Baseball

Pirates Spotlight: The Lone Bright Spot?

By Sam Fels 1246 0

Comparing hellish years for the Pirates is probably folly. Is this worse than winning 98 games and getting half of a playoff game? Or every season that’s come after it? Still, this one has particular sting, because not only have the Pirates been bad–last place in the division–but they’ve been startlingly unpleasant. Constant fights with other teams and themselves, capping off with leading, raging prick Kyle Crick (we’re a poet and don’t even know it) sending himself to the IL for the rest of the season in a fight with closer Felipe Vasquez. It’s one thing to be bad, it’s one thing to be no fun, but it’s another to be the former while trying to shard to be the latter. Penguins training camp can’t come soon enough.

Amongst the flood of horseshit baseball and horeshit people and horseshit tactics, there has been something of a bright spot. Bryan Reynolds led the NL in batting average for a long stretch, and has put up a pretty impressive season in left for his rookie campaign in The Confluence. He’s fallen off Anthony Rendon’s pace a bit, but has still managed a .326 average and a 137 wRC+ for a 3.2-WAR season so far. That’s something, right? It might ever so slightly soften the blow that he and the human thumbtack in the skin Crick were the return for team hero Andrew McCutcheon, no? Well, maybe not.

Reynolds has been good, but he’s probably been lucky too, and what that will translate to in the future is a hard guess. Reynolds has benefitted from a .404 BABIP on the season, which is absurd. It’s the highest mark of any qualified hitter in the majors, besting out Tim Anderson by nine points. And Reynolds doesn’t come with high-end speed that leads to beating out a lot of grounders that boosts a BABIP.

Reynolds carried a higher-than-average BABIP in the minors, so having a high number can be expected. In fact, he never had one below .376. Still, .404 is basically rude. Reynolds gets there by hitting the ball hard, but he doesn’t hit it as hard as most of the dominant hitters in the league. His 44.4% hard-contact rate is not even in the top-30 in baseball. His 23.8% line-drive rate is 29th. That’s good, but hardly dominant.

As you might expect, Reynolds can crush a fastball, which is how kids usually come up through the minors and arrive. He’s hitting .421 on them with a .726 slugging. Which makes you wonder why anyone’s throwing him fastballs at all at the moment, as he doesn’t have a .300 average on any other pitch and has been utterly helpless against sliders and change-ups, whiffing on over 40% of his swings against them. They’ll get there soon enough, y’think.

Going forward, Reynolds will probably have to add power to his game or the Pirates will have to find it in rarer spots. A left-fielder who only hits line drives puts a team behind the eight-ball a bit. He hasn’t been particularly good in left field either, and the Bucs might want to consider flipping him to right, which in PNC is the easier field to play. Would the Pirates ever swap their corner outfielders based on home or road? It’s the kind of outside-the-box thinking they used to specialize in, and then watched the rest of baseball catch them and pass them by.

This is what Pirates fans have to hang on to, which lets you know just about how bleak it’s been.

Eloy 2
Baseball

Series Recap – Sox Lose 2 of 3 To Royals: Rearview Mirror

By Andy Jonathan 1151 0

BOX SCORES

Game 1: Royals 3 – Sox 7

Game 2: Royals 8 – Sox 6

Game 3: Royals 6 – Sox 3

 

Man, the Sox sure are going to make it tough on me to keep up my sunny outlook on the rest of the season. After starting this series out on such a positive note, the Sox forgot the one axiom every team should have when playing the 2019 Kansas City Royals: Don’t Leave Shit Over The Plate For Soler To Nuke Into Orbit. You’d think by now most teams would’ve figured it out, but as Soler creeps ever closer to 50 dongs on the season I guess everybody is just gonna keep pressing their luck. Good lord when he connects with the ball it goes a long way.

It was actually pretty fun  watching Eloy and Soler go back and forth this series. Between the two of them, they accounted for 14 of the 23 runs knocked in this series. 60% of the runs! That’s pretty nuts. For the foreseeable future, that’s pretty much how the Royals are going to need to win games, and it worked out swimmingly for them this series. All told, the White Sox winning one was enough to wrap up the season series in their favor, but not nearly as satisfying an ending as I was hoping for.

