Miggy's Little Helper

There is clearly blame there. At this point, you cannot use Duffey against premier power hitters. Period. Once LeMahieu reached base, it should have been Smith. And if not Smith, literally anyone else. Maybe he (or any other reliever) gets beat, but at least you’re using someone that has a chance of keeping the ball down. Duffey hangs breaking balls every single outing.

Can anyone think of a worse group of batters in Judge/Rizzo/Stanton for Duffey to face? A hang-it-and-bang-it waiting to happen.

Rocco special.

Rocco’s rules: cannot use prime relievers close and late when losing.

If that was to Judge or Stanton, would have been. Got lucky.

To be clear, Wolfson claimed Joe Ryan is ready to go. But our beloved Perpetual Manager of the Year (Hallowed Be His Name) believes he needs a rehab start. So, he’d rather have Sands get lit up and go 2IP rather than get a pitch count limited Ryan through 4ish. To say that’s suboptimal is an insult to definition of suboptimal.

Gotta love Rocco bringing in Thielbar here. Has there ever been a manager that plays to lose the game more than Rocco? He gives up in every close game that we are trailing.

As a labor lawyer, it always seemed that this was the likely result at any initial deadline for negotiations (be it a lockout at season start or strike on the brink of the playoffs). Failure to reach an agreement was likely a baked-in consequence of the starting negotiating positions combined with a relationship that is less than "okay" (to be charitable). Although I understand the frustrations, welcome to labor negotiations--they aren't pretty. We'll get there at some point in the next several weeks to months, but this is how it is designed to work. In baseball, given the resources on both sides, it's about imposing some level of pain on the other in order to get to agreement (again, a product of a fraught relationship). As a baseball fan, I for one am happy that we have a lockout and are seeing this playout before a season starts. Without the lockout, we'd almost certainly just push this down the road to the brink of the playoffs--at which point we'd see the players walk off the job. I leave it up to you as to which of these scenarios, long term, is better for baseball. We'd all prefer option C, an agreement and opening day. But that was basically never in the cards. So we move on to the next best option.

If you want to objectively criticize his pitching performance, fine. But 40 pitches to get through 2 innings when you strike out 4 and give up 2 weak hits (flyball exit velo 69 and grounder exit velo 84), you are doing fine. Good luck to anyone hitting the change last night, Tigers or not.

The situation made little sense. You need to get the magic number down to 0 before you trust Gibson in that situation. BUT...Gibson was objectively good last night. His control was excellent and he had true swing and miss stuff. Did he give up a couple hard hit balls? Yes, but the Gibby we saw last night was mighty encouraging. If he can pitch like that, he's a valuable piece for the playoffs.

Call it whatever you want. It was patently obvious that Harper, May, and Hildy were all superior options to Mejia at that point in the game. Last time I checked, the general strategy in the eighth inning with a two-run lead does not involve running out your fourth best available relief option. If we play the optimal strategy and get beat, I can live with it. Play sub-optimal strategy and get beat, I think we all have the right to be frustrated.

The problem with tonight is clearly that WE DID have the bullpen to close it out. It didn't take a genius to figure out how to get the last nine outs from some combination of Perez, Harper, May, and Hildy. If Perez, May, and Hildy were considered off limits tonight, it's going to be a long year and perhaps the FO should've have thought about signing one of the four hundred thousand 7/8/9 relievers available.

Someday, I hope to see a manager that understands that there is no guarantee that the team will be in a position to win tomorrow. Quit worrying about a guy being unavailable out of the 'pen TOMORROW until that need presents itself. If Mejia had to pitch the 8th tomorrow out of necessity, I could understand. We weren't there yet. The splits in the 8th were essentially neutral. May should have pitched the 8th (there was a strong case for Harper to pitch a second inning given how well the ball was coming out of his hand) and Hildy the 9th. For all we know, 2-3 innings of mop up work will be available tomorrow. Also, I don't know what trash prep program we're running if we can't give Perez the ball in the 7th with something like 1,200 games in a row upcoming. Being on a pitch count when we've known this is the game he'd start for the last 30 years is insane. The managing (both general and game) errors are mounting.

Hot take: Not hyperbole, Baldelli (or the person that ultimately called for Vasquez) should be fired. Bringing in Vasquez in a 1-0 game with the bases loaded is the football equivalent of running the ball up the middle down 6 on your own 45 with 0:02 left. Hi, my name in Taylor Rogers and I am one of the most dominant, if not the most dominant, left handed pitcher in all of baseball. Instead, we brought in the guy with an MLB WHIP of 2.00 and AAA WHIP of 1.714. Shockingly, he did not get the out. OH AND DID I MENTION THAT ROGERS DIDN'T PITCH LAST NIGHT AND TOMORROW IS AN OFF DAY. This was malpractice of the most serious degree.

I'll put it in a bit of a different way: that's not how baseball works. You don't get to magically put Betts/Ramirez/Yelich on your roster. Trout is the greatest player in several generations. They did the right thing.