MLB 2023 Season

[Cobra Mgr]

Ohtani is being sat down for an oblique strain. I'm sure his people are shutting him down to avoid a pointless injury in another pointless Angels season.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by Westheim

September 10. The Royals have actually beaten the Oakland Pathetics to 100 losses with a 5-2 L to the Blue Jays.

Oakland had pulled ahead (behind?):

46-102 .311 = Oakland
48-101 .322 = Kansas City

[Cobra Mgr]

Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange

Oakland had pulled ahead (behind?):

46-102 .311 = Oakland
48-101 .322 = Kansas City

Atlanta 96 wins. How often has a team had more wins than 2 other franchises combined @ season's end?

[Amazin69]

Probably most of Joe Dimaggio's career, for starters. The Phillies were historically bad, the Browns sucked, the As had fallen apart after Connie sold everyone, the Senators, the Casey Stengel Braves…lots of options. (The White Sox were largely mediocre and the Cubs ran out of gas in the late 1940s, too.)

Pretty sure that most of the winningest teams accomplished the feat. Let's check 1909, for example.

Not only did the World Champion Pirates (110 wins) outpace the combined efforts of the Braves (45 wins) and Cardinals (54 wins), but you could leave the Braves (or whatever they were that season) out of it, and combine the 6th place Dodgers (55 wins) with the 54 for St. Loo and it still doesn't add up to 110.

And that's just one 8-team league. There are probably dozens of cases.

Also the 2nd-place Cubs had 104 wins so they were better than Boston and either Brooklyn or StL and yet they didn't come within 5 games of the pennant.

[Westheim]

The Cubs and the Mets won 99 in total in 1962, fewer than each of the Dodgers and Giants (101 each, excluding the tie-breakers). Just one off the top of my head

[Déjà Bru]

This year's AL MVP, early season exit notwithstanding.

[Amazin69]

Originally Posted by Déjà Bru

This year's AL MVP, early season exit notwithstanding.

That would be five MVP seasons in the past 10 years for the Anaheim Angels of Los Angeles. In 2014, Trout's first MVP season led them to a 94-win season. None of the other awarded years (Trout 2016, Trout 2019, Shohei 2021, this year) have seen the Katella Avenue Attractions win even 80 games.

I guess the FO doesn't know how to build around stars, huh? Which means that an owner would have to be fairly dim to hire a failed Angels GM to run his club, right?

(No offense, Uncle Stevie.)

[Cobra Mgr]

Rays plan to announce new St.Petersburg Stadium

[Cobra Mgr]

The dumpster fire that is Angel Hernandez.

[Cobra Mgr]

Robo umps, please. ........
.....and hurry!

[Amazin69]

Originally Posted by Cobra Mgr

Rays plan to announce new St.Petersburg Stadium

1. Adjacent to the current site, which means that all the current problems in reaching the Trop (1 highway, no public transportation) will still be in play.

2. 30,000 capacity? Way to overdo the "boutique" trend. Why not just ask the Tarpons if you can co-tenant their park?

I am glad that a deal has, apparently, been reached. It just seems that a better idea was out there. JMO.

[monkeyman576]

Julio Rodriguez has a case as he will likely end up with more hits, stolen bases and RBI's, played the whole season and was on a much better team. But I would probably vote Ohtani even though I am a M's fan.

[stl jason]

FINALLY!

In a forgettable season for the Cardinals, you gotta find things to celebrate when you can... Adam Wainwright finally picks up career win number 200 with a 1-0 win over the Brewers.

[Westheim]

Originally Posted by Cobra Mgr

The dumpster fire that is Angel Hernandez.

Bright sides: the playoff picture wasn't irreversibly changed.

That's all I got.

[thehef]

Originally Posted by Westheim

Bright sides: the playoff picture wasn't irreversibly changed.

That's all I got.

At least there's that...

But how does this guy keep his job? As the worst MLB ump, does he still grade out higher than every ump working in triple A?

[Sweed]

Originally Posted by Cobra Mgr

Robo umps, please. ........
.....and hurry!

Yeah, it's time. Even if the technology gets some calls wrong it won't be as bad as calls that are being missed now. Add in there will be a consistency that players, batters and pitchers, can adjust to and the game will be fine/better.

[Westheim]

Originally Posted by thehef

At least there's that...

But how does this guy keep his job? As the worst MLB ump, does he still grade out higher than every ump working in triple A?

My theory remains that he has pictures of Big Bud Selig and Rob Numbfred in a hot tub with a llama.

[kq76]

I'm wary of an ABS challenge system, but I really don't want to see an ABS non-challenge system.

