DrungoHazewood

Because you like to play devil's advocate? You're arguing that $500 reckless driving fines for 45.001 mph in a 45 are fine because that's the law, it's the cop's judgement. No reason to use common sense when there's some convoluted logical gymnastics you can perform to sorta-kinda justify the ump's call.

I assume it's the lure of gambling dollars, but otherwise I don't get the infatuation with Las Vegas as a major sports market. They're 40th in media market size, and 29th in population of the metro area. In population they're in a dead heat with Cincy and Kansas City, behind Sacramento, Portland, San Antonio, Charlotte, a million behind Tampa and San Diego. In media markets they're on par with Grand Rapids and Harrisburg., behind places like Greenville, Columbus, Hartford. They would be one of the smallest areas with a MLB team. And once you're 10 miles from city center there is nothing for three hours. I guess they have to think that the tie in to gamblers is worth likely poor attendance and ratings. And they've long since abandoned the idea that the risk to the game's integrity by accepting gambling money is worth worrying about.

There were 17 people in the stands. You could probably hear a casual conversation from six sections over. I'm sure half the people in the stadium could hear what he was saying.

If that was a move towards second base then every one of the ball fours in this video were swings.

The call was beyond nonsense. He didn't move towards second at all. The only tiny shred of logic the ump has to hold onto here is that Mancini turned counter-clockwise instead of clockwise, but he barely stepped on the foul line, much less moved towards second! Looking at the rules this is up to the ump's judgment if he moved towards second base, but I can't imagine an objective neutral party saying he moved towards second. This is like an ump calling a checked swing a swing when the bat barely left the batter's shoulder. It's his judgment, so he can call whatever he wants, no matter how ridiculous. I probably would have been thrown out there, too.

One-run strategies become more viable when runs are scarce. So, perhaps. But we'll see if MLB allows runs to stay low. Recently when batting averages were low early in seasons they started tinkering, messing with the ball one year and banning sticky stuff in June last year. Large strategic shifts take time. Rosters and farm systems aren't built for one-run strategies and contact. Even kids in high school or college are mainly taught the same launch angle/bat speed strategies. It would take years to shift to something else. By then MLB has probably tinkered to appease current players, GMs and managers.

No, that's right. Last April OPSes were 21 points higher than this April (so far). SSS, but you could imply that even as the weather warms the humidor will cut offense over the whole year from .728 to around .700 or so.

I don't think we can expect a lot more nibbling and walks. For most of baseball history strikeouts were far lower than today but the range of walks per game has been constrained to 2.24-4.04 for 130 years. Eyeballing the list, it looks like about 90% of seasons have been between 2.8 and 3.8. When the current distance was established in 1893 strikeouts fell by a third but walks only went from 3.4 to 3.9, and within five years were back under 3.0. And they stayed in that neighborhood for half a century. For almost all of history pitchers struck out 3, 4, 5 men per nine and baseball was the most popular sport in the country. Are today's fans so in love with wall-to-wall strikeouts that they're going to tune out if we return to something like historically normal baseball? I doubt moving the mound back 3' would return to historical norms; the historical median is probably 4 or 4.5. My guess is moving it back 3' drops it to 6.5 or seven. Which is 2005 or 2010 rates. When the Atlantic League moved the mound back 1' there was no discernible impact on anything. Ks actually went slightly up.

Maybe, and even if that happens it'll take a long time. You saw Chris Davis and all the other sluggers who won't bunt against a wide open left side of the infield. You think large numbers of players who've been successful and gotten rich pulling the ball 425' will switch to a different approach? They won't. They'll just eventually be replaced by others with different abilities. And don't underestimate baseball's will to hit homers. They might just start recruiting more Walter Youngs and Calvin Pickerings who can hit a dead ball 425'. Just move the mound back. It'll take the grounds crew two hours. And the Orioles have proven it's not impossible to move the fences back, too.

They had to have known that decreasing home runs by making the ball less resilient would also result in fewer singles, doubles, and triples. It's almost a guarantee that offenses will increase as the weather warms up, but April OPS so far is 21 points lower than last year. So you might infer that league OPS for the year will be around .700 if they don't change anything else.