To The Bullets

 

THE POWER OF POSITIVITY

-As mentioned above, Eloy had himself a series. His first career grand slam on Tuesday night, a 3 run shot on Wednesday night and another few RBIs thrown in for good measure. That brings him up to 26 on the season, with 68 RBI to go along with it. For comparison, Yoan Moncada at this point last season had 17 HR and 56 RBI. Right now he’s slashing .299/.357.508 with 23 HR and 69 RBI (NICE). Do I think Eloy will have the same progression as Yoan? Probably not, but it’s not out of the question. If he happens along the same climb statistically speaking the middle of the Sox order is gonna be something to behold.

-Lucas Giolito struck out 8 Royals in a row today, setting a new record for White Sox pitching on his way to 12 total Ks today. He made some mistakes as well, and this was one of those days where mistakes got pummeled, but overall it’s just a blip on his radar.

-Tim Anderson didn’t have a great series, but he managed 2 hits and kept his lead atop the AL batting list, thanks to DJ Lemahieu going 0 for 6 today. It’s gonna be a race to the finish, and hopefully Timmy can keep focused on opposing pitching and not get distracted.

-The Sox bullpen fared pretty well against KC this week, only giving up 2 earned runs (both charged to Carson Fulmer) in 9.2 innings pitched. This is a nice turnaround from last week where the Angels feasted on them. More please.

-Ivan Nova started out pretty shakily but settled down and came 1 out away from another quality start. Much like the other two starters in this series, the Royals were able to knock dingers off him, but they were of the solo variety so no real harm done.

-Next up is a trip to the Pacific Northwest for a battle with another team in the middle of a rebuild. It will be interesting to see who the Sox throw out there as a 5th starter. Fingers crossed it’s not Covey…I’m trying to stay positive.

Baseball Everything Else

Series Recap: NEW KID ON THE CUBS HAD A BUNCH OF HITS

By Forklift 1716 0

Game 1 Box Score: Cubs 10 Dads 2

Game 2 Box Score: Dads 9 Cubs 8 (10 innings)

Game 3 Box Score: Dads 4 Cubs 0

Game 4 Box Score: Cubs 4 Dads 1

Not the hero we need, the hero we deserve.

Not the hero we need, the hero we deserve.

 

For guys of a certain age (old), the thought of the Cubs going to San Diego in a must-win situation can still conjure up visions of 1984, with Steve Garvey walking the Cubs off in a game that looked as good as won, Jim Frey leaving Rick Sutcliffe in during Game 5 while he had Steve Trout rested and ready to go, then the ball getting past Leon Durham/s Gatorade-soaked mitt. So, good times.

Let’s…

Baseball

Series Preview – Royals At White Sox: Twirling Towards Freedom

By Andy Jonathan 1848 0

  VS 

 

RECORDS: Royals 53-91  White Sox 63-80

GAMETIMES: Tues/Wed 7:10, Thursday 1:10

TV: Tues/Wed NBCSN, Thursday WGN

Are You Missouri Or Are You Kansas: Royals Review

SERIES PREVIEW POSTS

Depth Charts & Pitching Staffs

Royals Spotlight: David Glass

Talk about your must see TV. A mid September battle between two of the AL’s worst should pull in the viewers, right? Coming into this series, the Royals are on somewhat of a roll, having won their last 3 series in a row. Granted those 3 series were against the Orioles, Tigers, and Marlins, so it’s not like they’ve exactly been slaying the dragons. The Sox actually present their stiffest challenge since losing 3 of 4 to the A’s at the end of last month. One of those losses to Oakland involved the Royals giving up 19 runs, which leads into their biggest issue right now, which is run prevention.

The Royals have languished at the bottom third of the league in pitching since the All-Star break giving up an average of 5.2 runs per game. In comparison, the Sox have rocketed to the top third on the wings of Lucas Giolito and a revitalized Reynaldo Lopez, averaging 4.8 runs a game. The only decent starters in the back half of the season for the Royals have been Jake Junis and Brad Keller, each worth 1 WAR a piece. Unfortunately for Royals fans, the team has shut Keller down as he’s reached his career high in innings pitched with 165, which is 20 innings more than he pitched in 2018. The Sox will see Junis, Jorge Lopez, and moon-faced yahoo Glenn Sparkman, who as you’ll recall plunked Tim Anderson in the dome last time the two teams met and was summarily ejected.