My biggest concern with the challenge system are selfish players challenging when they really shouldn't. And in case someone doesn't know, it's not just batters who can challenge, but the battery can too. I'd much rather it be up to the manager or someone else. And I realize that might take too long, but what if the player first made the signal to challenge, then the manager got 10 seconds to accept or reject it based on what his video coordinator told him. Somewhat relatedly, Foolish Bailey made a fascinating video on the effectiveness of the Royals' Video Coordinator, Bill Duplissea. Maybe cut out the manager altogether and just have a direct line to each team's replay guy in the ump's gear.

Watching videos of it in action is actually kind of interesting. At first I thought it would drag the game, but it actually adds to the suspense and thrill of the game. It seems like it takes less time (15-20 seconds) than replays in MLB take now, which I think are way faster than they used to be (I swear they used to take several minutes sometimes).

Another thing I took away from the videos is I really don't think the minor leaguers were challenging like major leaguers would. They were challenging early and often, at counts that made little sense to challenge, and at pitches that were really too close to the zone. It was as if they didn't care one bit about game theory. And I'm not surprised by that, it's there to be tested after all, but how accurate can your findings be if it's not being tested how it would probably be used in the majors?

A while back I was reading an ESPN article on the ABS systems and it sounded like players, and especially catchers, don't like the non-challenge system so I'm hoping the union wouldn't let it go through (I presume they'd still have to okay the kind they go with). I'd still like to see these skill differences between catchers and I like the game theory the challenge system adds.

It surprised me to learn MLB has to get it passed the umpire's union and I'm not sure how they'd take it. I imagine people might instantly assume umps would be against it, but they might welcome it. If they give the calls entirely to AI, then as an umpire you can't really feel bad when you make a bad call, you just blame it on the AI. And even if it's a challenge system, there still might be less pressure to make the call right because if you screw up, well, the batter has the challenge system. If I was an ump, I think I'd welcome it. As long as MLB doesn't also insist on a pay cut that is.

What I found most interesting in that article, however, was that, along with implementing some ABS system, they'd very likely change the strike zone to try to counter the increase in strikeouts. And do you just shrink it or do you play around with the heights, maybe say the zone is at the back or middle or front of home plate, maybe shrink the width of home plate? Who knows. The article even suggested making it oval-shaped which sounds crazy as that'd be way too much to ask of an ump, but if you're going all AI, then maybe it's not crazy.

It's curious that the strike zone, as it is defined now in the rules, isn't really the strike zone that ABS is set at. ABS is set at %s of a player's height (can you lie and say you're shorter or is it calculating your height?) whereas the rules define it at set points of the player's body (so the lower you crouch the smaller your strike zone). I prefer the idea of %s of a player's height so it doesn't matter how low you crouch, but I can't help but think the strike zone should be set at a size regardless of the batter. Without the guide of the player's body that might be too much to ask of a human however. And yeah, that might give an advantage to taller players, but right now there's an advantage to shorter players.

It also mentioned that at first ABS was set up like a 3d cube over home plate (like I think the rules imply umps are supposed to call it now), but that didn't work very well, so they went to a 2d plane at halfway depth over the plate for ABS. So unless you tell the umps to change their own strike zones to be like that of the AI, I don't see how you can really go with a challenge system. A strike with an ump could very legitimately be a ball to the AI and vice versa. I'm not sure if umps testing it have been told to adjust their own zone.

Anyway, as much as some of us have had enough with all the bad calls and want something different, I'm not so sure we're that close to seeing ABS in MLB. I was thinking that with how quickly they've introduced some of these other rules that there was a good chance we'd see ABS next year, but now I'm not sure. While it's fast and seems to work relatively well now, there seem to still be plenty of questions.

[MathBandit]

Originally Posted by kq76

My biggest concern with the challenge system are selfish players challenging when they really shouldn't. And in case someone doesn't know, it's not just batters who can challenge, but the battery can too. I'd much rather it be up to the manager or someone else. And I realize that might take too long, but what if the player first made the signal to challenge, then the manager got 10 seconds to accept or reject it based on what his video coordinator told him

See, to me, that's the best part of a challenge system: Bryce Harper (or insert other player name here) challenging a strike right down the middle in a 1-1 count in the bottom of the 3rd inning, which then means the team loses their challenge for the game.

[Déjà Bru]

Originally Posted by Sweed

Yeah, it's time. Even if the technology gets some calls wrong it won't be as bad as calls that are being missed now. Add in there will be a consistency that players, batters and pitchers, can adjust to and the game will be fine/better.

This. ^^^

I hate the creep of A.I. but in this case, it is associated technology that is exacerbating the problem. Centerfield cameras, superimposed strike boxes, social media web sites. What in the past would be dismissed as judgment calls or missed entirely is now blatantly obvious and things like those Instagram posts are hurting the game.