Hmm, forecast doesn’t look too bad. Warming up. That’ll be nice. I wonder how things are looking in Minnesota—
Oh, um, wow. Sorry, guys.
41 thoughts on “March 8, 2019: Weekend Outlook”
Not looking great in South Dakota, either. This will probably be the fifth consecutive Sunday we've missed church in Agar. Onida has decided they'll have church regardless, and if I can't get there I'll email the message to someone and they'll read it.
This time around it's just a slew of rain tonight into tomorrow for StL.
fwiw, there's currently an inland sea between my town and Sactown, several feet deep (deep enough to over-top the berm around the bypass channel, although not deep enough to endanger the levees).
With heavy rain expected Tuesday night through Wednesday, a Flood Watch has been issued. In the Valley, areas may receive 1 to 3 inches, with locations in the foothills seeing 2 to 5 inches. #CAwxpic.twitter.com/y9gsf4QHZF
I've been watching the forecast for Saturday as it changed through the week:
Started out 3"-5" plus up to 1" on Sunday
Yesterday was 8"-12" with another 1"-3" on Sunday
Today it's 5"-8" with nothing measurable on Sunday.
From what I can tell, most of the variation depends upon how much comes down as rain.
Unlike every person expressing their opinions in my FB timeline, I'm completely fine with this.
If it's up to me, I'd rather not have rain underneath it and have it all come down as snow.
Our predicted snowfall keeps going down. It started at 6-12 inches, then went down to 4-8, and now is 2-6. The bad news is there's a chance we'll get some freezing rain before it starts snowing.
But now I see 4-8 inches of snow are predicted for Wednesday and Thursday, too.
The snowfall forecast went from three inches to eight inches real fast. The analogy makes itself.
Just a few hours left to vote in the half-baked hall
Almost the opening day lineup for today's game -- was initially surprised to see this for a road game, but Port Charlotte is barely an hour drive north of Ft. Myers. Park in the Harley Davidson lot and save $5
My mom cancelled a trip down to visit because of the snow. They were going to get a hotel room and probably let the kids sleep there Saturday night, so there'd better be a load of snow because I'm losing a night of peace and quiet.
Good to have Cory Provus back in the booth.
And Baddison Reed is back on the mound. 🙁
Again, I wonder if he's going to be on the team. I know--it's still early, he's a veteran, he's just getting his work in, he's working on things, small sample size, etc. But it's really not all that early--opening day is twenty days away. I would think that at some point he's going to have to show that he can get people out.
Roster spots are too important, and he's not conditioned to be a mop up guy or anything.
He's just a season or two removed from a couple of very good seasons. I don't find myself upset that his contract runs out after this season, but I think it's too early to pull the plug.
Besides, Shohei Ohtani* had pretty awful numbers in Spring training last year (4 for 32 batting / 2.2 IP, 3HR, 9 runs allowed pitching) and he turned out okay, so I'm not too terribly fussed by a poor spring performance.
* Note: Baddison Reed is not Shohei Ohtani.
I wouldn't be as concerned if he had pitched well last year. But he didn't.
His velocity dropped last year as well, so that will factor in as well if he can get the velocity back up.
Instead of letting the next snowstorm cover up the dog mess like I did the last few times, I went out and picked up all I could find. But I know that below the surface, the back yard is basically a dog poop parfait now.
* Home plate umpire assisted in calling balls and strikes by a TrackMan radar tracking system.
* No mound visits permitted by players or coaches other than for pitching changes or medical issues.
* Pitchers must face a minimum of three batters, or reach the end of an inning before they exit the game, unless the pitcher becomes injured.
* Increase the size of 1st, 2nd and 3rd base from 15 inches square to 18 inches square.
* Require two infielders to be on each side of second base when a pitch is released (if not, the ball is dead and the umpire shall call a ball).
* Time between innings and pitching changes reduced from 2:05 to 1:45.
* Distance from pitching rubber to home plate extended 24 inches, in the second half of the season only; with no change to mound height or shape.
no change to mound height or shape.
But I assume they are moving the whole mound back two feet, right? Otherwise the pitcher would be going uphill.
The mid-season part is really strange though.
Have they done studies on the impact of moving the mound back 2 feet? All pitchers have trained to pitch from 60'6" What does it do to their breaking balls? Their sliders, etc. But more importantly, their arms? In response to HJ's observation below, maybe mid-season is to help pitcher's stretch out their arms.
Yeah, risk of injury for an airway violent, unnatural motion is why I hate that one. I could see his consciously or unconsciously throwing harder than they normally would.
I like that they're trying things (I don't agree with some of them or don't know the reasoning), but all of those at once (more or less) is going to be a challenge
I don't (although I appreciate your caveat on the particulars).
