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The Baseball Thread

 
 
Region Philbis
 
  1  
Reply Fri 20 Jan, 2023 04:57 pm

Arizona Diamondbacks name Ronnie Gajownik first manager at High-A level
https://www.mlb.com/news/ronnie-gajownik-named-high-a-hillsboro-manager
0 Replies
 
Region Philbis
 
  1  
Reply Wed 8 Feb, 2023 05:55 am
Quote:
Cleveland Guardians hire team's first female on-field coach

Amanda Kamekona, a former star softball player at UCLA, has been hired as a minor league
hitting instructor for the Cleveland Guardians. She's the first female on-field coach in team
history.

Kamekona, 36, will be based at the team's year-round complex in Goodyear, Arizona, where
she'll work with the team's developmental players. The Guardians have an Arizona Rookie
League team.

Her hiring continues a trend throughout Major League Baseball of teams adding female
coaches to their staffs. The Guardians have had women coaching mental skills, but have
never previously had a female instructor working with players on the field.
(espn)
0 Replies
 
Region Philbis
 
  1  
Reply Sat 18 Mar, 2023 07:09 am

Quote:
Brown's Olivia Pichardo becomes first woman to play in Div. I baseball game
(espn)

The freshman from New York City came on as a pinch hitter with one out in the bottom of the ninth inning and
grounded out to first base in what ended up being a 10-1 loss to Bryant in Providence, Rhode Island.

https://iili.io/HhFVqAB.jpg


0 Replies
 
Region Philbis
 
  1  
Reply Tue 28 Mar, 2023 10:29 am
Quote:
Shohei Ohtani to make MLB-record $65M in 2023
(Includes endorsements)

Mets pitcher Max Scherzer was second on the overall list at $59.3 million. Yankees slugger Aaron Judge, who
signed a nine-year, $360 million deal in December to remain in New York, took the third spot at $44.5 million.

Mets pitcher Justin Verlander ($43.3 million) and Ohtani's Angels teammate Mike Trout ($39.5 million)
rounded out the top five of Forbes' list...
(espn)

#MonopolyMoney



0 Replies
 
hightor
 
  1  
Reply Sun 15 Oct, 2023 06:22 am
A parade of strikeouts

Quote:
The final game of the playoff series between the Houston Astros and the Minnesota Twins on Wednesday lasted only two hours and 38 minutes. It was a crisply played game — which the Astros won, 3-2 — that highlighted Major League Baseball’s biggest accomplishment this season. Thanks to a 15-second clock that prevents players from dawdling between pitches, the average game lasted just two hours and 40 minutes this season, down a remarkable 24 minutes from last season.

Major League Baseball has trumpeted this change with television commercials. Journalists have praised it for speeding up a hidebound sport. Fans seem to have noticed, too: Attendance rose 10 percent, to its highest level in six years.

The shorter game times will help more fans enjoy the sport’s semifinals, known as the League Championship Series, which begin tonight with an intra-Texas rivalry between the Astros and the Texas Rangers. Tomorrow night, the other series — between the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Philadelphia Phillies — begins.

There will be plenty of good stories over the next couple weeks. The Astros could become the first repeat champions in more than two decades. The Rangers have never won a World Series. Neither has Bryce Harper, the Phillies’ star. The Diamondbacks’ best player, Corbin Carroll, is a 23-year-old rookie. If you like watching only a few baseball games a year, now is the time to tune in.

But the sport still has a basic problem that the celebration over the pitch clock has obscured: Major League Baseball, which can already seem slow compared with football and basketball, includes less action than at any almost any other point in its history.

Baseball executives tried to address this problem with a package of rule changes before this season, including not only the clock but also larger bases (to encourage steals) and restrictions on where fielders can stand (to allow for more hits). They didn’t solve the problem, though.

