Secretly using two different balls is all kinds of fuckery.
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Lol and your Braves just won it all
lots of activities available, bro, it’s amazing
Good story. And yeah, as I mentioned earlier, Manfred is a complete jackass and has come very close to wrecking the game by fucking around with the baseballs. I’m also kind of surprised that no pitcher has been killed by a 115mph liner coming back at them. But exit velocity is such a thing now, and my guess is that they want higher numbers, and of course, one day that will lead to a tragedy.
My only beef with the article is this:
Not necessarily. In manufacturing processes things can tend to drift. Often times people want to attribute randomness to things that have a distinct cause. I don’t know their processes, and it does say that they are hand made, but some times differences can come down to things like “Joe was on vacation this week, so Jim filled in this task” type stuff.
The other data does suggest that’s not what’s going on here. The data shown is indeed bi-modal, indicating that there were two distinct targets being aimed for, and not likely as an accident either.
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This guy makes my points about small market teams a lot better than I can.
10. More than half of all teams in the majors have, over the past decade, adopted an approach that most describe as “tanking.” Meaning they allow their payrolls to plunge to low levels, rebuild their roster by moving veterans for prospects, then push to win again once those prospects are in the majors and cost little more than the big-league minimum wage over their first three years.
The Pirates are doing it right now. The Cubs, Astros and Braves have done it in recent years on their way to World Series championships.
11. Three years ago in Bradenton, Fla., I asked Clark why the union, which had just filed a grievance against the Pirates and three other teams, wouldn’t just agree to a salary floor. His response: “If you agree to a floor, you agree to a cap.” That’s been the standard union line on that subject for decades. They see the floor as a slippery slope.
12. That stance is held most vocally by super-agent Scott Boras , who currently has five clients on the MLBPA’s eight-player executive board, one of whom is Gerrit Cole , who’d follow Boras off a cliff.
Boras last month derided the Braves’ first championship since 1995 as “the Easter Bunny delivering rotten eggs,” adding, “We have seen the championship in 60 days. The rules allow them to be a less-than-.500 team at Aug. 1 and add four or five players from teams that no longer wanted to compete and for very little cost change the entirety of their team and season. And we saw this unfold to the detriment of teams that create at vast expense, planning and intellect and won over 100 games.”
That’s how he sees this. The teams that pony up for his clients, like Max Scherzer just getting a $43 million annual salary from the Mets, are worthy winners. The rest are undeserving.
13. The Boras Corporation – and that’s what it’s called – employs an army of workers constantly staying in touch with reporters, most of them at non-local outlets, and feeding them information. Boras himself will even attempt to instruct reporters on what they should write. I’m speaking from firsthand experience.
19. They also regularly cite this claptrap as evidence of parity:
Make it 21 years without a repeat champion
pic.twitter.com/odNy904FCs
— MLB (@MLB) October 24, 2021
It’s extrapolating the haphazard results of the final round of a playoff and nothing more.
The pertinent facts: The Yankees haven’t had a losing season since 2000, averaging 94.1 wins per a full season, a span in which the Pirates, Reds, Brewers and Royals – based in the four smallest actual markets – don’t have 20 winning seasons combined . One out of that bottom four – Royals in 2015 – won the World Series. And only one team in that entire time — Marlins in 2003 — won a World Series without being in the upper half of the payroll rankings.
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Stupidity is everywhere these days.
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Those cards were pretty clearly written by someone who knows nothing about baseball. We all make mistakes, so even something that factually wrong can happen (shouldn’t in this case, but can), but it definitely reads like it was written by someone who doesn’t know baseball.
I write and edit news articles for a living. Sometimes I get a European writer writing something about American sports. I’ve let my fellow editor (who is a Brit) know that these all need to be run by me - it’s really obvious when the writer doesn’t know about the sport and is just trying to sound like they do. The card back in this case really looks like one of these articles beyond just the factual errors.
Yeah. I used to do a lot of copy-editing too back in the day. I see a lot of stuff online that just seems like it wasn’t edited at all. Typos and extra words or missing words and in this case, wrong facts. Good help is hard to find.
They usually get the facts right (though I did catch something that would’ve been horribly wrong right before the World Series), but the way they word things just sounds weird sometimes. Stuff like “the Houston Texans NFL team” instead of “the NFL’s Houston Texans” or referring to a basketball arena as a stadium. Wording a sports fan would never use.
“punctually defeated the Houston Astros”. Yeah. If I ever hear a sports announcer use the word “zero” in a score, I instantly write them off as a non-sports fan who’s faking it. Real sports announcers say the Braves are leading five to nothing. Never five to zero. And if I hear a play-by-play guy say that “Jones flew out to center field in the first inning”, I immediately write them off as someone who didn’t follow baseball as a kid and thus didn’t really learn the awkward but correct term “flied out”. Admittedly, that’s a bit old school, but still…
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It’s like when Roger Ebert said that some movie director was “batting 100”. Siskell told him it’s batting 1000. Ebert tried to argue back that batting 100 and batting 1000 can mean the same thing. Siskell just laughed at him.
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Former major leaguer Jeff Frye is among those trying to undo some of the damage Manfred has done in his tenure as commissioner. I admire the effort.
A Redditor emailed a baseball HOF voter and may have unintentionally figured out why Jeter wasn’t unanimously inducted:
https://www.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/s5n442/i_emailed_nick_canepa_to_ask_why_he_would_submit/
Canepa submitted blank ballots this year and last year and appears to be unaware of the fact that Jeter was on the ballot the year before that, where he received 396 out of a possible 397 votes.
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Bonds and Clemens on pace with around 50% of the vote counted. Arod starts his 10 year punishment for juicing with only 40% of the vote so far.
http://www.bbhoftracker.com/2021/12/2022-bbhof-tracker-summary-and-leaderboard/
Obv want Bonds in, but doing so shows just how futile this dumb ten year punishment session is
hall of very good indeed
I mean, Ortiz obviously juiced, but he didn’t get 100% caught, so I guess that is the line. So stupid.
I guess it helped that Ortiz is a likeable guy and nice to the writers. Every writer that voted for Ortiz but not Bonds or Clemens should have HOF voting credentials revoked.
Baseball Hall of Fame is such a joke that they’ve made themselves irrelevant at this point. There are over 10 players on that ballot that should be in by historical standards and they voted in one.
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