Baseball isn't broken. Shifts are natural, efficient responses to improved analytics. I don't care about the utilization of bullpen specialists and hate the idea of forcing a pitcher to face a minimum number of batters unless "injured". We are gonna suddenly discover phantom injuries in response.
The mound visit thing is fine and makes sense, but then keep the damn batters in the box too. Speed up the game by clamping down (a little) on all the bullshit between pitches, not by trying to regulate actual, meaningful strategery. What's wrong with the old Orioles' approach of "work fast, throw strikes"??
MLB attendance peaked in the 2006-08 period at around 32,000+ per game. The last two years attendance has been down under 30,000 per game, coinciding with a bump up in numbers of pitchers per game (4.36 last year) and pitches/PA (slow rise from around 3.75 in the peak attendance period to about 3.9 the last couple of seasons). And a slow rise in game time to around 3 hours from about 2:50 in the mid-oughts.
Is an extra ten minutes per game really deterring fans? It would help to see the distribution of game times against team performance. My prior is that the bigger problem is teams that aren't trying to win.
Just over half the teams had year-over-year attendance drops in 2018, but just under had year-over-year attendance increases. The biggest year-over-year drops in attendance were in Toronto (down almost 11,000 per game) and Miami (just over 10,000 per game). Those two franchises alone accounted for over half of the cumulative MLB attendance drop from 2017 to 2018. Toronto was just two years off of having led the AL in attendance (and still drew over 28,000 per game).
Miami, on the other hand, gets outdrawn by some AAA clubs and deserves to be relegated. They drew a pathetic 10,014 per home game last year. Rather than regulate pace of play to fix attendance issues, get Cap'n Jetes to put a decent product on the field.
For me, one of the biggest problems I have with baseball is the service time and how it has been manipulated. If I'm not going to see a team in contention, I want to see their best prospects so I can at least dream about the future; or enjoy some highlights occasionally. Seeing AAAA players play ahead of real prospects is awful for the product and a slap in the face to the few fans still watching teams that are out of contention by the end of the year.
This is the first time in over ten years that I won't be part of a season ticket group. I couldn't even give tickets away in August/September last year. I'll just go to a couple games at the last minute depending on weather and my schedule.
Yeah, the service time thing needs to be addressed. I don't blame teams for taking advantage of it. I blame the league and the Players Association for not doing anything to change the rules.
What's wrong with the old Orioles' approach of "work fast, throw strikes"??
Well, true that they weren't throwing mid-90s all the time. But what does that have to do with slowing the game down? Are you suggesting that more max-effort pitches means more delay between? Or just making the point that over-throwing means more balls outside the zone (thereby raising the rewards of patience at the plate and leading to more pitches per PA)? (or, I guess, more velocity means more foul balls, which also raises the number of pitches per PA?)
My hypothesis is batters are stalling because they can while pitchers stall because they need several extra seconds to recover.
Baseball isn't broken. Shifts are natural, efficient responses to improved analytics. I don't care about the utilization of bullpen specialists and hate the idea of forcing a pitcher to face a minimum number of batters unless "injured". We are gonna suddenly discover phantom injuries in response.
The mound visit thing is fine and makes sense, but then keep the damn batters in the box too. Speed up the game by clamping down (a little) on all the bullshit between pitches, not by trying to regulate actual, meaningful strategery. What's wrong with the old Orioles' approach of "work fast, throw strikes"??
I'm not going to argue these points; the reason I like that they're trying things is that (hopefully) they come to the same results. Part of the scientific process is to experiment, and if the conclusion is that baseball isnt broken, then they'll think twice making unnecessary tweaks, and they'll have evidence why they shouldn't. Have you seen "futuristic" uniforms lately. Right.
I agree on the shifts. If they're going to leave you one whole side of the field to hit to and you're too stupid to take advantage of it, it's your own fault. Don't complain about them daring you to hit the ball to a different spot than normal. The funny thing is, it really hasn't affected ground balls. Players get on base on ground balls at about the same rate. It's line drive success rates that have really dropped over the last decade or two. Hitters are so focused on hitting balls in the air and K rates have gone up so much, I don't see why infield shifts matter that much anyways.
The Twins made their first round of cuts:
Pitchers Kohl Stewart, Andrew Vasquez and Lewis Thorpe were optioned to Triple-A.
Alex Kirilloff, Brent Rooker, Luke Raley and Ben Rortvedt were reassigned to minor league camp.
The #1 SCSU Huskies and #3 UMD Bulldogs face off in the last weekend of NCHC action before the conference tournament. Tonight's game is at 7:30 on CBS Sports Network, and tomorrow's game is at 4:00 on FSN.
Huskies win 4-3 with a power play goal off a skate in overtime. I almost had to reach for my nitroglycerin, boys.