This chart tells the story:

https://ci4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/GuSRogtvQTiWxjLtfJfFvx2Eh6mT2eL6YKCmELooRP1ckPzp-GGK4324Y6vG5oCkg7q0apU0Zkm_Ej7N2mbydaEiZksBFI1SfXk4wUkNpoRqOeHLN0Pxwf0GN9o1xgkSlcMD2Drf7Wv3gGVAJMOkDPZPsNqGTkLpa956ye8L=s0-d-e1-ft#https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/10/13/briefing/oakImage-1697231017530/oakImage-1697231017530-jumbo.png

For most of baseball’s history, hits were much more common than strikeouts — and hits are exciting. They can score runs, as a home run always does, or can put a runner on base who creates game action. Strikeouts, by contrast, involve a batter walking back to the dugout after failing to hit a pitch.

“The idea that there would be more strikeouts than hits would have been a crazy idea even 20 years ago,” Joe Sheehan, a longtime baseball writer, told me. “Well, strikeouts surpassed hits in 2018 and there have been more strikeouts than hits in every year since.”

(The small recent decline in strikeouts you can see in the chart is the result of pitchers — who tend to be weak batters — no longer hitting for themselves in any game. That change happened two years ago, and it had a one-time effect.)

Going to 11

Why have strikeouts increased so rapidly in the past two decades? Pitchers have become stronger and can throw harder. Computer analysis has taught them how to spin pitches even more effectively than before. And teams have jammed their rosters with pitchers so that many need to throw only one inning at a time, allowing them to throw as hard as possible to just a few batters each night.

As a result, the late innings of games often resemble a procession of strikeouts. During the Astros-Twins game on Wednesday, six of the Twins’ last seven batters struck out.

There are reasons to think that fans would prefer a livelier game. Attendance, despite the increase this year, is still about 10 percent below its 2007 peak. In polls, baseball has slipped to be the country’s third most popular sport, behind both football, which it has long trailed, and basketball. “Baseball, in its design, was a game of baserunning and defense, and there’s less baserunning and defense than ever before in the game’s history,” Sheehan said.

Baseball has more promising ways to address the problem than it has tried so far. It could limit the number of pitchers on a roster to, say, 11; that was a normal number a few decades ago, but teams now often carry 13. Baseball could also lower the mound, as it did in 1969, or shrink the strike zone.

Some of these changes might sound radical, but most successful sports — and successful businesses of any kind, for that matter — make significant changes over time.

nyt
0 Replies
 
izzythepush
 
  1  
Reply Sun 5 Nov, 2023 05:00 am
The curse of KFC.

Quote:
The last time the Hanshin Tigers were proclaimed the best baseball team in Japan, their fans celebrated by hurling themselves into a canal and carrying out an “abduction” that many believe placed their team under a curse that has lasted almost four decades.

On Saturday, the sleeping giants of Japanese baseball were forced to wait another day for the chance to banish the jinx by winning their first Japan Series title since 1985, after a defeat to local rivals Orix Buffaloes ensured that the season’s finale would go to a seventh and decisive game.

Hanshin never came close to securing their first series title in 38 years at Kyocera Dome in Osaka, after another heroic pitching performance by Yoshinobu Yamamoto helped Orix level the series at 3-3 and set up what promises to be a classic at the same venue – and Orix’s home turf – on Sunday.

A Tigers victory in Japan’s most popular sport would set off wild celebrations in their home city of Osaka, even though their ballpark, the fabled 99-year-old Koshien stadium, is in the neighbouring Hyogo prefecture.

Hanshin and Orix, who were seeking their second title in a row, have set up a tantalising end to the first Japan Series between two Osaka ball clubs for 59 years. With the series on a knife-edge, the Tigers’ raucous supporters filed out of the dome on a sultry evening hoping that their wait would be over in 24 hours’ time.

In 1985, the last time Hanshin were victorious in the series, Japan was on the brink of its asset-inflated bubble economy, Margaret Thatcher was Britain’s prime minister and Nelson Mandela was still in prison in apartheid South Africa.

