A Sense of Doubt blog post #3696 - Baseball is Back! No Foolin'
Welcome back Baseball!!
Two recaps and links to box scores from yesterday's games and a reprint of last year's Welcome Back Baseball.
The Cubs BACK UP catcher become the first player in MLB history to hit for a cycle in MARCH.
After being swept by the LA Dodgers, the champs, arguably the best team in Baseball, the Tigers get their first win.
Thank you Baseball.
https://www.espn.com/mlb/boxscore/_/gameId/401764519
https://www.espn.com/mlb/recap/_/gameId/401764519
Kelly hits for cycle and Cubs power past Athletics 18-3 in 1st MLB game at Sutter Health Park
WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- — Carson Kelly hit for the cycle and drove in five runs, Michael Busch launched a two-run homer on the way to a career-high four RBI, and the Chicago Cubs pounded the Athletics 18-3 on Monday night to spoil their first game in their new Northern California home.
Busch connected in the first inning and Dansby Swanson followed with a homer on a blustery night when the wind carried balls over the fence just as Cubs manager Craig Counsell predicted. Indeed, there were plenty of offensive fireworks in the first major league game at Sutter Health Park in California’s capital region.
With 21 hits, the Cubs amply backed right-hander Ben Brown (1-1), who struck out five in five innings for his second career win. They scored their most runs since an 18-8 victory at Pittsburgh last Aug. 26.
The 18 runs allowed by the A’s were the most by any team in a home opener in 100 years, according to Sportradar. The Browns allowed 21 to the Indians in 1925.
A's shortstop Jacob Wilson hit his first career homer leading off the third in front of a sellout crowd of 12,119.
The Cubs jumped on A’s righty Joey Estes (0-1), and Swanson homered for the second straight game.
All the A’s players wore No. 24 to honor late Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson, who died Dec. 20 five days before his 66th birthday. A 24-second moment of silence was held after player introductions, then Henderson's three daughters threw out ceremonial first pitches.
Kelly homered in the fourth inning, had a two-run single in the fifth, doubled and walked in the sixth, and tripled in the eighth. The previous Cubs player to hit for the cycle was Mark Grace on May 9, 1993, against the San Diego Padres — before Kelly was even born in 1994.
No catcher for the Cubs had accomplished the feat since Randy Hundley on Aug. 11, 1966, versus Houston.
Kelly even walked twice, too. His run-scoring triple made it 17-3.
Cubs LHP Justin Steele (1-1, 8.00 ERA) takes the mound Tuesday in his third start of 2025. RHP Luis Severino (0-0, 0.00) makes his second start for the A's after pitching the opener Thursday at Seattle.
https://www.espn.com/mlb/recap/_/gameId/401694973
Greene homers as the Tigers use fast start to beat Mariners 9-6 for 1st win of the season
SEATTLE -- — Riley Greene homered and Javier Báez hit a two-run double in Detroit's six-run first inning, helping the Tigers beat the Seattle Mariners 9-6 on Monday night for their first victory of the season.
Báez, Dillon Dingler and Trey Sweeney each had three of Detroit's 18 hits. Kerry Carpenter had two hits and two RBI.
The Tigers were swept by the Los Angeles Dodgers in their season-opening series.
Randy Arozarena, Cal Raleigh and Luke Raley homered for Seattle. Julio Rodríguez had two hits and scored two runs.
Mariners right-hander Emerson Hancock (0-1) recorded just two outs before he was pulled.
Carpenter singled in Justin-Henry Malloy, and Greene hit a solo drive for his first homer of the season. Dingler and Sweeney each hit an RBI single before Baez chased Hancock with his first double of the year.
Tigers rookie Jackson Jobe permitted three runs and three hits in four innings in his first career start. He struck out three and walked four.
Tyler Holton (1-0) got the win, and Brant Hurter pitched three innings for the save.
Baez’s first-inning double broke the game wide open. Hancock was one strike away from getting out of the inning, but Baez’s hit went off the wall in left.
Eight players had at least one hit for Detroit.
Tigers right-hander Casey Mize will start Tuesday against Seattle ace Logan Gilbert (0-0, 1.29 ERA).