We went to the Mumford & Sons concert last Thursday in H'istan at XL. Great show, really professional lighting, fireworks, etc.
This song was done on Stephen Colbert's The Late Showlast night. Great performance. I have the CD - that version of the song is really lackluster compared to the live one.
The wife got her first night away from the kids and also attended that show. I don't know how much of it was the show versus not having to worry about children for several hours, but she enjoyed it a lot.
Not looking great in South Dakota, either. This will probably be the fifth consecutive Sunday we've missed church in Agar. Onida has decided they'll have church regardless, and if I can't get there I'll email the message to someone and they'll read it.
This time around it's just a slew of rain tonight into tomorrow for StL.
fwiw, there's currently an inland sea between my town and Sactown, several feet deep (deep enough to over-top the berm around the bypass channel, although not deep enough to endanger the levees).
How about saving some of that water for the next drought? I know, stupid idea.
already on it
frankly, the bigger problem is how to restore groundwater levels, particularly in the Central Valley, where farmers severely over-pumped during the drought. One town in suburban Sacramento is experimenting with groundwater storage but it's expensive to pump water into groundwater reservoirs rather than allowing gravity to do the work (which can take yearrrrrrrrs).
I've been watching the forecast for Saturday as it changed through the week:
Started out 3"-5" plus up to 1" on Sunday
Yesterday was 8"-12" with another 1"-3" on Sunday
Today it's 5"-8" with nothing measurable on Sunday.
From what I can tell, most of the variation depends upon how much comes down as rain.
Unlike every person expressing their opinions in my FB timeline, I'm completely fine with this.
If it's up to me, I'd rather not have rain underneath it and have it all come down as snow.
Our predicted snowfall keeps going down. It started at 6-12 inches, then went down to 4-8, and now is 2-6. The bad news is there's a chance we'll get some freezing rain before it starts snowing.
But now I see 4-8 inches of snow are predicted for Wednesday and Thursday, too.
The snowfall forecast went from three inches to eight inches real fast. The analogy makes itself.
Just a few hours left to vote in the half-baked hall
Almost the opening day lineup for today's game -- was initially surprised to see this for a road game, but Port Charlotte is barely an hour drive north of Ft. Myers. Park in the Harley Davidson lot and save $5
My mom cancelled a trip down to visit because of the snow. They were going to get a hotel room and probably let the kids sleep there Saturday night, so there'd better be a load of snow because I'm losing a night of peace and quiet.
Good to have Cory Provus back in the booth.
And Baddison Reed is back on the mound. 🙁
Again, I wonder if he's going to be on the team. I know--it's still early, he's a veteran, he's just getting his work in, he's working on things, small sample size, etc. But it's really not all that early--opening day is twenty days away. I would think that at some point he's going to have to show that he can get people out.
Roster spots are too important, and he's not conditioned to be a mop up guy or anything.
He's just a season or two removed from a couple of very good seasons. I don't find myself upset that his contract runs out after this season, but I think it's too early to pull the plug.
Besides, Shohei Ohtani* had pretty awful numbers in Spring training last year (4 for 32 batting / 2.2 IP, 3HR, 9 runs allowed pitching) and he turned out okay, so I'm not too terribly fussed by a poor spring performance.
* Note: Baddison Reed is not Shohei Ohtani.
I wouldn't be as concerned if he had pitched well last year. But he didn't.
His velocity dropped last year as well, so that will factor in as well if he can get the velocity back up.
Instead of letting the next snowstorm cover up the dog mess like I did the last few times, I went out and picked up all I could find. But I know that below the surface, the back yard is basically a dog poop parfait now.
Wow, the Atlantic league is going to get a little weird.
* Home plate umpire assisted in calling balls and strikes by a TrackMan radar tracking system.
* No mound visits permitted by players or coaches other than for pitching changes or medical issues.
* Pitchers must face a minimum of three batters, or reach the end of an inning before they exit the game, unless the pitcher becomes injured.
* Increase the size of 1st, 2nd and 3rd base from 15 inches square to 18 inches square.
* Require two infielders to be on each side of second base when a pitch is released (if not, the ball is dead and the umpire shall call a ball).
* Time between innings and pitching changes reduced from 2:05 to 1:45.
* Distance from pitching rubber to home plate extended 24 inches, in the second half of the season only; with no change to mound height or shape.
no change to mound height or shape.
But I assume they are moving the whole mound back two feet, right? Otherwise the pitcher would be going uphill.
The mid-season part is really strange though.
Have they done studies on the impact of moving the mound back 2 feet? All pitchers have trained to pitch from 60'6" What does it do to their breaking balls? Their sliders, etc. But more importantly, their arms? In response to HJ's observation below, maybe mid-season is to help pitcher's stretch out their arms.
