Playoffs
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It’s funny. I thought the Rockies had a good chance to win yesterday because Kyle Freeland had the ball. He’s been great all season, had a sub-3 ERA pitching half of his games in Colorado, which almost never happens for Colorado pitchers. And he was particularly great in the 2nd half of the season, with a sub-2.5 ERA, but has been pretty much ignored by the national media. Yesterday, most of the major sports outlets were all picking the Cubs to win (ESPN, MLB, CBS all pretty much unanimous for Cubs). So I’m really happy the Rockies won, and I’m really happy that Kyle Freeland played a big part in making that happen.
Go Rox!
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@approxinfinity I would say like 65-35 in the Brewers favor. So the Rockies have two good pitchers – Freeland and Marquez – and then after that the pitching really falls off. Marquez pitched Monday in the NL division game against the Dodgers. Freeland pitched on short rest yesterday. So neither of them will pitch to start the series against the Brewers on Thursday. Also, the Brewers are white-hot right now and are playing probably the best ball in the national league. So I give them the edge. But I think Colorado has a chance if their pen can hold it together.
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@approxinfinity And yeah, Bud Black is underrated as a manager.
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@wissox Don’t feel bad about your prediction. I too have the Astros repeating this year!
I’m also extremely biased since I’ve lived in Houston since I was in kindergarten except for my years at KU.
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“the Athletics, at $66 million, are the first team in 30 years to make the playoffs with baseball’s lowest Opening Day payroll”
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@Texas-Hawk-10 Oh, the reason I hate to do so is because as a Sox fan, the last thing I want is the Cubs to even get to a world series!
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MLB getting what they want with a forthcoming BoSox/Yankees series.
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@wissox Honestly, I may watch that series the closest lol. That’s just good tv. As much as I hate to say that.
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I think MLB has made a mistake by scheduling both NL games on the same day, and then both AL games on alternating days. Used to be one of each, which drew watchers from both leagues every day.
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@mayjay I have an annual rant on TV coverage. In short, Fox treats baseball as an inconvenience, only televising WS games.
MLB decided they won’t compete with football meaning all playoff games until the WS are not available to all viewers in the US. Not only that, the WS now has the majority of its games on weeknights and not on weekends by virtue of them starting on a Tuesday night. It used to be reversed until Selig, the worst commissioner in sports history decided they were’nt going to compete with football.
ESPN would much rather show football, so even though they show a few regular season games involving NY/Bos/Atl/Wash, they’ll only do 1 postseason game and that’s happened already.
I could go on and on. Makes me blood boil!
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@wissox Selig is the 2nd worst commissioner. His contemporary over in the NHL Gary Bettman is the worst. Selig did a lot of bad things for baseball, but he never came as close to killing the sport as Bettman did to killing the NHL. The NHL still is only has a handful of games in network TV and with the NBC game of the week the Stanley Cup finals are only NBC during the weekend.
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@Texas-Hawk-10 I don’t know that much about Bettman. I do know that he deserves his title Buttman though. And of course I didn’t actually study all league commissioners when I made my hyperbolic statement! But baseball was the national pasttime arguably when Selig became commissioner, and under his watch it fell to maybe 3rd in relevance to the NFL and NBA.
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This Brewer bullpen reminds me of the Royal pens from their World Series years.
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Brewers bullpen completely shutting the Rockies down. Rockies better hit better than this in Game 2 or they’ll be going back to Denver down 2 games. Yikes.
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Wow, that’s a really close fair/foul ball. It looks foul by just a hair.
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MOOOOOOOOOSE
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Pitching to Moustakas and throwing him 4 fastballs down the middle is a mistake. His slider is almost unhittable. Maybe because Yelich is on 3rd he didn’t want to throw a wild pitch but I mean. That’s really frustrating. Trust your best pitch.
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Moose, Soria, Cain, Cedeno, Albers. 5 ex Sox/Royals on this Brewer team.