Offensively the Royals are 25th in the league in hitting, a whopping 1 position higher than the White Sox. Jorge Soler quite possibly may have finally reached the potential he always flashed in his time with the Cubs. He’s sitting on 41 home runs thus far, with 102 RBIs which is extra impressive considering he’s only had Hunter Dozier and Whit Merrifield to knock in, as everyone else is lost in the dugout tunnel. Merrifield in particular is having another standard year for himself, getting on base at his usual prodigious clip (.364). Hunter Dozier is also having a breakout year, worth 3.4 WAR so far.

For the White Sox, they’ll send out the best of their starters with Nova, Lopez and Giolito scheduled to take the bump. Hopefully all three will get the offensive support that the Sox flashed in their weekend series against the Angels. Tim Anderson continues his quest for the AL batting title, and this is the perfect pitching staff for him to do that with. Ricky Renteria has talked about putting Moncada back in the leadoff spot, which, whatever. He can definitely get on base, but I’d rather have someone else there as Yoan is more valuable knocking in the runs. I’m curious as to which Eloy Jimenez we’ll get this season, as the one that showed against the Angels was not optimal, but the one against the Indians was cash money.

This is the final meeting of the season between these two teams, and with the Sox holding a 2 game edge all they have to do is win one for the season series. While winning the bare minimum has been the Sox modus operandi thus far I say fuck that, take all 3 and drive home the point that having fun in baseball is not a bad thing and Tim Anderson has more personality then your whole fucking city. Except for maybe Patrick Mahomes.  He’s cool.

 

 

Baseball

Royals Spotlight: They Call Him Mr. Glass

By Andy Jonathan 1388 0

Word broke a few weeks ago that longtime Royals owner David Glass would be selling the team to an ownership group lead by Kansas City businessman (and Cleveland Indians vice chairman) John Sherman. What was particularly staggering about this news was the fact that Glass would be selling the team for a tidy $900 million dollar profit. Glass originally bought the team just before the start of the 2000 season for $96 million dollars. The sale (if finalized and approved by MLB ownership) would be for over a billion dollars. That number in and of itself is pretty ginormous, but when you factor in how the Royals consistently pleaded poor during most off-season free agent periods it becomes even more obnoxious. A brief glance at where the Royals fall in reference to the rest of the league in payroll since Glass took over the team in 2000 shows that in those 20 years the team has averaged 21.5th in the league in payroll. They’ve never been higher than 15th in the league, and in the bottom 1/3rd 15 out of the 20 years. Yet in that time, the biggest contract they’ve handed out was to Alex Gordon this year, a whopping 20 million dollars. In comparison, the Red Sox are paying one of the Royals former players (David Price) 31 million. The now suddenly financially conscious New York Yankees still have 4 players on their team making more than Gordon, and the usually spendthrift Cardinals have two (and Dexter Fowler making 17 million).

All of this adds up to yet another MLB owner who has purchased a team not because he loves the game of baseball, but because it’s a profitable investment for him. Glass has made plenty of money in his career as a CEO of Walmart way before he bought the Royals for a song. Now he’s flipping the team like a shitty house in Skokie because he’s made 10X the profit on a less than $100 million dollar investment. You don’t have to look very far to see how actual Royals fans (and there are only about 34 of them left) feel about the deal. BeyondTheBoxScore did a pretty in-depth review of what Glass actually provided the team in his almost 20 years of ownership. Other than a one time luck out of a World Series win, it’s not a whole lot. In fact, Glass’ ownership of the team (other than the WS win) is a pretty impressive display of how an owner can come in and treat an MLB team like an asset, then flip it like Two Face’s coin in Batman and sell it to someone that gives a shit about the sport.

Patrick Brennan said it best as a guest writer for Beyond The Box Score in the article about the sale of the team:

“As a Royals fan, I took this news as nothing short of fantastic. I can’t sit here and tell you all the things I know about John Sherman, because I know very little. If he ends up buying the Royals, I don’t know how much he’ll spend, I don’t know what changes he’ll make, and I don’t know how he’ll run the organization. But he’s succeeding an owner that a) was very scarcely involved with the Royals and Kansas City, b) slashed payroll constantly, c) spent very little, even though he’s likely to turn a $96 million investment into over a billion dollars, and d) ran a terrible organization for 95 percent of his tenure.”