Yeah, risk of injury for an airway violent, unnatural motion is why I hate that one. I could see his consciously or unconsciously throwing harder than they normally would.
I like that they're trying things (I don't agree with some of them or don't know the reasoning), but all of those at once (more or less) is going to be a challenge
I don't (although I appreciate your caveat on the particulars).
Baseball isn't broken. Shifts are natural, efficient responses to improved analytics. I don't care about the utilization of bullpen specialists and hate the idea of forcing a pitcher to face a minimum number of batters unless "injured". We are gonna suddenly discover phantom injuries in response.
The mound visit thing is fine and makes sense, but then keep the damn batters in the box too. Speed up the game by clamping down (a little) on all the bullshit between pitches, not by trying to regulate actual, meaningful strategery. What's wrong with the old Orioles' approach of "work fast, throw strikes"??
MLB attendance peaked in the 2006-08 period at around 32,000+ per game. The last two years attendance has been down under 30,000 per game, coinciding with a bump up in numbers of pitchers per game (4.36 last year) and pitches/PA (slow rise from around 3.75 in the peak attendance period to about 3.9 the last couple of seasons). And a slow rise in game time to around 3 hours from about 2:50 in the mid-oughts.
Is an extra ten minutes per game really deterring fans? It would help to see the distribution of game times against team performance. My prior is that the bigger problem is teams that aren't trying to win.
Just over half the teams had year-over-year attendance drops in 2018, but just under had year-over-year attendance increases. The biggest year-over-year drops in attendance were in Toronto (down almost 11,000 per game) and Miami (just over 10,000 per game). Those two franchises alone accounted for over half of the cumulative MLB attendance drop from 2017 to 2018. Toronto was just two years off of having led the AL in attendance (and still drew over 28,000 per game).
Miami, on the other hand, gets outdrawn by some AAA clubs and deserves to be relegated. They drew a pathetic 10,014 per home game last year. Rather than regulate pace of play to fix attendance issues, get Cap'n Jetes to put a decent product on the field.
For me, one of the biggest problems I have with baseball is the service time and how it has been manipulated. If I'm not going to see a team in contention, I want to see their best prospects so I can at least dream about the future; or enjoy some highlights occasionally. Seeing AAAA players play ahead of real prospects is awful for the product and a slap in the face to the few fans still watching teams that are out of contention by the end of the year.
This is the first time in over ten years that I won't be part of a season ticket group. I couldn't even give tickets away in August/September last year. I'll just go to a couple games at the last minute depending on weather and my schedule.
Yeah, the service time thing needs to be addressed. I don't blame teams for taking advantage of it. I blame the league and the Players Association for not doing anything to change the rules.
They weren't throwing mid-90s. There's some evidence the increase in velocity has slowed or stopped. It's starting to look like the desired changes are addressing a problem that may solve itself.
Well, true that they weren't throwing mid-90s all the time. But what does that have to do with slowing the game down? Are you suggesting that more max-effort pitches means more delay between? Or just making the point that over-throwing means more balls outside the zone (thereby raising the rewards of patience at the plate and leading to more pitches per PA)? (or, I guess, more velocity means more foul balls, which also raises the number of pitches per PA?)
My hypothesis is batters are stalling because they can while pitchers stall because they need several extra seconds to recover.
I'm not going to argue these points; the reason I like that they're trying things is that (hopefully) they come to the same results. Part of the scientific process is to experiment, and if the conclusion is that baseball isnt broken, then they'll think twice making unnecessary tweaks, and they'll have evidence why they shouldn't. Have you seen "futuristic" uniforms lately. Right.
I agree on the shifts. If they're going to leave you one whole side of the field to hit to and you're too stupid to take advantage of it, it's your own fault. Don't complain about them daring you to hit the ball to a different spot than normal. The funny thing is, it really hasn't affected ground balls. Players get on base on ground balls at about the same rate. It's line drive success rates that have really dropped over the last decade or two. Hitters are so focused on hitting balls in the air and K rates have gone up so much, I don't see why infield shifts matter that much anyways.
The #1 SCSU Huskies and #3 UMD Bulldogs face off in the last weekend of NCHC action before the conference tournament. Tonight's game is at 7:30 on CBS Sports Network, and tomorrow's game is at 4:00 on FSN.
Huskies win 4-3 with a power play goal off a skate in overtime. I almost had to reach for my nitroglycerin, boys.
We went to the Mumford & Sons concert last Thursday in H'istan at XL. Great show, really professional lighting, fireworks, etc.
This song was done on Stephen Colbert's The Late Show last night. Great performance. I have the CD - that version of the song is really lackluster compared to the live one.
The wife got her first night away from the kids and also attended that show. I don't know how much of it was the show versus not having to worry about children for several hours, but she enjoyed it a lot.