champaignchris

Alzolay has pitched a couple games in a row. As strong as Leiter looked there, I’d bring him back for the 9th.

At this point you at least keep him through the end of the season and give yourself a chance to bring him back at 1 year/$16 million, which would be a great deal if he keeps going anywhere close to what he’s been doing over the first 12 starts.

I think it’s pretty clear he’s getting suspended for lying to the investigators. The underlying offenses are so piddly that I can’t imagine he’d have gotten more than a slap on the wrist if he’d come clean from the start.

In “maybe only interesting to me” news, Illinois hired former Wisconsin DC and interim HC Jim Leonhard as a defensive analyst, a job for which he is immensely over-qualified. Apparently he had hip surgery in the off-season and took himself out of the running for the Eagles’ DC job. He’ll be a nice mentor and second pair of eyes for Illinois’ first time DC who just got promoted from DB coach. I suspect Leonhard will be on his way to bigger and better things next season.

Carlson has to be Taillon’s last batter, right?

Mancini would have been nailed at 2nd with a good throw. He is so slow.

Nimmo has his own injury history.

Insert “pay that man his money” gif here.

What‘S the record for singles in a game by a team? 17 has to be damn close.

A guy shouldn’t look like he needs a day off so much only 4 days after the ASB.

The defense has been real bad. The Nats have at least 2 extra runs from defensive misplays.

Nick Madrigal has yet to play 60 games in any Major League season and hasn’t surpassed 70 games total in a professional season since 2019. I’d like to see him prove he can stay healthy for more than a month at a time before I count on him to fill a MLB roster spot.

I assume it’s to give the players a little extra time to get back from break.

The NCAA didn’t step in when a player died of heat stroke at Maryland in 2018 with accusations of a toxic culture and unsafe practices. It was somewhat similar to NW, where the university did an investigation, suspended Durkin for awhile and then reinstated him, causing an uproar with some players walking out in protest. They then fired him the day after announcing he was reinstated. The NCAA hasn’t had effective rules enforcement for a couple decades, but even when it did, it was monitoring whether schools bought recruits a pizza or a pair of sneakers, and not whether schools were mistreating their players.

The Reds aren’t going to keep playing +.700 ball like they have for the last 40 games. They’ve gone 22-4 in 1- and 2-run games during that span. They’re going to come back to earth. With that pitching, they’re more than likely a slightly sub-.500 team the rest of the way.

Illinois went through similar circumstances with Beckman and handled things about as badly as things could possibly be handled. They waited to fire Beckman until a couple weeks before the start of the season, despite the investigation beginning towards the end of the prior season. They let the AD stay on until the middle of the football season before deciding to fire him, too. They didn’t immediately hire a replacement AD, but instead let their interim AD extend the interim head coach one year. Then, just before the start of spring practice, they finally hired their new AD and forced him to decide whether to go another season with a lame duck interim or try to make a long term hire outside the normal coach hiring cycle. Illinois basically lost three recruiting classes and ended up with Lovie Smith as head coach. He wasn’t able to fill out his staff with great options because of the off-cycle hire and wasn’t able to improve the staff in his second season because he had to assure his original staff that they’d get more than one season to get them there in the first place. So by his third season he was still trying to rebuild his staff while coaching essentially a ju-co team of only freshmen and sophomores. Smith got a lot of criticism for his time at Illinois - much of it deserved - but he moved that program from full on dumpster fire to a merely bad football program. So, to not repeat the mistakes Illinois made, NW got a good start by dumping Fitz now instead of waiting longer. Now, NW needs to fire its AD immediately and have the new AD in place well before the hiring cycle for a new HC starts in November.

Goldschmidt makes a lot more sense to trade than Arenado.

Yeah. I looked up the Dodgers after the fact and was not particularly ashamed of having missed it.

Took one look and suddenly realized that my general hockey knowledge ended in about 1998. I know those two logos are for the Predators and the Wild, but I couldn’t name a single player that ever played for either team.

Bill Buckner never had a 200 hit season with the Dodgers?!?! Topped out at 193. Had 200 hits with both the Cubs and Red Sox. Ugh.

Looking to next year, three of five starting pitching slots are up for grabs, with Taillon holding down one of the two. They have maybe half a bullpen. They have major questions at 1B, DH and CF, and definite concerns at 3B and RF. Payroll looks to be about $180 million before even signing a free agent. That’s really freaking grim.

From today’s game I learned that I didn’t appreciate how good Miguel Tejada was.

Ok. Pretty much must win this game now. Can’t squander this.

Estimated start time 6 pm.

Walk, single and RBI since I complained about him. Anything else I should gripe about?