Here’s where it becomes more important to Sox fans. Does that sound like anyone you know? Does that blueprint seem pretty familiar to you? Granted, I’d never trade 2005 for any pile of magic beans, but it’s a pretty common refrain throughout the league. You have your top 10 teams who spend the money that’s required to make you team competitive, then you have the bottom 2/3 of the league that is more concerned about wringing as much value out of underpaid young talent as you possibly can before you let them hit the bricks in free agency.

Basically the entire AL Central falls into this category. When was the last time you saw any of the 5 teams in this division spend big money on a free agent? The Tigers and Miguel Cabrera are the only ones that come to mind. Even the Sox with Jose Abreu didn’t break the bank, as they spent 68 million on the man as the most highly paid player in team history. Other than Cabrera and maybe Alex Gordon the AL Central isn’t exactly breaking the bank. Yet we are expected to sit here and listen to the owners cry poor after getting loads of money off the newest TV deal. Combine that with the 900X investment David Glass made off his purchase of the Royals and I start rooting more and more for the inevitable lockout 18 months from now. Do I think this is important? Absolutely, as the White Sox enter the most critical phase of their rebuild after shitting the bed on potential game changing free agents like Bryce Harper and Manny Machado. Now the rumor mill churns about JD Martinez opting out of the deal he has in Boston. As much as I’d like to see the Sox sign him to a deal and piss off both the Boston AND Detroit fanbases (The legendary Double Play), I find it super hard to believe that Sox ownership cares about anything more about the bottom line of the organization’s value on the open market.

 

But hey, at least the Rick Hahn brought up Dylan Covey to entertain us for the rest of the season…

 

ITS SUCH GOOD SHIT.

 

Baseball

Series Preview – Cubs vs. Padres: Anytime Now, Assh—s

By Sam Fels 1153 0

vs.

RECORDS: Cubs 76-66   Padres 66-76

GAMETIMES: Monday-Wednesday 9:10, Thursday 2:40

TV: WGN Monday, NBCSN Tuesday/Thursday, ABC 7 Wednesday

LOOKING FOR THE SUIT STORE: Gaslamp Ball

SERIES PREVIEW POSTS

Depth Charts & Pitching Staffs

Padres Spotlight: Manny Machado

I may have waved the white flag at this team, or something a lot more impolite, but there are those out there that haven’t. And maybe the players haven’t either. They can’t say they have. We’ll find out real soon. If they do plan on making a fist of this season, and not just waiting around for the Diamondbacks or Brewers or Phillies to come and slip the quiet knife between the ribs, it should probably start….cue Denis Lemieux…RIGHT FUCKING NOW.

The Cubs head out to the West Coast for the fourth time this season (because that makes sense) for four games with the Padres before returning home for a 10-game homestand that definitely has the feel of 2004 where everything will go wrong. But before we get there, it’s this series against the Padres, one of the NL’s most exciting teams…next year.

The Fathers sit 10 games under, and suffered through a brutal July where they went 8-16. They recovered for a 13-15 August, and just won a series off the moribund Rockies (whom the Cardinals get to play soon. Oh joy!). They also took three of four off the Giants to end August, though getting swept by the D-Backs is also in there.

One reason for the ho-hum record is that this isn’t a very good offense. Producing a good one in that park will be the challenge for GM AJ Preller going forward, as Petco seems to gobble up offense even in the face of demonic baseballs. Of late, only new kid Josh Naylor is hitting, taking Hunter Renfroe‘s job in right field. Naylor is playing to lock down a spot next year, which is a common theme amongst this team at the moment.

They weren’t helped by Fernando Tatis Jr. going on the shelf for the season either. Wil Myers has been the only other regular to hit the past month, but he doesn’t always get playing time either in left, center, or first, though you might see him at the latter as Eric Hosmer has been emitting a weird smell all season. Recent promotion Nick Martini, and all the Groucho Marx jokes that come with him, has hit since arriving as well and gets most of the time in left.

The Cubs missed Chris Paddack when the Padres invaded Wrigley right after the break, but they won’t do so this time. However, the second half has been much rougher on the rookie, with an ERA a rest stop or two away from 5.00. He’s still carrying near a 5-to-1 K/BB ratio, but the Fiendish BABIP Kung Fu Treachery has gotten him in the second half, and he’s giving up more fly balls. These days, that’s not going to work out well. They’ll miss Joey Lucchesi, who has been great over the past month, and they will see Cal Quantrill who is carrying an ERA over 9.00 in that span. Ronald Bolanos will only be making his second start in the majors, so look for him to throw six shutout innings in true Cubs tradition.