Some of the team’s fans trace the fallow decades that followed back to the excessive celebrations that greeted their Central League title that year. Not content with leaping, fully clothed, off Ebisubashi bridge into the murky waters of Osaka’s Dotonbori canal, a few uprooted a statue of Kentucky Fried Chicken founder Colonel Sanders – who bore a passing resemblance to the team’s star slugger that season, the stocky and bearded American Randy Bass – from outside a nearby KFC and dumped him in the water.

Many suspect his rough treatment at the hands of Tigers’ fans placed a curse on the team, even after the colonel was retrieved from the canal, minus his spectacles and left hand, during renovation work in 2009.

In the 17 years that followed, Hanshin recorded just two top-three finishes and a glut of last-place finishes, and did not win the league pennant again until 2003. They repeated that feat in 2005, but the series and the title of Nippon ichi (Japan’s no 1) eluded them.

“It’s been 38 years, so of course there are more nerves than usual,” Yuko Kawase, a Hanshin fan who watches her team about 90 times a season, said on the eve of the series. “But the fans are totally behind the players.”

Masaki Yamaguchi, a 24-year-old Tigers fan who watched Saturday’s match on TV, said Yamamoto’s pitching had made all the difference. But he had not given up hope. “I wasn’t born the last time Hanshin were the best team in Japan, so I’m desperate to see it happen.”

That two teams from the Osaka region have made it to the series will have delighted many neutrals who tire of the focus on the Tokyo-based Yomiuri Giants – backed by the influential conservative newspaper the Yomiuri Shimbun – whose loss of form has done little to dim their reputation as Japanese baseball aristocracy, not least among the capital’s media.

The Giants dominated the early years of professional baseball in Japan, while the then-named Osaka Tigers, formed in 1935, were considered the country’s second team.

But they became a lightning rod for the hopes of people in Kansai – the region of western Japan that includes the major cities of Osaka, Kyoto and Kobe – and sports fans elsewhere in Japan who bristled at the Giants’ supremacy.

Despite Hanshin’s lack of success, loyalty to the club has spawned a boisterous fan culture unmatched in Japan. When the team are playing at Koshien, the noise can be deafening, especially when an opposition pitch is sent soaring through the sky and into the stands for a home run.

A large police presence in downtown Osaka means there is unlikely to be a repeat of the canal-diving antics should Hanshin win the series decider on Sunday. Instead, the commercial city, whose people pride themselves on their carb-heavy street food and sense of humour, will mark the team’s feat with department store sales and cut-price deals at bars and restaurants.

Jason Coskrey, a baseball writer for the Japan Times, said a Hanshin victory in the Japan Series – the country’s equivalent of Major League Baseball’s World Series in the US – would be a “big deal” for local people.

“The Tigers winning would be a huge celebration for Osaka,” Coskrey said. “The Tigers have not won in so long that the area is ready to burst if they finally get it done again. They have a huge, passionate and proud fanbase.”

As they approach the end of their pennant-winning season, Hanshin fans, players and management have imposed an unofficial ban on uttering the word yusho (victory), fearing they will be jinxed by the merest hint of overconfidence. Instead, they refer to that longed-for outcome as are (you know what).

Only a Japan Series victory will convince Hanshin’s long-suffering and superstitious supporters that the curse of the colonel has truly been lifted. All they can do is wait and hope.


https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/05/osakas-baseball-underdogs-hope-one-more-win-will-lift-curse-of-kfc
0 Replies
 
Region Philbis
 
  2  
Reply Wed 29 May, 2024 01:02 pm

interesting...

Quote:
MLB incorporates Negro Leagues statistics, shakes up record books

Josh Gibson became Major League Baseball's career leader with a .372 batting average, surpassing Ty Cobb's .367, when Negro Leagues records for more than 2,300 players were incorporated Tuesday after a three-year research project.

