I’m simply surprised at how little regard so many teams have for keeping their AAA teams close enough to get a replacement player up *today *instead of 2 days from now. As well, there’s a common lack of regard for building their fan bases in nearby areas. So what if there’s a new ballpark - the minor league owner gets the revenue from that, not the MLB club.
So the Rockies would bailing out of Colo Springs, for instance, makes no sense.
A Texas team abandoning Oklahoma doesn’t either, but now they both have.
The minor league team has to have money to hold up its end of the player development deal. That’s part of why Fresno was an unattractive option to the A’s (and many others) - the Fresno team was practically bankrupt at times.
Also, I suspect that with the A’s difficulty in getting a new stadium for itself built in the Bay Area, they might see Nashville as a potential re-location target, and thus might want to cultivate a fan base there. I’d been trying to find out if the stadium was designed with possible expansion in mind, but haven’t seen any sites that say one way or the other.
I think Clayton’s big problem today was that he sat on the bench for about 45 minutes before he threw his first pitch. He’s not really used to doing that considering the run support he usually gets.
What’s going on in Det-KC? You can’t use a replay yet. The ball has to be in play and thrown to third before there’s a call to make. (Line drive to second, ball thrown away, runner at third scored without going back to third.)
The ball apparently was thrown back to third, but they didn’t show it on TV. Regardless, it’s a non-reviewable play, even though they did actually use the replay to make their decision. It’s bullshit - but I guess you can’t expect such a colossally terrible baserunning blunder to be over-looked. That loss is Yost’s fault. I better not have to wait another 29 years to watch an equally important game for the Royals.
Effing college football pre-empting the Mariners game on the radio. And of course, as usual, this will continue on Saturdays all through the postseason.
Which really goes to show how ridiculous win/loss records are when assessing a pitchers overall performance.
Hiroki Kuroda has the poorest run support in the Al at 3.68 per game. His ERA is 3.77, so it’s not surprising that his record is 11-9. On one of the powerhouse Yankee teams, his record would probably be somewhere around 16-4.
That brings me to Andy Pettitte and why he isn’t a Hall of Famer. It’s hard for me to admit, because I really enjoyed watching him play. Lots of great memories.
In 2003, Pettitte won 21 games with a 4.02 ERA. Of course ERA isn’t everything, but it’s illustrative when you compare it to the run support he received: a whopping 6.61 per game. For his career he averaged 5.4 per game.
Sorry to have gone off on a rant about win/loss stats. What would be the best replacement stat? Win shares?
This is true, but I’ve watched every Kershaw start for the last three years and when he sits for a long time between warming up and taking the mound, he can start out a bit shaky. In the game in question, he sat for 48 minutes before throwing the first pitch of the game and came out shaky. I wasn’t surprised.
I think it’s only useful in the context of Wins. Otherwise, run support isn’t all that useful of a pitcher’s stat, since he has absolutely no control over it (at least for AL pitchers, NL pitchers have a very small amount of control). It’d be about as useful as average temperature during his starts. The only takeaway from a significantly large ERA-RunSupport (positive or negative) would be “wow, he got lucky/unlucky!”
Josh Hamilton has reportedly had 12 cortisone shots over the past couple of weeks. Still not playing. The Angels should give serious thought to leaving him off the playoff roster.
The point, though, is that 6 innings and three runs is the MINIMUM. No one ever before, and no one ever will, has a full season with a lot of quality starts that are exactly 6 innings, 3 earned runs. After all, you don’t get more than one quality start if you throw a shutout, either. The point of quality starts is “he gave him team a legiitimate shot at winning,” nothing more.
That said, we have some pretty decent complete stats for pitchers, like WAR and Support Neutral W-L.
I would point out that Andy Pettite’s 21-win, 4.02 ERA season in 2003 was a damned good year. 4.02 sounds like a high ERA today, when the average team only scores about 4 runs a game. In 2003 the average teams scored 4.52 runs per game, so Pettite was substantially below the league average. He had 3.1 WAR that year, which makes him a pretty damn good player; his season was more or less the same year that Jered Weaver is having this year with a 3.52 ERA, or that Chris Tillman is having for the Orioles. Pitchers who can throw 200+ innings with below average ERAs are in short supply.