deward

Jersey Shore has also been 21% of Aberdeen's schedule so far (by my count), so they've played them a lot. I'm going with coincidence.

HR and a triple tonight. Loved this guy in college, excited to see him doing so well in his first AAA exposure.

2-3 so far, with a 2B and a walk. I'm starting to think he might make short work of low-A ball.

Fast start for Westburg in AAA

But, to your point, I guess it maybe opens up a potential avenue to build a staff of control artists who pitch to contact. I'm not convinced that would work, but it's a better theory than I had before.

Fair point, I'll cherry pick another example. Why would Bruce Zimmerman become 15% better, but Jameson Taillon only 10%?

Wouldn't the talent gap between our pitchers and opposing pitchers still be the same though? I can't think of a reason why Spenser Watkins gets 15% better at OPCY but Gerrit Cole only gets 10% better. Time will tell, I guess. Maybe I'm missing something.

I'm not talking about people watching other teams on tv, I'm talking about fans of a team watching their team play against a greater variety of opponents. Wouldn't it get stale to watch them play the same handful of teams, in the same handful of stadiums, over and over again, 154-162 times a year? It would for me. I understand that some schedules don't allow for watching the late games, but (as you've mentioned) you can't please everybody. No solution is going to be perfect, but I would prefer to err on the side of more variety. I'm all for moving the start times up and introducing a pitch clock to speed up the game times, but I don't see the 10 or so evening games on the west coast as a major issue in the big picture. I don't think you can compare the popularity of MLB 1906-1960 to the situation today. The entertainment space has changed, there are so many more options than there were 60 years ago. Things fans might have accepted as normal back then wouldn't necessarily work now. I'm sure the players don't really enjoy the travel. I do things for my job that I don't particularly enjoy, but I get paid to do them anyway. If we didn't have different opinions, then it wouldn't be any fun arguing on the internet. This is all just a thought exercise anyway, I can't see MLB ever going down this route.

Neutral overall would make sense, right? Since both teams are playing under the same conditions. There's no reason why this move would lead to more wins over the long-term, just altered stat lines. The notion that this would somehow be more helpful to O's pitchers than it would to visiting pitchers has always seemed bizarre to me.

I don't care about the travel aspect of it, at all. The players get compensated very well for that travel. It's not a fan issue. I don't have an issue staying up late a few times a year for two west coast swings to watch the games (if the team is worth watching). If we're going to compromise, losing some viewers who don't want to stay up for a handful of games seems like a much more viable and reasonable one to me. I don't like the unbalanced schedules, but I have no interest in being stuck watching the same 7 opponents over and over and over again. Not to mention, from a business standpoint, reverting your national business back to a regional one would be foolish. Asking your season ticket holders to continue to pay the same prices to see less of the best players in baseball would be ridiculous. MLB would never even consider that, nor should they. 8 team leagues concentrated in the same couple of time zones might have worked in 1918, but it would likely kill the sport now. Blowing up the existing league/division structure and reworking it into something more logical? Sure, that's not a bad idea, but cutting teams off from playing the majority of the league would be going way too far.

And if you want to see them in person, playing against your home team?

And play the Yanks and Red Sox even more than we already do? No thank you. Plus, I can't imagine that MLB would ever consider it to be in their best interest to place such restrictions on which cities their marquee players show up in, and I suspect they would probably be correct.

I liked interleague play better when the NL didn't have the DH. I enjoyed the novelty of having to play under different rules for a series or two. It also made the WS feel a bit more special to me when it was a matchup of two teams that hadn't seen each other that year. With the universal DH in play, I don't guess it matters anymore, they might as well bring every team in every year so that fans can see all the stars. I just liked baseball better with two leagues that were clearly distinct; I'm instinctively opposed to any push to homogenize things.

It's just a gut thing, but I suspect that making life harder for hitters would be a little more of a deterrent than the other way around. Think about how players view their counting stats. Pitchers are largely remembered for how many games they won/strikeouts they picked up/saves recorded. A pretty ERA is obviously desirable, but winning an ERA title still doesn't come with the same prestige as winning 20 games does. Randy Johnson could have come here and struck out 300 guys, won 20 games, and not have been too bothered by a few extra home runs. Hitters are more directly impacted in the most prominent counting stats by bad hitting environments. Take a guy who is used to hitting 30-40 home runs and tell him that he likely won't get to that number if he plays here, and I think there's a greater chance of that being an issue for him. I can't prove any of that out, of course, it's just a theory that kind of makes sense to me.

Elias is very clearly in the camp of "I'm going to treat this like a national security matter and not share any info that isn't required", which is a silly approach for an entertainment product. As smart as he may be, I'm deeply unimpressed with his ability to manage the relationship between the front office and the fanbase.

Mancini looked disgusted with having to settle for a double on that ball he hit off the top of the wall tonight. I continue to suspect that the biggest impact of The Wall on free agents will be driving away RHH.

If Zimmerman or Lyles were unpitchable at home with the old wall, then the problem is with them, not the park. Is making Zimmerman borderline pitchable worth turning Gerritt Cole into Bob Gibson whenever he rolls into town?

Didn't seem to prevent the team from winning games and having good pitching

Mountcastle, of course, isn't exactly Joe DiMaggio, or even necessarily a star. He's going to need to prove that he can adjust his approach to offset the 5-7 potential home runs that are going to die on the new warning track.

1 - I wouldn't say he has NO defensive value. I'm no scout, but he looks like he's capable of playing a decent-to-good 1b. He's not good in LF, but you can throw him out there in a pinch in some parks, and he could still play an emergency 3b for a few innings if called on. When I think of no defensive value, I think of someone like David Ortiz, who had no business owning a glove. 2 and 3 are definitely issues I could see him settling in for a few years run as a no worse than league average 1b, but I don't see it being here, not in New Camden.

So, Luke Scott? I'd be pretty happy with peak-Luke Scott.

That's not who Mountcastle is.