squally1313

18.1% K rate, which is much higher than his career rate (13.8%) and still comfortably below the team rate (26.6%). Against these Peralta/Burnes/Woodruff, unfortunately with our options and their skill you have to hope you get a little bit of BABIP luck. More confused by Lobaton, tough to give Contreras a night off with Rizzo already down, but also Contreras has been ground down to nothing a few different seasons now, so it is what it is. Find a competent backup catcher. All that being said, Sogard is a garbage human and should be gone yesterday.

While Dame is definitely better, I don't know that that gets you where you want to go. The dream is to find a way to get them together, but there's basically no way to do that unless Portland thinks Pat Williams is going to be a star Figure out a way to facilitate Dame to Philly, Simmons to Chicago. Pretty unlikely unless Portland just commits to blowing it up, but if Dame forces his way out they might not have much of a choice.

Well, per FG, we have the lowest line drive rate, 5th highest FB rate, and 9th highest infield fly ball rate. We also, concerningly, have the highest HR/FB rate, which hurts BABIP as well. 13th in average exit velocity and 9th in barrel %, so that doesn't really support it, but everything else would lead you to conclude we should be near the bottom based on batted ball profile. Bottom by 40 points is obviously a little unlucky and will turn around. But with the highest K rate in the league by almost 2 points, we're going to have less balls in play and our results are more likely to be fluky in a small sample.

Last time I played 9 I had four pars, four triples, and a three putt bogey. Probably the best I’ve ever hit my irons, but the driver was a disaster. Lefty swing, and it was either on the next fairway to the left or OB. So that’s the project of the month. If the weather holds up, playing Dunes Club tomorrow, which I had never even heard of but sounds incredible.

Totally. Again, these are famous, rich, super religious white people. I get wanting to be sympathetic, but let's face it: these sorts of people almost always suck. And, if we're being honest, those kids have about a 97.8% of growing up just as horsefeathers, if not horsefeathers. 97.8% before all this. An absolute lock at this point.

Yes, it does, and yes, they don't. But as mentioned earlier, if we could somehow get to 4 wins in these 10 games, that's a solid run, keeps us near the top of the division, and probably eliminates any chance of a sell off in the next month or so. So now it's just 3 out of the next 9. Then 7 at home against two struggling teams with bad road records, the ASB, and it lightens up a lot from there in the second half.

That's 80% of the people here.

Think that would go against their other project of speeding the game up. Still seems like a very dumb approach. With such a harsh penalty, you can afford to make the actual checks pretty rare. Check one or two starters a night across the whole league, keep it random and unpredictable, should work just as well. All of this is just performance theatre.

He’s two weeks into one of the hottest stretches in baseball history and as of this exact moment his OPS is 1 point higher than his season numbers in 2019. He did plenty of proving here.

Ricketts has had this stretch of the schedule circled for weeks now. Just so pumped to use a 2-8 stretch as an excuse to go into sell mode. Sure would be nice to have a corner outfielder averaging a dong a game over the last couple weeks. Or a shutdown starter.

Simmons averaged 10 shots a game, making 55%. Rondo never shot more than 12 per game, and after age 29 never averaged double digit shots. Simmons shot 61% from the line this year, Rondo was a career 61% FT shooter, with some much worse years than Simmons ever had. The contract situation is obviously very different, but unless you think this playoff stretch is what he'll be going forward, I think he's definitely a second/third piece with 2 proven scorers and a Clarkson/idealized Coby White type off the bench. It's not necessarily what I expect going forward full-time, but it'd be nuts to assume this won't happen when the lights get bright again. Simmons is a worse FT shooter for his career than Rondo (59%). And his shot attempts have gone down from 10 to 8 and 11.5 to under 10 in the playoffs the last 2 years. The difference in shooting percentage can be summed up by 6'10 vs. 6'1, which is where Simmons maintains some value. 76ers had that blueprint you speak of with Embiid, Harris and Curry and it still wasn't good enough. I said in the Bulls thread though that i'd be willing to give Simmons a shot with LaVine, Vucevic and Coby White and hope having the top option be a wing instead of a C would help. But I wouldn't give up anything worthwhile to take that shot. Yeah, which I think you're just higher on Williams than I am. Still think there's a good chance he puts it together at some point, but the odds of that lining up with this two year stretch of Lavine/Vuc are pretty low, in my opinion.

Even Rondo has increased his willingness to shoot the ball later in his career. He's not great at it or at the FT line, but he's willing to get to the line or take an open shot. Prime Rondo didn't really shoot the ball much, but he also was not a max contract or a #2 option. He had KG, Pierce and Allen to do the scoring. With the money Simmons is making, you can't surround him with the 3 scorers you need to make up for his lack of shooting. Simmons averaged 10 shots a game, making 55%. Rondo never shot more than 12 per game, and after age 29 never averaged double digit shots. Simmons shot 61% from the line this year, Rondo was a career 61% FT shooter, with some much worse years than Simmons ever had. The contract situation is obviously very different, but unless you think this playoff stretch is what he'll be going forward, I think he's definitely a second/third piece with 2 proven scorers and a Clarkson/idealized Coby White type off the bench.

The issues are glaringly obvious, and the contract is huge, but even if it never gets fixed, Rajon Rondo but also a lockdown defender is still pretty valuable right?

I would trade Williams or Coby. Williams, Aminu, Sato, and Thad for Simmons and Gary Clark works on the Trade Machine. Don't think that's a final package that would work for the Sixers in win now mode, but they could flip Williams for a scorer.

This week definitely hurt the chances of the central getting a WC team, but whatever, go win the division.

So how much of an impact do we think this is going to have? Are we hammering overs for a few weeks here?

Plus we're in an era where really only the top handful of pitchers in baseball should be going more than twice through a line up. I have no idea if our bullpen will stay elite, probably not given the name recognition outside of Kimbrel, but if you're evaluating the team as it stands now, we basically just need our starters to give us 5 solid innings, which Hendricks is more than capable of, Azlolay has shown a lot of potential, Davies has had a great 6 weeks, pick up a starter, tell Jake to throw 96 for 50 pitches, etc, etc, etc. By the time we get to August/September we could have a few more high velocity arms ready to shut down the middle innings and turn it over to the back end. It's not the team we're used to, for sure, but we're here, take the shot.

Uh oh, someone hacked his account

I don't know, forcing Ross to not play Sogard/Heyward/Jake for a couple weeks would probably cancel out losing Rizzo for that amount of time.

Heyward always seemed like a good dude and has done a ton of good for the community since coming to Chicago (and I assume before). Usually with athletes I let my enjoyment of their skills be the focus rather than their likely terrible character, Heyward has been the opposite since coming here. So this is disappointing. Definitely think some of his overall frustration (.565 OPS, suddenly very mediocre defensively, etc) came out in those quotes.

His quotes after the game made it seem like he read the room a little bit, for what little’s that worth. “Definitely not against getting it”.

Would pay a good amount of money to have a Len 'oh baby' over that one.

Addition by subtraction? Don't think they have an in house replacement, but .191/.279/.337 in 202 PAs this year wasn't doing a whole for them.

Darvish over 7.5 Ks against this team and this lineup had me really wishing I was more of a degenerate gambler.

It does seem that way, but he's leading the team in PAs and 43rd in baseball. Some combo of nagging injuries and a team wide directive to increase rest would be my guess.