I don't know how you cut down on strikeouts without moving the mound back. Well, I guess there are less direct ways like limiting teams to seven or eight pitchers on the roster and strictly limiting callups and demotions to the minors. But I'm not sure there's any appetite for that, since limiting to 13 pitchers was not wildly popular. Or (and you knew this was coming) you could just revert to 1860s rules, which banned overhand and most sidearm pitching and forced pitchers to keep a stiff arm and both feet on the ground while delivering the ball. In the early 1870s there were about 0.75 strikeouts per game. It seems a lot more straightforward and less controversial to just set the pitcher's plate at 63' 6". When they moved the pitching distance back in 1893 strikeouts fell by about 30%.

As we know, the best way to get 10s of thousands of fans to stay home each night is to put a very poor product on the field. A good fan boycott is indistinguishable from a 50-win season.

Yes. This combined with some chilly weather has led to a MLB-wide slash line of .230/.309/.369, and the lowest HR/G rate since 2014. We'll see how long MLB keeps up with this. They're not above making mid-season tweaks to things. I think they'd be better off with a livelier ball but the mound moved back 3' and every park with fence changes like OPACY's.

That was common in the Memorial Stadium days. Just picking a random year, the 1962 Orioles were coming off a 95-win season and opened the year against the Sox on Saturday, April 14th and the listed attendance was 11,379. In '63 they drew about 27k two days after the Senators drew 43k. In 1966 35k showed up to see Frank's Oriole debut in a stadium that seated over 50k. That was two days after the O's finished a two-game set at Fenway to start the year in front of 12,386 and 1,955! I think Fenway has concessions lines longer than 1,955 today.

Jordan Lyles, most of the time he'll get you through the fifth without being mathematically eliminated from the game.

They need to pull a Dan Snyder and physically remove thousands of seats so they can call it a sellout with a straight face. Or have the seats on some kind of clips or rails so they can quickly remove large numbers of them right before each game, and then every game is a sellout. It's like a Mitsubishi Eclipse Cross Limited. Limited? Yep, limited to the number we can sell.

I'm okay on four months rest, but I'd feel better with 24.

It's true. Try getting into an NFL, NHL, NBA or even MLS game for the $14 Steve is going to spend this week. The only way that's even theoretically possible would be StubHub'ing a ticket for way under face (I guess that's a thing?) and then not paying for parking or getting any food and drink. I just got some DC United tickets, by the supporters section and the goal, about $50 a head and no way you're bringing any food or drink in.

In 2022 filthy means 14 strikeouts in 4 and third before the relievers who have really filthy stuff start coming in.

Oh but they do! You can sign up for a DirecTV/ATT streaming package for the low, low price of $100 a month and you can get MASN. If you have some other streaming service like Hulu or FuboTV, or some other type of cable or satellite that doesn't carry MASN, well, just cancel that and get the other one even if you don't want that service except for MASN. Or just pay for both. That all makes sense. Nobody would ever try to circumvent that with a VPN or someone else's DirecTV password or anything like that when they make it so straightforward and cost-effective.

Two and a half innings, 10 strikeouts, no runs, and we're still on pace for about a three hour game. Yep, it's 2022.

You Florida people are hilarious. When I was in Iceland a few years ago there was a day it got up to about 60 with a decent breeze but some actual sunshine and everyone was in shorts, people laying out. Florida Man would be in a parka with a wool hat. 68 and mostly sunny is the best weather. You can run forever if it's in the 60s. If it gets much over 80 I'm not exercising outside, too hot.

It's 72 and mostly sunny in Tampa today, let's go inside and play some Arena baseball in a mausoleum.

Gonzalez was signed in the 2009-10 offseason, and coming into the year he had a career ERA of 2.57 in 302 games. He blew leads in two of his first three games with the O's and that was it. He was done as an effective pitcher in the minds of most Orioles fans. Went on the DL after the third game, didn't come back until July. But after that had a 2.78 ERA for the rest of the year. Someone can look up the threads, but I'm sure I was screaming Small Sample Size, give the guy a shot and was drowned out by the cries of this guy doesn't have the closer pixie dust get him out of here. In 2011 he once again was terrible in April, bad in May, and mostly relegated to low-leverage situations afterwards. In September they traded him for Pedro Strop, who was awesome for a while then melted down, then we traded him to Chicago where he was very good for a long time.

Wow, I forgot Mike Gonzalez was a thing and now it all comes rushing back.