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Brewers with 11 wins in a row. Rockies scored in one of 27 innings. This is a team on a roll right now.
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So far 1 playoff game has ended under 3 hours. Brewers have played 4 games all at least 3.25 hours long while giving up a total of 3 runs. How does that happen? MLB you have a problem and it’s called length of games.
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@wissox Pitching changes are the worst. They kill at least an hour of the game. Especially during the playoffs. They need to force all relievers to ride in on a cart and get delivered to the mound.
But to add to it, there are so many “extra” things that baseball allows and shouldn’t. Managers shouldn’t be able to leave the dugout. That means no mound visits, no umpire arguments, nothing of the sort. Players shouldn’t argue at all. You argue even a little, you’re gone.
Touching the bases on a Home Run is a waste of time.
A pitch clock should absolutely be installed.
Switching innings needs to become faster. High School players can flip an inning in under two minutes easily.
Catchers should have courtesy runners so innings can get flipped quicker.
There are plenty of things that can be done to speed the game up and make it more compelling.
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@Kcmatt7 All of those are true, but we’re also in an era of huge strikeout numbers. Those take a lot of time particularly when a pitcher goes 0-2 on the batter, then nibbles on the corners missing or inducing foul offs, suddenly, it’s 3-2 and batter fouls off 3 or 4 pitches. Of course between each pitch is checking on runners, batters stepping out, etc.
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@wissox people love home runs and home run hitters. So K numbers aren’t going down. We have to find a way to cut down game time and still see the excitement of guys hitting 50+ HRs a season.
MLB is trying to have their cake and eat it too.
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@Kcmatt7 haha its called sports center. Only way to watch multiple games action without a nap.
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@dylans I can’t even stand SC anymore… I just read about everything the next day if I don’t watch it live. Deadspin is the best for this, imo.
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Football does a great job of filling in the void between plays. There’s only about 15 minutes of actual action in a 3 hour football game.
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@Kcmatt7 box scores are what i grew up on and what i fall back on. The time investment for sports is too great at this juncture. I’m stoked about the Chiefs, but have only watched highlights. I really only make time for KU bball. I’ll watch every minute of those games!
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DVR is the best way to watch games, but of course, a game that ends at 11PM it’s really hard to do so.
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@wissox I just start watching the DVRed game about 50 mins late, then fast forward. You catch up to the live feed at the very end, and have to watch a few ads, but generally it works pretty well with that amount of lead time.
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Update: Game 1 4 hours long! Watched blue bloods in the middle and then Seinfeld and still only missed the 7th and 8th innings!
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Update 2 Game 1 of ALCS 4 hours long! If Rip Van Winkle was still around, he’d go back into another 100 year snooze! 37 pitchers combined being used in LCS games so far. Brewers manager takes out a starter who’d given up 2 hits, no runs, no walks and only 74 pitches. 2 innings later lead gone. The better arms in his pen used the day before in a bullpen game where the starter is a reliever. This is insanity! Make it stop!
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I turn to Yahoo sports to see who’s playing tonight in MNF and it’s the big main story. Buried on their main page is the NLCS. Unbelievable.
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3.5 hour games the last two. Still only one sub 3 hour game in the entire postseason.
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Anyone happy the Red Sox are back in the World Series? I’m not.
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@wissox Not happy but I am feeling a little ratified in my suspicions about the way the world works: money buys achievement, elections etc.
So my goal is to conduct my own experiment by winning Tuesday’s $1.6 billion Mega Millions jackpot. I will take the >$900 million cash option and scientifically investigate whether money can indeed buy happiness.
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@wissox Can we just fire Boston into the Sun and replay the ALCS?
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@mayjay Of course you’d share it with some of your screen name only friends I’m sure. That would make me happy which in turn would make you happy.
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@wissox I was thinking a cruise to the Bahamas for everyone who has approved of some of my jokes. We could make it interesting by having no nametags and seeing if we could all figure out who everbody is. HEM would be easy, of course, with those round glasses.
