Bertz

Just noticed that Jose Escobar finally got the bump to SB. Hard to get a read on him because he's hit basically since the second he got to Myrtle, at a young age to boot, yet the team let him spend parts of three seasons there and get to 700 PAs. Pretty strong show of no confidence. Man Lovich is insanely hot right now. Very much feeling left behind by all his teammates going to SB.

Am I supposed to be impressed? I mean that only made it to the last row of the bleachers.

This is Shota's 12th start and 9th caught by Kelly. I think that likely tells us more than catcher's ERA.

I'd love to see these direct quotes. But they signed Ross for three reasons 1. They needed a backup catcher and Ross was a fine one (you scoff about WAR but 5.2 in 483 PAs his prior 3 seasons) 2. Montero was a lefty so a righty who mashes lefties was a good compliment 3. Ross was buddies with Lester and they wanted to roll out the red carpet for Jon

The team did not choose to sign Ross because he had a sparkling catcher's ERA come on now be serious

I'm fairly open to catcher soft skills being a thing but when you're cherrypicking to the extent that flipping one outing would completely change the calculus I think it's probably best to just touch grass.

DIETZ! DIETZ! DIETZ! DIETZ!

I would be loathe to blow our prospect wad on a rental given the shape of the rotation heading into next year. Go get someone with control (Reid Detmers?) or try to pan for gold like the team did with Soroka last summer (Trevor Rogers?).

Pete running to the dugout doing the earmuffs sign and demanding the high 5 procession even though he was called out because he was so sure it'd get overturned is my favorite thing in a while. That's like a prime Javy move.

So Kepley hasn't played the field in over a week. If we're wondering why he hasn't been promoted probably some sort of nagging injury?

I think this might be the first one he's pulled. His others that I've seen have all gone to LCF.

Manfred and most of ownership (everyone but the Dodgers?) wants to consolidate TV under the league umbrella. That does two things; - Makes it easy for fans. All local broadcasts for all teams live under MLB.tv (probably with some different pricing tiers) and blackouts are officially dead - If the league controls the whole pie instead of it being team by team, it makes it easier for MLB to peel games off and package them to national broadcast partners at a markup I don't know exactly what level of veto rights the players have, but my understanding is this is something that needs to be handled under the CBA. And the league set all of the current national broadcast deals to expire in '28 specifically so they could come to the negotiating table with as much inventory as possible. So it can't be punted to 2032 without some major pain. (As an aside this TV stuff is why there's roughly 0% chance of the lockout impacting a significant number of regular season games)

It's very obvious that this is going to end up being a trade of: - Green light on TV and expansion changes for - 10-15% bumps to various financial pieces (LT, min salary, etc.) It's so stupid this is going to require a 3 month lockout first. This god damn league just can't do anything without a deadline.

The good and the bad about Bummer is his issue is clearly velocity. On the one hand that's an issue that is generally tough to address in season. But on the other if a month from now he's at Iowa sitting 93-94 you don't have to do a lot of hemming and hawing over whether he's worth a shot.