Game 20: Indians 9, Angels 2

Now, I liked this much better. Except I think Eric Young makes too much sense in the above.

baseball needs more people like you, to keep that fountain of youth in our beloved game.

so thanks for taking risks.

that is all.

I definitely didn’t mean to be harsh. It may not have worked for me, but who the hell am I? In no way do I want you to stop producing content.

I don’t remember where I saw it (may have been game thread, I truly don’t remember), but it said that Talbot has started 72% of hitters off with a strike this year. Numbers aside, off speed stuff becomes that much more effective when getting ahead like that.

Perhaps he can keep it up, as long as he keeps pounding the zone. Sure his ERA will probably end the year in the mid 4’s, but isn’t that what this team needs at the back of the rotation?

Not arguing with anyone’s point, just thinking out loud.

Triple short. He advanced to 3rd on the throw after his double.

Big story is Kearns: single short of the cycle, right? Can somebody give odds on us actually having stumbled into a player? The narrative has a lot of appeal: hugely touted prospect who struggles with injury and gets banished to hinterlands. It’s not like he’s ancient.

Here’s my take. That narrative is as old as the hills: a guy who used to perform and then stopped performing for one, two, three years running – and a new team takes him and tries to explain away his suck because of injuries/circumstances.

It’s a story that has turned out poorly so many times that we are rightly suspect of it. The great majority of the time, that guy has simply lost it, and will never again return to anywhere near those levels (over any substantial sample size).

But maybe for every 10 guys that are put in that category, for 1 guy, the story holds. That those were limiting injuries, but recoverable ones. Maybe its 1 for every 20 guys.

So people were right to be skeptical, the odds aren’t great, but at least Kearns is the perfect type. His injuries were real, and like you say, he’s not that old.

Cautiously hopeful.

Andrew – yeah, I’m with you on the K rate…it is really low. But I like the delivery.

I have no idea if it will last, but Kearns has been on everything all year. In other words, he’s usually not been real late on the fastball or way out in front of the breaking stuff.

LaPorta? Eh. He drove one to the warning track, but it was towards the end of the bat on a pitch down the middle. That usually indicates he’s pulling off the ball and not covering the plate. It’s hard to say based on one game. In his second at bat, he took quite possibly the worst two back-to-back swings on changeups I’ve seen in awhile. Saunders came back with a couple more changeups that LaPorta barely fouled off, and then threw him a fastball down the middle that was whistled back into center field. Thank you, Joe Saunders.

Thoughts to why he does it or why it might be effective for him?

My guess is that he does it to keep him on balance and so he avoids rushing to the plate. He’s trying to stay tall in his delivery so he can drive the ball down in the zone. And maybe the hesitation breaks up hitters rhythm, but that’s a stretch.

I just thought his sinker moved more horizontally last night and wasn’t as firm. And his changeup wasn’t good, and that’s universally regarded as his best pitch. But that cutter has been a bit of an equalizer for him, and it looked like he threw quite a bit of those for strikes.

Oh and I’m blown away by how on-board every ESPN personality seems to be with the “wouldn’t this star from sport A be incredible at sport B?” How much stupider of an angle can you take?

MLBN is far better, so the only nitpick I have is why the hell Gammons would come back to ESPN in Andrew World.

Aren’t we 3 and 5 on the trip, with the last game tonight? Jinx avoided!

But yeah, 4-5 would be nice. C’mon Jake.

The Andy Marte starting for the Indians split is the same as the Hawk Harrelson starting for the opponent split…

Free Marte!

Thread started. I’ve got the Clippers on the radio this afternoon.

INSERT SLEWIS REPLACING WRIGHT RUMOR HERE

Yep. White had a similar start in yesterday’s game, but fell apart in the 5th.

Kinston needs to get Jordan Henry back.

It’s self-loathing.

How is it that you’re an Indians fan?

My father brainwashed me on the Tribe and Browns. He grew up in the 50’s when both were good…and he also was a big Bob Feller fan.

Yes.

I think that the coverage shapes the audience’s expectations

Me, I think that ratings shapes the coverage. You better numbers by featuring John Kruk instead of Peter Gammons, you’re gonna give John more camera time than Peter.

The whole idea of “idiot” stats is both off-putting and wrong. As I’ve said many times before, must serious baseball fans of the 60s, 70s, 80s and before knew that wins, BA, RBIs etc. should not be used as stand alone metrics to measure a ballplayers contributions. The idea of coupling them into one distorted data point like OPS is not a revolutionary idea.

And, oh yeah, Bill James, along with being a big tub of goo, is also a hack.

Yeah, I have to say that the advent of ESPN was far, far less significant to me than the moment when you could read every Plain Dealer and Beacon-Journal article on the web, a moment which fortuitously arrived in 1995, if I’m not mistaken. As much as we now rail on most of those reporters, it was an unbelievable advance in being able to follow the team back then.

(Y)ou had to wait for The Sporting News to come in the mail on Saturday before you could get all the Tribe’s boxscores

I’ve always assumed you and I are from more or less the same time and place. This quote leads me to believe that you must have lived somewhere other than Cleveland during your formative baseball years, since – back when I was a kid – the print media produced box scores in the morning – the PD – and the afternoon – the Press, the Cleveland News and the Call & Post. There was the "bulldog" edition of both the PD and the Press – the former you could get at midnight and the later at noon. If you wanted something more esoteric there was always the Beacon Journal and the Blade. Plenty of source material and box scores by the boatload. So you could read about the Tribe from a number of different viewpoints.

The other thing you need to remember is that ESPN had a rival at one time – CNN Sports. Guys like Nick Charles, Fred Hickman, Vince Cellini – a NE Ohio boy from Mayfield – , Dan Patrick, the aforementioned Keith Olbermann and Hannah Storm – back when she knew howta dress, did sports for CNN and where much more mature and reporter-like than the Bermans of ESPN. And I’m sure that if they wouldda been competitive with ESPN Brother Turner wouldda stood up a ESPN competitor. But the public – as is their want – preferred entertainment over insight, and after 9/11 CNN dropped sports all together. Now the only thing that looks like competition for ESPN is Fox Sports. In other words, ESPN now has a monopoly on national sports coverage.