40 thoughts on “August 26, 2019: Fundead”

    1. This thing is, I understand both of Verlander's gripes (it would be annoying to have every offhand comment fast-tracked for public consumption, and he has a....history that would make him leery of any possible breach with his personal cell phone). But.....yeah, this is all pretty silly, and not exactly a valid reason to violate press and CBA rules.

  5. So, since the next team in the HR parade is non-Yankees and from a while back, let's take a look at them: 1996 Baltimore Orioles

    • HRs: 257 (PED: Anderson 50, Palmeiro 39; non-PED: Bonilla 28, Ripken Jr 26, Hoiles 25, Alomar 22, Surhoff 21, Murray 10)
    • PH HR: 2 (Devereaux 1, Smith 1)
    • GS HR: 11! (Hoiles 2, Murray 2, Surhoff 2, Alomar 1, Bonilla 1, Incaviglia 1, Palmeiro 1, Ripken Jr 1)
    • RH/LH HR: 174/83 (RH: Anderson 37, Palmeiro 25; LH: Palmeiro 14, Anderson 13, Bonilla 10)
    • Home/Road HR: 121/136 (home: Palmeiro 21, Anderson 19; road: Anderson 31, Bonilla 19, Palmeiro 18)
    • inside-the-park HR: 0

    This whole entry feels a little dirty to me.

    1. As far as I can remember, the only evidence that Anderson used PEDs is that he suddenly hit a bunch of home runs. I may have forgotten something, of course.

  8. Plouffe with some interesting theories on MLB realignment:

    The Plan SelectShow

    1. Seems pretty reasonable. As a fan I like 162 because more baseball and because records from my childhood are based on it, but I can't think of a non-selfish reason not to go with this.

      1. I’m not sure whether this is really true in general, but I get the sense that ever since Bonds plus steroids, etc., there just isn’t that much romance for fans in a lot of the single-season records. With the ease of pulling data, too, I think records have gotten somewhat watered down with all the ways stats get sliced and diced and presented on the broadcast, I wouldn’t blame a viewer for just figuring that some record is broken every day, so who cares, etc.

        1. It's still bizarre that in the Year of the Home Run where team and league records are getting obliterated, no one is even threatening Bonds' record or even to get to 60.

          1. Injuries and walks. You need a lot of at bats and the top players have either missed time or walk too much.

    2. I wouldn’t do it exactly that way, but some of those are good ideas. Travel within a time zone is less taxing than cross-country travel, and eliminating AL/NL means teams get to play within their city, and even with dropping 10 games per year, fans would likely have more of their local team games on in prime time. I wouldn’t do 2-game road trips but I’m less tied to that than just a desire for reduced travel burden on the players and more games in prime time.

      MLB should really rework their sponsorship deals so they can sell ad time for the YouTube games, and they should expand to showing more games on that platform with no blackouts—it’s essentially the new over-the-air transmission format and with cable/streaming in flux, and more and more TVs sold with streaming capability, I would think they’d both bring in a lot of fans and make a lot of ad revenue by consistently showing games on the broadest-possible platform.

  9. I have no objection to the shortened schedule, but I don't like his alignment. It's not like he's balanced the schedule, but then he goes and actually has playoff seeding based on that unbalanced record.

    I think this would also heighten the divide between the competitive and non-competitive teams. Picture 3 or 4 teams in each division fighting for the 2 playoff spots (since wild cards are even harder to get (and probably less balanced than now) because split among 30 teams, not 15), and 5-6 giving up on the season).

    I also don't like getting rid of AL/NL. What's the problem that he's trying to solve here?

    1. The AL/NL split only matters for historical reasons. If you care about that history, fair enough, but if you were starting from scratch there would be no reason to do it that way. Getting rid of the AL/NL split means you can put Seattle in the same division as the Dodgers, Padres, Giants, and Rockies, which are all closer and in a better time zone than the Astros and the Rangers (that is to say, half of the Mariners’ divisional opponents.) And you can replace games against the Yankmes, Red Sox, Orioles, Rays, etc, with games against the Cubs, Cardinals, Brewers, etc.

      If we can remove games from the schedule, I’d say expand by two teams to get to 32, do 4 divisions of 8 teams split as closely as you can by time zone first and distance second, something like a East conference with NE, SE divisions and a West conference with Midwest, and Pacific divisions. Have each team play division opponents 12 times (2x home/away 3-gamers), play the opposite division in your conference 6 times (home/away 3-gamers), then have NE host half the Pacific 3 each and play away at the Pacific 3 each, and similarly SE vs Central, and make a 4-year rotation so everyone plays each team in the other conference every other year, and hosts each team in the other conference every 4 years. That’s 156 games, and I’d say take the division winners plus next 2 best records in each division for playoffs. First round is one-off playoff amongst the division WCs to face the division winners in best-of-7. Then Conf champ is best-of-7 and WS is best-of-7. I’d be 100% open to something like skipping the WC game and playing A1 vs B2 and B1 vs A2 in the first round best-of-7.

