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Silver Linings Playbook


Frobby

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The thread title caught my eye because I grew up less than a mile from the diner that was featured in the film, the open-all-night Llanarch Diner (which is not in Llanarch, but across Route 1 from it).

Silver linings:

Urias at the plate, of course. (On his very non-silver defense, a digression/question. When I played third base as a teenager -- and I'm not counting playing there, later, in softball -- I was taught to try to get in front of everything and if I couldn't react in time to field balls cleanly to try to take them off my chest, grab them and then throw. Somewhere along the line, that approach seems to have disappeared from MLB. Do any third basemen play balls that way, maybe at lower levels?)  

There were a couple of good ABs from O'Hearn.

I thought there was more hard contact than I'd seen for a while. Not a lot, but more.

2 for 7 with RISP.

Soto, Akin and Kimbrel were surprisingly effective. Hyde used only three relievers, so a lot of bullpen guys had the night off.

The Dodgers used their top bullpen guys, most of them anyway.

The MASN announcers, especially the Palmer-Ben exchanges, keep getting better. 

Finally, a dark horse candidate. When Burnes is pitching like a Cy Young candidate, he can get away with (pretty much) the rampant base-stealing. He has to see how destructive the steals are when he's not on his A game, and maybe he'll try to do something -- a little something, not a revamping of his windup and delivery -- to cut down on the free bases., if only to show some effort and reduction for use in his free agency.

Most important, the NYYs are still in close range. 

 

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Honestly I thought Burnes was pitching much better than he had lately, until he wasn't.

He was getting some swings and misses, he was locating really well, every thing looked pretty sharp.

While I don't be the "only one earned run", and he clearly made a horrible pitch to Teoscar, I think his pitching as a whole was much better than it had been in some of his recent "bad starts".

Now the fact that he fell apart a bit after the defensive lapses, and made the awful pitch to Hernandez, is totally on him.   But I do feel like it appeared he was pitching better up to that point than he had in some of the previous starts.   And hopefully that can carry forward into his next start and be accompanied by a bit more mental toughness.   If he no-hits the White Sox, his inability to hold runners won't matter a bit!

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4 minutes ago, SteveA said:

Honestly I thought Burnes was pitching much better than he had lately, until he wasn't.

He was getting some swings and misses, he was locating really well, every thing looked pretty sharp.

While I don't be the "only one earned run", and he clearly made a horrible pitch to Teoscar, I think his pitching as a whole was much better than it had been in some of his recent "bad starts".

Now the fact that he fell apart a bit after the defensive lapses, and made the awful pitch to Hernandez, is totally on him.   But I do feel like it appeared he was pitching better up to that point than he had in some of the previous starts.   And hopefully that can carry forward into his next start and be accompanied by a bit more mental toughness.   If he no-hits the White Sox, his inability to hold runners won't matter a bit!

I agree, I thought he looked good.  And the pitch that Ohtani hit out was a pitch only Ohtani could hit out...no one's supposed to be able to hit that pitch like that.  I wasn't even mad at it.

He was going well up to the Teoscar bomb.  

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41 minutes ago, CaptainRedbeard said:

After Soto’s absolutely disastrous start as an Oriole, in his last 6 games:

5.1 IP

1 H

0 ER

2 BB

7 K

I said this during my 105.7 spot. Soto has actually thrown the ball well since his disastrous start. 

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6 minutes ago, Moose Milligan said:

I like how they answered the Dodgers scoring with three runs of their own.  Cowser seems to have found his swing again, that ball he hit over Kiermaier's head was an absolute missile.

Sure, but we'll really know Cowser is on a heater when he's hitting piss missiles!

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Just now, Fiver6565 said:

Sure, but we'll really know Cowser is on a heater when he's hitting piss missiles!

When he puts one over the fence, then you'll know.

Seriously, I was ready to start cussing Kiermaier a bunch because I thought he was going to haul that in...he's a great defensive centerfielder, but that ball was torched.  

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Just now, Moose Milligan said:

When he puts one over the fence, then you'll know.

Seriously, I was ready to start cussing Kiermaier a bunch because I thought he was going to haul that in...he's a great defensive centerfielder, but that ball was torched.  

Agreed, had same thought.  I thought, damn that's a laser, then damn that's Kiermaier out there, then DAMN that's over his head on a line!

 

All in about 1.5 seconds, LOL

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Just now, Moose Milligan said:

When he puts one over the fence, then you'll know.

Seriously, I was ready to start cussing Kiermaier a bunch because I thought he was going to haul that in...he's a great defensive centerfielder, but that ball was torched.  

Kiermaier has announced his retirement after the year.   If the Dodgers aren't our World Series opponent, tonight will be the last time we are ever on the same field with the guy, who has been a nemesis for us for over a decade.

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2 minutes ago, SteveA said:

Kiermaier has announced his retirement after the year.   If the Dodgers aren't our World Series opponent, tonight will be the last time we are ever on the same field with the guy, who has been a nemesis for us for over a decade.

Thank goodness.  

