ashbury

Welp, like others, I'm off to do more compelling things than watch this travesty. We got a foot of snow last night and I'm now out of excuses for not dealing with it.

It's unfair and the umpire really needs to step in and correct the obvious cheating. KC put a major league pitcher on the mound. Ringer.

Welcome, and good first post. Hopefulness is always gladly received by every poster here. 😀 Pitching could be good. We have some good starters. There are hopes that the front office has assembled a reasonably strong bullpen. Some are, ahem, more skeptical than others.

Who replaces Ober in your rotation? It's going to take a while before his ERA descends below 4. 😀

I think I'd rather still have Berrios in the game today than Martin, TYVM.

Skill and poise. Both notable by their absence today.

Funderburk, WTF.

Yes and no. An offense can't bury the team for an entire game in just the first two innings. Ober did.

Dis-concur. If you have a BP pitcher throwing useless offspeed pitches, miles from the plate, you get another BP pitcher.

Clearly the game is out of reach unless the bats really come alive and nothing else bad happens while KC is up. So Rocco is trying to preserve the pen, and asked Ober to do the reliever's job and just get through some more innings. And in response, yes, Ober relieved himself on the mound, all right.

Pete Maki's got a project to work on in the coming week.

Perez can't score from first, against that arm? The old man is SLOW.

Held Perez to a single. Progress.

Oof. Difficult play in CF there. But ultimately, catchable.

Please review your actions during the bidding and figure out what kind of jinx you placed on the man. Just tuned in, so nothing in the first inning colors my view, but Ober's got zero today.

Is a preist one who believes in Preism?

Came in late to the game, caught up on the box score, and was looking to you for this update.

Pitch to contact. Concur. Kirilloff doesn't have good enough breaking stuff to get the strikeouts if he's called upon.

The first baseman's wife, obvii.

If Dobnak had been an off-season minor league signing, we'd be talking up his chances "if he can just find that one tweak." We're thin at starting pitching and one or two untimely injuries for a few weeks combined with underperformance from 40-man arms at St Paul will have us reaching down to AAA for whichever non-roster arm with enough stamina to start has the best results to date. If Randy performs, he'll have his chance - it's really all up to him, given how the major league season is played. Last year for the Twins was such an aberration, we forget. / ninja'd, in greater detail, by jmlease1

From this morning's b-r.com email digest: Byron Buxton (MIN) vs. Brady Singer (KCR): 13 PA, .538/.538/1.154, 2 HR If present trends continue.....

Looking forward to seeing how he does there. If he proves to be serviceable as Buxton's understudy, that could be big!

You are correct. https://www.mlb.com/news/rule-5-draft-results-2022 Weirdly, the official MILB player page has it as a waiver claim. https://www.milb.com/player/yoyner-fajardo-679938 I just thought the discrepancy a little interesting. Don't believe everything you read. 😀

Satire is apparently lost at this site unless it's labeled as such. So here's more satire. If you want the absolute shortest distance from home to the body of the runner, then throw to first base, as long as the runner is slow enough. Here's the not-satire part. Correa is an excellent shortstop. I presume the position he's shown in the screen grab is not accidental. The 2023 change in rules about infield shifts affects the logic just slightly, but when a steal attempt is developing there is some time after the pitcher releases the ball to pick the desired location to receive the throw from home. The ball in that screen grab is already partway to its destination. and Correa hasn't begun his lunge. If the location the ball actually arrived at was optimal, wouldn't Correa have been set up differently? The ball thrown by the catcher goes at a far higher velocity than a human can run. So the distance being a few inches shorter,, thrown a few feet toward the first base side, does not make up for the speed differential of throwing to where the runner must eventually arrive in order to steal the base. The little joke, above, about throwing to first if you want to minimize the distance, is just to help visualize that the shortness of the throw does you no good if the runner is already past that point. Throw to the optimal corner of the base, at 80+ MPH, and you'll beat the runner much more easily than throwing to a spot the runner will reach sooner., those few feet closer to first A throw at the same speed Vazquez threw, but to the spot that Correa clearly was setting up for, has the runner sliding hand-first into the glove that's safely holding the ball, with much less drama. You're certainly correct that no catcher can throw with pinpoint precision. And you're right that the infielder taking the throw must be agile. Vazquez did his job on that play. Correa, by contrast, went above and beyond his job, and made a play worthy of a Gold Glover. Greatest play ever by a SS? No. But a play that I don't think most infielders can make. He gave a master class on that tag. My post wasn't in response to any particular other post, and even less so to your first one which was relatively moderate in its praise for Vazquez's throw.