Transmogrified Tiger

In terms of minutes you're sitting there watching it, soccer goals happen about the same frequency as touchdowns. while this may be true, literally nothing about this post is going to convince someone like myself to watch soccer. i don't outwardly hate on the sport, but i just don't like it. and that's ok. in regards to the "in terms of minutes" part, though, that seems a little lackadaisical in describing the action. Football is a sport that importance is dictated by field position. 3rd and 10 from a team's own 15 isn't going to require the same attention/anticipation as 1st and goal. Not all snaps are equal based on score, field position, time remaining, etc. In soccer, (in my extremely self admitting uneducated opinion) it's pretty much just "try to stop a goal" vs. "try to score a goal". There's just less nuance (as far as I can tell - I rarely watch it). First things first, people should like or not like what they want. Personally, I can't get into hockey outside of playoff overtimes, when I watch it seems like the goals are too much a function of what I'll call randomness, scraps in front of goal and aiming harder shots in the direction of the goal that a deflection or screen helps it through. I'm sure there's more to the planning than that, but I can't escape the feeling that teams have a lot less control in their scoring than I'd like to see. That said, if you are interested or curious, one of the things that helped with my enjoyment of soccer was to see the play on the field as most similar to basketball. Without the ball, teams have the option to press high up the field to try to create dangerous turnovers, give up a lot of space to stay compact and avoid the opponent getting close to goal, and (this is where the analogy breaks down a bit) they can also stay deep to try to lure the other team with the ball forward and then attack via a fast break of sorts when they get it back. With the ball, there's a lot of choreographed movement without the absolute structure of say, Football plays, players move without the ball to help create space for others and moving the ball around helps create opportunities. In other words, if you really like Xs and Os stuff in other sports, there's plenty of that in soccer too, but it also has baseball's slow burn as a viewing experience so it's not gonna have universal appeal.

Aldi-brand Soler’s throw was about 30 feet up the line, that’ll cover a lot of slow

who does this Ervin character think he is, Ian Happ

I'm a little skeptical of that article's framing. Murton did not have plus power for an outfielder, and he certainly wasn't working with the juiced ball of today. Less loft and more line drives is a pretty logical plan of attack. In 2006 he was pretty high on the list for IFFB% too.

He was under it and whiffed like a little leaguer

Almora if you could at least not let the brain worms infect your defense that doesn’t seem too much to ask

Getting some intense Michael Rucker vibes with Patterson.

make him play third base I dunno about that

Joey Votto's player's weekend nickname is "Who", man he is just great.

That's 6 games flipped from L to W, so assuming none of those came against those who are chasing them, 7.5 games. "Realistically", probably in the neighborhood of 8.5 games.

Zack Greinke remains incredible: https://theathletic.com/1116748/2019/08/05/i-love-that-guy-the-diamondbacks-will-miss-zack-greinke-their-awkward-and-brutally-honest-teammate/

Castellanos should be hitting 7th, hopefully he gets hot

this one hurts hope they have good dinosaur museums in San Diego, Carl

Much as the galaxy-brained solution to the Cubs being better is that Kris Bryant simply needs to decide to make fewer outs, the easy answer to these trade woes is for Theo and co. to decide to get better at making baseball guys. D'UH.

That probably depends on a number of things, from how well Happ and Bote play, to if and when Zobrist comes back. Castellanos being a nothing against RHP is bad either way, because even if you aren't overextending him, he's a guy who's easy to game plan around in late innings and he lacks a defining tool like Daniel Murphy's contact ability to help smooth that out. He has a career 103 wRC+ vs RHP. That’s better than a lot of the Happ/Bote/Descalso/etc bunch has been for some time. Bote or Descalso, sure. But I'll take most every lefty over him against RHP(Caratini, Rizzo, Robel, Schwarber, Heyward, Happ, Zobrist when he comes back) plus the obvious Bryant, Baez, Contreras; and there's more than a few situations where I'd rather have Kemp or even potentially Almora(if contact was goal #1). It's not that he's completely unhelpful, I know I'm being a little harsh in the characterization. But I don't see this as any different in terms of impact as Kemp or Maldonado, and not a 'big bat' or major acquisition in the sense that even Murphy was.

Does Castellanos not move into a platoon with Schwarbs? Or does he play right and move Heyward to Center? That probably depends on a number of things, from how well Happ and Bote play, to if and when Zobrist comes back. Castellanos being a nothing against RHP is bad either way, because even if you aren't overextending him, he's a guy who's easy to game plan around in late innings and he lacks a defining tool like Daniel Murphy's contact ability to help smooth that out.

I'm not going to gnash teeth over the individual players, but I'm again bummed that we're still on this multi-year track of frittering away prospect currency on so many rentals. It doesn't help that I am not a very big Castellanos believer, hard to get too over the moon over a position player that is the worst defender on the roster and not in the top dozen or so hitters against RHP.

Maybe the worst pickoff throw I’ve ever seen

KB's OPS in St Louis is a Code Blew This seems like an incredibly weak payoff for all the effort you’ve put into this

what idiot thought it was a good idea to hit Robel lead off

Gonna have to run for president so people who call for steals with the heart of the order up get sent to jail

...did I go too far again? Nah I dont care. I pretty much expect to get the smackdown from TT when I post like that. He probably could've drawn back the condescension but it is what it is. Admittedly that came off snarkier than intended. Absolutist lineup second guessing is a pet peeve of mine and while I don’t think there’s much to worry about with Robel leading off, you weren’t shrieking about it either.

1) Garcia has less than 60 PA, those numbers are not meaningful 2) Wainwright gets destroyed by LH and has a below average K rate against them, that matters too 3) Garcia has less than 60 PA, those numbers are not meaningful 4) Even if they were meaningful, Garcia's SSS pitch values are only problematic against sliders and changeups, which combine to make up 1.4% of Wainwright's arsenal this year(in practice these are almost certainly crappy curveballs)