Hallas

I actually do think Melanie is better than she was. But she was so decidedly awful that she couldn't have gotten any worse.

One thing the article doesn't mention is that baseball agreed to use MLB baseballs, which are harder and have a lower seams, in AAA. The season they started using the MLB baseballs (2019) AAA average OPS jumped by like 80 points. Before 2019 you could more reliably project major league performance from AAA stats for hitters, because it was more plausible for AAA pitchers to be able to produce pitches with an MLB level shape. The downside was that for pitchers you had a really high failure rate going from the minors to the majors. For the Orioles in particular, the fact that Norfolk is such a hard place to hit meant that a hitter doing even passably ok meant that he was probably MLB ready. I think that putting them on the same equipment in the high minors makes a lot of sense, and the problems with projecting hitters is almost certainly less than the issues with pitchers having to learn how to pitch with a different baseball. But it's definitely something to keep in mind when looking at minor league hitting stats, especially those from AAA.

who needs functioning pitches when you can just let Gunnar double them off?

I counted that at 3.5 seconds hangtime and 68 feet to cover, that is probably a 5 star catch comparing it to other statcast balls.

Bradish has figured out his breaking ball. It's unhittable now.

not gonna lie, Santander and Soto are about the same speed, which is to say, not very fast, but Santander looks decent in the outfield, and Soto looks like a complete butcher.

O's are hitting into a lot of loud outs.

Before the ball got to him, he set up with 1 knee on the plate and his body covering about 4/5 of the plate. I saw some examples where 1 foot on the plate like that where it was supposed to be considered a plate blocking violation. But it was close, because you could argue that the tiny corner constituted a (tiny) path to the plate.

Whats the rule on blocking the plate? That seemed awfully close to a violation.

Bradish! They're not seeing it well off him at all. He threw like 4 fastballs right down broadway and they either whiffed or stared at them.

That was a perfect throw too.

Shohei changed from a leg kick to a toe tap during his first US spring training, because he was late on everything when he got here.

27 weeks × 6 days is 162. So it's doable in theory but the existence of 2 and 4 game series makes it challenging in practice.

Shohei converted to a toe tap once he hit MLB because he had trouble catching up with fastballs. Maybe Holliday can experiment with something similar.

I don't know what to make of his absurd statcast data. There's no shot he's Shohei vs RHP, is there?