Gibson's .466 average for the 1943 Homestead Grays became the season standard, followed by Charlie "Chino" Smith's .451 for the 1929 New York Lincoln Giants. They overtook the .440 by Hugh Duffy for the National League's Boston team in 1894.

Gibson also became the career leader in slugging percentage (.718) and OPS (1.177), moving ahead of Babe Ruth (.690 and 1.164).

"It's a show of respect for great players who performed in the Negro Leagues due to circumstances beyond their control and once those circumstances changed demonstrated that they were truly major leaguers," MLB commissioner Rob Manfred told The Associated Press on Wednesday. "Maybe the single biggest factor was the success of players who played in the Negro Leagues and then came to the big leagues."

A special committee on baseball records decided in 1969 to recognize six major leagues dating to 1876: the National (which launched in 1876), the American (1901), the American Association (1882-1891), Union Association (1884), Players' League (1890) and Federal League (1914-1915). It excluded the National Association (1871-75), citing an "erratic schedule and procedures."

MLB announced in December 2020 that it would be "correcting a longtime oversight" by adding the Negro Leagues. John Thorn, MLB's official historian, chaired a 17-person committee that included Negro Leagues experts and statisticians.

"The condensed 60-game season for the 2020 calendar year for the National League and American League prompted us to think that maybe the shortened Negro League seasons could come under the MLB umbrella, after all," Thorn said.

Baseball Hall of Fame president Josh Rawitch said statistics on Cooperstown plaques would remain the same because they reflect the information available at the time of a player's induction.
(espn)
0 Replies
 
tsarstepan
 
  1  
Reply Thu 30 May, 2024 11:04 am
Infield fly and interference call loom large during 1st inning of Yankees-Angels game

tsarstepan
 
  1  
Reply Mon 29 Jul, 2024 09:14 am
@tsarstepan,
tsarstepan
 
  1  
Reply Sat 17 Aug, 2024 07:07 am
@tsarstepan,
tsarstepan
 
  2  
Reply Fri 30 Aug, 2024 06:41 am
@tsarstepan,
Shohei Ohtani's dog 'throws out' 1st pitch at Dodgers game
https://imgur.com/ZTqT9gD.jpg
tsarstepan
 
  1  
Reply Wed 18 Sep, 2024 11:27 am
@tsarstepan,
0 Replies
 
Region Philbis
 
  3  
Reply Thu 19 Sep, 2024 05:19 pm

quite the achievement...

Quote:
Ohtani first 50 HR /50 SB player in MLB history

Shohei Ohtani became the first player in baseball history to reach the 50/50 club on Thursday, and he did so in dominant
fashion -- with two home runs and two stolen bases in a five-hit game that could clinch a postseason spot for the LA Dodgers.
(espn)
0 Replies
 
tsarstepan
 
  1  
Reply Mon 23 Sep, 2024 06:16 pm
0 Replies
 
hightor
 
  2  
Reply Wed 9 Oct, 2024 05:06 am
Luis Tiant, Crowd-Pleasing Pitcher Who Baffled Hitters, Dies at 83

Cuban-born and charismatic, with a personal tale caught up in politics, he was a dominant hurler with a quirky windup who helped lead the Red Sox to a pennant in 1975. (no paywall)

https://static01.nyt.com/images/2024/10/09/multimedia/08Tiant-zmbh-print1/08Tiant-zmbh-superJumbo.jpg?quality=75&auto=webp
Ragman
 
  1  
Reply Wed 9 Oct, 2024 10:13 pm
@hightor,
That makes me sad. I watched him pitch as I grew up an RS fan. He was an artist. I would’ve been a fan of his regardless. And he belongs in the Hall of Fame, too.
0 Replies
 
Taylor232
 
  1  
Reply Tue 15 Oct, 2024 06:28 am
@Rockhead,
Great
Region Philbis
 
  1  
Reply Tue 15 Oct, 2024 06:47 am
@Taylor232,

please expand on that...
0 Replies
 
 

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