TroutBaseball

Hola VPN is free https://hola.org/

THANK YOU for the link @TaylorBot. I signed up but never got the link. (correction: I got a link that doesn't works until tomorrow)

There's a supply and demand thing happening because of social distancing. Check out the mid week games for affordable tickets.

Expanded rosters in September and ALL of the pitching changes as a result.

Would you say that he's "in the best shape of his life?"

How I'm dealing with loss today. https://twitter.com/Trout_LA/status/1243221002001104896

I was doing research on this tonight. I really don't want to drop YTTV. I have T-Mobile so it looks like I'll be testing out the hola.org free VPN. If it doesn't work I'll switch to Hulu Live.

This morning my wife said that the fact that the road teams have won all of the games in the World Series actually seems like a relevant and interesting stat. Now I'm stuck. How do I weigh out the fact that my wife might have some interest in the World Series and the reason might be some some bogus, arbitrary anomaly? I want her to like baseball but I also don't want her to believe malarkey about statistics. Is someone even allowed to like baseball for bad reasons? If I try to tell her the Astros are better unless Strasburg or Scherzer are pitching . . . she gone.

My bad, it's late and I've had a bad day

This just in

There's no doubt the manufacturing processed changed and the balls are more tightly wound at the core and have reduced drag on the stitches. There have been several independent investigations into it. The question is did MLB do it on purpose for more home runs OR were they just trying to get a more consistent product out of the manufacturing process and accidentally juiced the ball?

If Arte had strong opinions about illegal drug use BEFORE Josh Hamilton joined the team imagine how he feels about it now.

Blake Jordan Adams > Blake Parker Bridwell

The Red Sox might go into a rebuild mode in the off season and have doubts about Mookie Betts signing long term. Would you trade Jo Adell to get a year (and the first chance at signing) Mookie? Adell is still a prospect. Mookie is a legit MVP caliber player.

this was wisdom on display

Bold predictions = bad predictions

The Joe Sheehan Newsletter Vol. 11, No. 54 July 13, 2019 I don’t really believe in anything. I was raised Catholic. I don’t remember faith being a big part of our home life, but I know my being an altar boy at Good Shepherd made Nana happy. I know I got a good, safe education at the school across from that church, and then in four years at Regis. I can just about pinpoint the moment I began to fall away from whatever faith I had, a conversation with a parish priest that didn’t go well when I was...12, maybe 13. From that point on, church was an obligation tacked on to my education. Theology classes in high school didn’t help, reinforcing my belief that this big book of stories was just a big book of stories. It was, perhaps, this break from religious faith that made it easy for me to adopt a stathead approach to sports. Chemistry? Momentum? Clutch? These were beliefs, and they fell apart when you used facts and data to get at the truth of them. By the time I graduated from USC, I was both an agnostic, in a Pascal’s Wager way, and a fervent devotee to the idea that all answers were found in facts and data. Facts and data were the foundation on which we built Baseball Prospectus. Around that time, I got married in a church, but the ceremony and the location didn’t mean anything to me; it was about the girl in the dress with the smile. My ex-wife liked to say that everything happens for a reason, and I didn’t buy that, either. There’s no grand plan, just individuals acting in their own self-interest, with a healthy dollop of randomness thrown in. She and I didn’t meet because of fate, we met because my friends at a party needed a blender. We didn’t split up because it was meant to be, but because I was a selfish husband. There’s no plan that explains her losing her parents four years apart before she was 35, none that doesn’t force you to conclude that the planner is vicious and mean. Over the past 30 years, most everything I have seen and I have heard has reinforced what that seventh-grader thought as he left his meeting with Fr. Ryan -- this is all B.S. As I approach 50, coming off a wretched few years wholly explained by human frailty, human venality, human fear, human evil, I see no grand plan, no guiding hand. I don’t really believe in anything. I know that which I can prove, and the rest is varying degrees of unknown, all of it determined by us, not some mythological deity or unseen force. So I don’t know what do to with last night in Anaheim. Eleven days after losing their friend and teammate suddenly, shockingly, the Los Angeles Angels played their first home game since his death. They stepped on to the field, every one of them, wearing Tyler Skaggs’ #45 jersey, the one he’d worn for years battling back from injuries, battling his command, battling for them. They watched Skaggs’s mother, Debbie, looking unimaginably young for such an awful task, step to the mound, scratch her son’s initials in the dirt, toe the rubber and deliver the kind of strike her boy should have been hurling. If the story had ended there, if the next three hours had been filled with the kind of mundane baseball game, some 5-1 contest, that you forget even as the teams are walking off the field, that would have been enough. That would have been, if not closure, certainly catharsis, another step in the process of grieving a friend, a child, a teammate, a fan favorite. I don’t know how to explain what happened next. There was SKAGGS 45 launching a two-run homer. SKAGGS 45 crossing the plate seven times in the first inning. SKAGGS 45 ranging to his left to make a diving stop, rising and throwing to first for the out. SKAGGS 45 throwing a no-hitter. After the game, the Angels came on to the field and put SKAGGS 45 on the mound one final time, laying their jerseys on the dirt he’d kicked so many times before. Watching them pay tribute to their friend, I thought about how the Mariners are bad and Mike Trout is good, how no-hitters are random and an 0-for-19 on balls in play is as much bad luck as anything else. I though, angrily, that no justifiable plan for the universe, no deity worth worship, inflicts this kind of pain on this many people, makes a mother bury her son. It all seemed inadequate as an explanation of what I watched last night. Facts and data, my bedrock, don’t seem like enough right now. What happened last night will happen a handful of times in any baseball season, but that it happened last night, in that place, by those people, in front of that crowd, in the wake of this horrible event...is that coincidence? Is that just human strength, human skill, human passion, human good? I don’t know. I don’t really believe in anything. For the first time in a while, though, I think I understand the people who do.

This thread depresses me that no one else has found something there they'd recommend. The prime rib grilled cheese behind third base is probably the best thing I've had there. Keep meaning to try that restaurant on the first base side where they serve different player themed food every month.

To the contrary this is a good sign. One runs games are statistically a coin flip. We should be 9-9 in those games and we've been on the wrong side of randomness at least three times. That puts us tied with the Indians.

Kimbrel hasn't even pitched this year and I still prefer the contract we gave to Allen. Even more so compared to the contract Kimbrel wanted in the preseason. Allen was a bad move that's easy to move past.

From Joe Sheehan: So it’s reasonable to say that for the last year, Ohtani hasn’t been the two-way player of mythology but, rather, a one-way player. In that year, Ohtani has hit .282/.353/.556. Left alone to rake, he’s been one of the 15 best hitters in baseball, with a 146 wRC+. Here are his comps in that time. Oh! -tani (Hitting since June 14, 2018, min. 250 PA) PA AVG OBP SLG wRC+ 11. Max Muncy 589 .286 .380 .551 149 12. Mookie Betts 711 .307 .416 .524 149 13. Shohei Ohtani 375 .282 .353 .556 146 14. Josh Bell 602 .299 .385 .544 145 15. Pete Alonso 277 .258 .339 .598 145 “I’m pretty sure Shohei Ohtani is a five-win pitcher, and I can be convinced he’s a five-win outfielder. I just don’t know if we’re taking those players and making them into a four-win P/DH.” Ohtani is a top 15 hitter since last June. Do you take that kind of production out of the lineup 40% of the time? Probably yes if you have a pitching staff like the Angels.

What took Jo Adell so long? #weak

See also: Buttrey, Ty (high leverage usage)