Random things are not distributed evenly.
There is no reason to think bad calls are equally distributed amongst all teams.
EVen if they were, the timing of calls is exceptionally important. A poor call in a 14-2 regular season game in May against a team that will finish dead last anyway is not important. Blowing the Jeffrey Maier call was very, very important.
To use the Yankees as an example, they have been the beneficiaries of several infamously terrible playoff calls in the last couple of decades; the Maier call, the Joe Mauer hit that was technically fair twice over and called foul anyway, and the Chuck Knoblauch non-tag. They have been unusually lucky in this regard, or were up to a few years ago, anyway.
The Cardinals might well have lost the 1985 World Series because of a blown call. That’s the WORLD SERIES. What call has made up for that?
As of today, Boston is +171 in Runs Scored minus Runs Allowed; Baltimore is +28, but only 2 games behind.
The real standout is Texas: A meager +19, but 27 games above .500 (nine more than Boston). Yankees are -14, but still 8 games above .500.
Its even better that Betances obviously got the signs crossed up and threw a heater instead of a slider (watch the catcher flinch as he’s expecting a slider; good thing Hanley’s bat was there to keep the ball from going to the backstop.
)
http://www.espn.com/video/clip?id=17559407
Bonus schadenfraude for crushing John Sterling’s hopes and dreams.
Best win of the year.
Win, dance, repeat.
With a large enough sample size, they are.
Your point, which is valid, is that the sample size for baseball isn’t large enough. It’s no comfort to Cardinals fans that a 1985 World Series injustice will probably be offset by some matching injustice in the next several hundred years.
And your point, Xema,
which is what I was talking about upthread,
Every bad call is undesirable. Another bad call, perhaps going the other way, makes it worse, not better.
43 saves goes a long way to explain how the O’s have been able to contend with their anemic run differential. He hasn’t given up a home run since April and only allowed 4 earned runs all season. His 98 mph sinker is absolutely insane and he can make it break to either side of the plate :eek: (Eck: “Its impossible to throw a sinker any harder than that”)
He’s a lock for the Cy Young and IMO he should be the AL MVP.
Rick Kitchen:
I did see that, but the end run differential in the game was still 9, which means a run differential of 41 for the series. I haven’t yet determined if this is a record, either for the team or MLB-wide.
Great stuff.
Of course, since Buchholz is pitching tonight, I expect a riveting, low-scoring contest. 
I haven’t been able to find anything definitive. The closest I’ve gotten is looking at a list of the biggest blowouts in MLB history and then finding out what happened in those series. So far, the closest contender I’ve seen is the Red Sox in a series against the St. Louis Browns from June 7-9, 1950. Boston won the first two games by scores of 20-4 and 29-4, respectively. But they lost the last game in the series 12-7. By my math, that’s a run differential of 36. I haven’t found anything closer, yet.
Side note: in this era of trying to speed up baseball, the Red Sox are often named as one of the slowest teams in the game. But of the three games referenced above, none of them went longer than 2 hours and 45 minutes, officially. I’m not even sure how it’s possible to score a combined 33 runs in a game in less than three hours.
They played “Yakety Sax” the whole game.
David Ross celebrates the Cubs clinching with a shot.
Britton has had an amazing year. One great thing about watching the Orioles this year is the rock-solid certainty that if they get to the 9th with any sort of lead, they’re going to win the game. Watching Britton pitch is awesome.
But i think it’s extremely unlikely that he’ll win the Cy Young, and there is no way on earth that he will be in serious consideration for MVP.
Britton’s WAR for the season so far is 3.7, which is pretty impressive for a guy who’s only pitched about 60 innings. But two of the top contenders for the Cy Young—Tanaka and Kluber—have WARs of 5.1 and 5.0 respectively. While relief pitchers have won the Cy Young, it’s pretty damn rare, and Mariano Rivera never won it despite having season WARs of 5.0, 4.3, 4.2, and 4.0 during his career.
When we factor in hitters for the MVP, Mike Trout is at 8.3, and there are five others above 6.0, including Britton’s teammate Manny Machado. And then there’s David Ortiz, whose WAR is only 4.1, but who is having an amazing year with the bat (only AL player with OPS over 1.000), and will also likely be a sentimental favorite among many voters. And all this despite the fact that, on the occasions when he takes the field, he could be replaced quite easily with a barcalounger without losing the Red Sox any more runs.
Check your math.
I get a run differential of 31 for the series, not 41.