Morgan423

Also how worthless official scorers can be... they have leeway under the rules to give the win to another, deserving pitcher if the guy who letter-of-the-law "earned" it was flat out terrible.

What a strange season. These guys are setting various weird records all over the place, and in the end, they will be a 50ish win team.

If Mancini isn't bringing back what's needed to trade him, I'm fine with keeping him. It's win-win either way.

On a side note, may I say how nice it is to see us hit a pitcher we just traded away for once? I know it doesn't come up much, but in my memory historically if we trade a pitcher and then run into him within a couple of weeks, he owns us. I'm like, why? It's not like you don't know exactly what he does and how he does it. And he hasn't been gone long enough to have picked up mysterious new tricks.

I don't know why, but I was expecting this to be a sarcasm-laced thread about Broxton when I opened it.

Some of them never fell and are still orbiting Earth today.

Ah yes, right on schedule. The mandatory all-star break-ish "let's cut our Rule 5 guys for some contrived reason instead of keeping them on the team for two more months during a pointless losing season" thread. You know, if a another week had passed without this being posted, I might have become worried.

That's what I'm talking about. It's time to start clearing roster spots for them to play. You can't look at this 25-man at the MLB level and not see several guys that could be trimmed right off to make room.

Agree with you there. That's part of the construction, and indeed, we've been lax there. I'm hoping that starts to change a bit in the second half. We have a few guys that don't have service clock concerns that we need to be looking at.

People who don't come to the realization that Elias and company were hired for a Houston-style full rebuild, and then don't come to terms with the two or three horrendously painful years of major-league level baseball that entails, are going to have a really tough time of things upcoming. I agree, if they can't stomach this, it's probably in their best interest to find another hobby the next few seasons and check back later. This is a time where you take your enjoyment from watching the construction of the new building... not looking at the ground where the building is going to go and exasperatingly bemoan that it's empty right now.

Though we did throw a minor wrench in their gears. It must be annoying to have scored three times more runs than your opponent over a three game set, and yet also you have lost one of the games.

Batter to the men on base every time the catcher drops the ball:

By this logic, they've already gotten that one decent year out of Davis on this contract (he put up a 3.3 WAR in 2016). It just came at the front, rather than the end, of the deal. So no more need to hold on to him when odds aren't great that he'll ever be a positive value major leaguer ever again.

We simply can't lose with the Mancini situation. The team has so much time in control upcoming (I don't think he's a free agent until what... 2023 or so?) that we simply aren't in any position where we are pressured to deal him. We hold him to be with the team at the end of the rebuild, or someone unexpectedly blows us away with surplus value for him. It's a win-win.

There were a couple of fly balls hit to him in center, but pretty much right to where he was positioned. He didn't get any challenge plays out there last night.

We're going to have to dip into three digit jersey numbers by the end of the season!

If anyone ever has a -8.2 dWAR in a single season, take their glove from them, burn it, and then DH them until the end of their career.

This was my thought as well. The Astros are not currently slouches in the player development department. If they can't get a player to have his click moment, then other teams likely won't either. With maybe the exception being an Arrieta mentality who desperately needs a different town to be able to get past his stumbling blocks and finish developing. I don't know if that's Reed or not, and even if it is, odds are still not great that he'll succeed.

Which is the only part of this story I actually care about. Hope it wasn't anything major.

As far as I'm concerned, they can tank to their heart's content. There is ZERO practical difference between winning 55 games in a season, and winning 75. The results are the same (you didn't have a winning year, nor did you make the playoffs, and no one will even remember the exact record three years from now), but you get a much better draft pick with the terrible record. If we're following Houston's rebuild path as closely as possible, get ready for more of this next year too (they tanked three seasons in a row, and then had a better but still sub-500 year before they started winning again).

Hey, we're back in first (draft pick) place. Can't make any moves that win us extra meaningless games and jeopardize that.

Plot twist: We've spent the last week and a half converting Straily into a left-handed knuckleball pitcher, because we realized that it couldn't possibly be any more ineffective than what he is currently doing... and at this point, hey, we may as well have fun with it.

I guess they had to cut it off at eight guys. Otherwise, the Sally League All Star team would have just been the Shorebirds.

Pretty sure the board rules say something somewhere about manipulation of the spacetime continuum being a no-no.