The Cubs would be well advised to get to the starters, because you don’t want to have to stare down Kirby Yates and Craig Stammen late in the game, or a few others. The Padres always seem to fashion a plus-pen out of whatever’s lying around in true MacGeyver fashion, and this year is no different. Luis Perdomo has returned from injury this year into the pen and has been lights-out of late. This is just not the unit you want to try and come back against, not that this Cubs outfit as currently molded has much interest in doing that against anyone these days.

The Padres are not a doormat, but they’re not offensively charged and their starters can be had. Then again, that description could be thrown at the Cubs, and they don’t have the bullpen the Padres do. At some point, if only out of embarrassment, you’d think the Cubs would turn the levels up just a tad, and it would have to start here. But hey, if they fuck this up, with the Cardinals getting the funeral dirge that is the Rockies for three games, then at least you know the division will be over.

If you need a reason to watch and hurt yourself some more, Nico Hoerner will be up to take over at short with Baez and Russell out. Isn’t this fun?

Clean it up, assholes.

Baseball

Padres Spotlight: Take A Load Off, Manny

By Sam Fels 1257 0

There was no avoiding the winter debate over Manny Machado devolving into the much of the stupid and deranged. Machado has had just enough incidents on the field, and comes from somewhere other than these shores, that the justification for freezing him out until spring training was always going to include something beyond collusion. Which we know is all it was. So “attitude problem,” “lazy,” “doesn’t hustle,” and various other dog-whistles were brought to the fore for teams that didn’t sign him. Even the Padres took their sweet time, though got their man at a price to anchor a team on the rise.

Sure, Machado brought a fraction of this on himself with some petulant displays here and there, none of which have anything to do with how hard he runs to first. But you always knew it would get overblown. Whatever, he’s getting $30M a year now, so do you think he cares?

The Padres might, because what they’ve gotten in their first of a 10-year investment is a lot of the confusing player the Orioles saw in 2017.

Machado has seen a 37-point drop in his average, 43-point drop in his OBP, and a 68-point drop in his slugging, to go along with the highest strikeout-rate of his career. He has put in some sterling defense at third, which helped keep him a three-WAR player this season. But you don’t pay $30M for a three-WAR player. You pay for the six-to-seven one Manny was last year, and in ’15 and ’16. So where did that guy go?

In ’17, when Manny had his first “down” year at the plate, it was mostly blamed on luck. And that wasn’t untrue, as he suffered through a .265 BABIP, some 35 points of his career norm and league average. Still, that year his line-drive rate tanked, which didn’t help his batted-balls find the Valhalla of open spaces much. Machado’s line-drive rate has only risen a tick above that in the proceeding two years, and is at 17.1% this year.

It would be easy to believe that the deeper dimensions of Petco Park and the marine layer have hurt Manny’s power, but he’s actually got the highest home run/fly ball ratio of his career. So that’s not it. His hard-contact has gone up along with everyone else’s, enjoying the use of the juiced ball, so it’s not there. Manny is making more soft-contact though, and that might be where the trouble spots are.

Manny is making less contact than he ever has, which means he has the highest swinging-strike percentage of his career. All offspeed and breaking pitches have seen an uptick in whiffs, though not violently so. Manny’s work with fastballs has remained steady and damaging, but everything else is a gooey mess.

Change-ups: .154 average

Sliders: .217

Curve: .195

And again, all have seen an uptick in whiffs/swing, which generally is a signal for someone cheating on the fastballs, fearful they can’t catch up anymore with normal timing. But that’s not what should be happening to a player at 27. That’s for players that are 32 and above.

Another warning sign is that Manny’s slugging in the upper part of the zone has taken a hit, especially on fastballs:

And all his whiff rates at the top third of the zone have increased, including nearly doubling on the inside-high section. But again, Manny is just 27, so this can’t be the start of a decline. On the other side though, Bryce Harper–his free agency contemporary-also seemed to develop a hole high and in this year on fastballs. Except when facing Derek Holland, of course.

More likely this is a one-year glitch. Something in his swing or approach. Pitchers aren’t attacking him with anything terribly different this time around, he’s just not getting there. Perhaps he’s carrying something. The Padres had better hope so, otherwise this is going to be a long ride for everyone.