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3 minutes ago, Fiver6565 said:

Agreed, had same thought.  I thought, damn that's a laser, then damn that's Kiermaier out there, then DAMN that's over his head on a line!

 

All in about 1.5 seconds, LOL

That was my thought process, too.  There was a split second there where Kiermaier looked over his shoulder to track the ball and I swear he had it measured and was going to haul it in.

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37 minutes ago, tntoriole said:

Ramon!!!  Urias looks as calm, patient, relaxed, confident and comfortable at the plate as I have ever seen him.  He should move up in the order. 

Maybe Urias should be batting 2nd instead of Adley.  That would usually sound crazy but I bet it would be an improvement.

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  • Posts

    • dWAR is just the run value for defense added with the defensive adjustment.  Corner OF spots have a -7.5 run adjustment, while CF has a +2.5 adjustment over 150 games.    Since Cowser played both CF and the corners they pro-rate his time at each to calculate his defensive adjustment. 
    • Just to be clear, though, fWAR also includes a substantial adjustment for position, including a negative one for Cowser.  For a clearer example on that front, as the chart posted higher on this page indicates, Carlos Santana had a +14 OAA — which is the source data that fWAR’s defensive component is based on. That 14 outs above average equates to 11-12 (they use different values on this for some reason) runs better than the average 1B.  So does Santana have a 12.0 defensive value, per fWAR? He does not. That’s because they adjust his defensive value downward to reflect that he’s playing a less difficult/valuable position. In this case, that adjustment comes out to -11.0 runs, as you can see here:   So despite apparently having a bona fide Gold Glove season, Santana’s Fielding Runs value (FanGraphs’ equivalent to dWAR) is barely above average, at 1.1 runs.    Any good WAR calculation is going to adjust for position. Being a good 1B just isn’t worth as much as being an average SS or catcher. Just as being a good LF isn’t worth as much as being an average CF. Every outfielder can play LF — only the best outfielders can play CF.  Where the nuance/context shows up here is with Cowser’s unique situation. Playing LF in OPACY, with all that ground to cover, is not the same as playing LF at Fenway or Yankee Stadium. Treating Cowser’s “position” as equivalent to Tyler O’Neill’s, for example, is not fair. The degree of difficulty is much, much higher at OPACY’s LF, and so the adjustment seems out of whack for him. That’s the one place where I’d say the bWAR value is “unfair” to Cowser.
    • Wait a second here, the reason he's -0.1 in bb-ref dwar is because they're using drs to track his defensive run value.  He's worth 6.6 runs in defense according to fangraphs, which includes adjustments for position, which would give him a fangraphs defensive war of +0.7.
    • A little funny to have provided descriptions of the hits (“weak” single; “500 foot” HR). FIP doesn’t care about any of that either, so it’s kind of an odd thing to add in an effort to make ERA look bad.  Come in, strike out the first hitter, then give up three 108 MPH rocket doubles off the wall. FIP thinks you were absolutely outstanding, and it’s a shame your pathetic defense and/or sheer bad luck let you down. Next time you’ll (probably) get the outcomes you deserve. They’re both flawed. So is xFIP. So is SIERA. So is RA/9. So is WPA. So is xERA. None of them are perfect measures of how a pitcher’s actual performance was, because there’s way too much context and too many variables for any one metric to really encompass.  But when I’m thinking about awards, for me at least, it ends up having to be about the actual outcomes. I don’t really care what a hitter’s xWOBA is when I’m thinking about MVP, and the same is true for pitchers. Did you get the outs? Did the runs score? That’s the “value” that translates to the scoreboard and, ultimately, to the standings. So I think the B-R side of it is more sensible for awards.  I definitely take into account the types of factors that you (and other pitching fWAR advocates) reference as flaws. So if a guy plays in front of a particular bad defense or had a particularly high percentage of inherited runners score, I’d absolutely adjust my take to incorporate that info. And I also 100% go to Fangraphs first when I’m trying to figure out which pitchers we should acquire (i.e., for forward looking purposes).  But I just can’t bring myself say that my Cy Young is just whichever guy had the best ratio of Ks to BBs to HRs over a threshold number of innings. As @Frobby said, it just distills out too much of what actually happened.
    • We were all a lot younger in 2005.  No one wanted to believe Canseco cause he’s a smarmy guy. Like I said, he was the only one telling the truth. It wasn’t a leap of faith to see McGwire up there and Sosa up there and think “yeah, those guys were juicing” but then suddenly look at Raffy and think he was completely innocent.  It’s a sad story. The guy should be in Hall of Fame yet 500 homers and 3,000 hits are gone like a fart in the wind cause his legacy is wagging his finger and thinking he couldn’t get caught.  Don’t fly too close to the sun.  
    • I think if we get the fun sprinkler loving Gunnar that was in the dugout yesterday, I don’t think we have to worry about him pressing. He seemed loose and feeling good with the other guys he was with, like Kremer.
    • I was a lot younger back then, but that betrayal hit really hard because he had been painting himself as literally holier than thou, and shook his finger to a congressional committee and then barely 2 weeks later failed the test.
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