      1. Of course, you could keep the AL/NL split and still put Seattle in the NL, you just gotta sub out the Brewers or something. I agree that regional divisions make more sense. That certainly doesn't seem to be what Plouffe was going for at all though... I genuinely have no idea which scheduling and/or balance issues he was trying to solve.

      2. The thing is, they’re not starting from scratch. Anything that blows up more than a century’s worth of historical continuity should have to face a rigorous litmus test. In the case of a franchised entertainment cartel like Major League Baseball, the burden should fall on proving a significant change to its foundation makes the game more entertaining, while preserving as much history as possible. History is likely the most valuable thing baseball has relative to its competition; it is integral to baseball in a way it simply is not to any of the other major sports leagues. Much of the statistical revolution in baseball over our lifetimes has been predicated on making better comparisons between players, not just relative to their performance against the league, but in a way that can (as objectively as possible, given the information available to us) measure players who were active decades apart against one another. I'm not convinced that radical changes to make baseball's logistics to more efficient for players will actually make the game more entertaining for fans.

        People might say the current league structures are illogical, but what I think they really mean is that those structures are anachronisms, survivors from a time when major league baseball was a rough, two time-zone affair. For a half-century, the westernmost teams in each league were in St. Louis, and teams travelled by train or bus from city to city. MLB’s expansion across the Continental Divide was enabled by fast commercial air travel as much as anything else. In fact, the very alignment ubes describes above existed — it was the Open-class Pacific Coast League, which had teams not only in Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle, and Oakland, but also Hollywood, Portland, Sacramento, and Vancouver. The PCL had existed since 1903; the National League simply started the gentrification of the neighborhood. The gee-whiz era of expansion was also the era of planned obsolescence, peak disposability in consumer goods, exurban migration, "urban renewal," and, undergirding it all, a general sense that the new and innovative was better than the old and storied. Baseball adapted to modernity by assimilating the fruits of these trends into its league structure, rather than grafting the PCL or the Continental League onto the AL & NL.

        At some point, I hope a competent sports historian writes a good book on Bud Selig's tenure as Commissioner, one that situates someone so deeply involved in destroying baseball's history — through elimination of league offices, multiple rounds of expansion, realignment, interleague play, Wild Cards, self-serving league switches, attempted franchise contraction immediately following franchise expansion, unbalanced schedules, wink-wink juiced players and hush-hush juiced balls fueling a destruction of records, and so on — with the rise of publicly-financed, phony "neo-classical" ballpark architecture, throwback jerseys, near-compulsory patriotic displays, and all the other fondant-like trappings festooned across the game to give a certain kind of fan a shiver of nostalgia. Bud Selig, as my institution never fails to remind me, majored in history of all things. Seligula knows history — or crass artificial substitutes engineered to more efficiently separate marks from their money — can be a very valuable asset. It took quite some time, but all those Seligula-era innovations are now — for better or worse — themselves part of baseball's history. And yet, even the game's most "progressive" commissioner failed to radically realign the leagues (though then did his best to destroy most of their individual character). The case for tearing down a century-old structure in favor of radical realignment wasn't good enough in 1997, and I'm not convinced it's any more compelling now. If anything, MLB should be thinking about how restoring some of the structures Seligula tore down could create opportunities for stronger competition, more excitement, and thus, more fan engagement and revenue.

        I think history means more to people than they realize most of the time. History easily recedes into the background of everyday life; things connecting us to the past are always there, because they’ve always been there — until, suddenly, they’re not. They go up in smoke like a “forest” of hundreds of centuries-old trees, and we’re left with a very clear sense that something isn’t the same anymore, and that our common connection with the past has frayed. Suddenly, we realize how much history means to us.

  10. Cody Laweryson has thirteen strikeouts in five innings for Elizabethton tonight, including an immaculate inning in the fifth.

  11. MIguel Sano's 2.6 rWAR is the best of his career along with his current OPS, although his OPS+ is not as good as his rookie year because the league wasn't as good then. His defensive WAR of -0.1 is also the best of his career.

    1. At the end of June, Sano was struggling and started to work on making a change to his swing by lowering his hands when he sets up. On June 27, Sano's numbers bottomed out when he went 0-for-7 in the 18-inning game. His numbers up to that point in the season were .195/.278/.483. Some fans were calling for him to be demoted to the minors as he racked up by strikeout totals. Since then, however, Sano is batting .282/.387/.644 in 202 PAs.

  12. Hey, if anyone wants to hear anything incredibly stupid, flip on ESPN and listen to these guys barf or why they think Yadier Molina is a no doubt hall of famer.

      1. There is a pretty entertaining twitter game of asking the more, uhhh, rabid Cardinals fans if they would trade Molina straight up for Trout.

      1. Worse, I accidentally didn't turn the volume down far enough on a game being called by Rick Sutcliffe.

Comments are closed.