A Sense of Doubt blog post #3327 - Welcome Back: Baseball Returns 2024
I love Baseball.
I often reprint lots of baseball content as I did in last year's opening day post linked below (from March 30, 2023).
I missed you, and I love having you in my life.
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The last year of Baseball posts:
Eventually, MLB would like to have both national and local broadcast revenue run through the league’s media departments. That would be a significant change for a sport that has long been defined by the differing behavior of big markets and small markets and in which the value of the local broadcasts has been a major source of that disparity. Even as an aspiration, it bears paying attention to.How the league navigates from now to that version of the future — and how it strategizes around the predictable resistance from big-market owners, who presumably won’t want to see the payroll playing field leveled — will dominate the business of baseball for years to come. Ultimately, MLB believes even the still-lucrative iterations of RSNs are a sinking ship, and teams will have to embrace the league’s plans for a digital-first future.
#Giants RHP Ross Stripling is working on a new pitch for 2024 - The Deathball - a type of gyro slider meant to drop late.
— Ari Alexander (@AriA1exander) January 27, 2024
Looked absolutely filthy live today as he worked out north of Houston.
Stripling tells me he’s looking for more swing & miss. pic.twitter.com/spsKEkWsfN
"I'm throwing the 'Deathball,' " Stripling told Alexander. "Which is essentially an inefficient spinning slider that, from my arm, angle really high; if you can cut the efficiency of the spin, it basically can't move horizontally, so the only way it can go is down. So it's just kind of like a funky, downward, harder slider that guys from high arm angles are trying to figure out."
Stripling revealed that while his pitch-to-contact style has been effective, the Giants pitcher's motivation for workshopping the new addition to his pitch repertoire stems from his desire to induce more strikeouts moving forward.
"Even though I feel like I have a good arsenal and I get a lot of soft contact, I just don't miss a lot of bats," Stripling explained. "So this is a pitch that [Tyler Glasnow], [Justin Verlander], Luke Jackson and Nick Anderson, some guys [are] throwing, they get a lot of swing-and-miss. Like some of them over 50 percent, so even if I can get a fraction of that, it would be a huge addition to my game to be able to put people away."
DETROIT -- Matt Manning wasn't upset about being pulled while pitching a no-hitter.
He said he didn't even realize it until someone told him in the dugout.
"I had no idea," he said. "I was like, 'well, dang,'"
By the time the game was over, everyone at Comerica Park knew what Manning and relievers Jason Foley and Alex Lange had achieved.
Foley and Lange finished what Manning started, and the Tigers no-hit the Toronto Blue Jays in a 2-0 win on Saturday.
Manning (3-1) pitched 6⅔ innings and Foley got four straight outs.
"He's just a natural supinator," Hottovy told Yahoo Sports. "Like, he can throw a football really well. Everything he does is kind of from that supinated position. So the cut was always going to be easy for him."
Averaging 91.7 mph, Steele’s heater looks relatively slow for a primary fastball. But if it were dubbed a cutter, it would rank as the third-hardest thrown by any starter in 2023 and the hardest thrown by a lefty, which nods at the deception behind its success.
In the language of pitch design spoken throughout professional clubhouses and player development teams, Steele’s fastball has "cut ride." It veers to the glove side, horizontally, without taking the same sort of vertical dive you associate with a slider or sinker.
"A lot of organizations, a lot of teams, obviously want guys to have this kind of cut ride four-seam, but they want to err on the side of more ride than cut because they want to be able to get above the barrel," Hottovy said. "You want to be able to get swing and miss in big moments."
Since integration, only nine seasons (from six hitters) have matched or bested Acuña’s current combination of on-base percentage (131 OBP+), slugging percentage (138 SLG+) and strikeout rate (55 K%+) dominance compared to the MLB norms of the time.
Albert Pujols (2009, 2008)
Barry Bonds (2004, 2002)
Todd Helton (2000)
Wade Boggs (1987)
George Brett (1985, 1980)
Stan Musial (1948)
None of those seasons, by the way, involved more than 16 stolen bases. But the implications of this list exist outside the running. They hint at a new gear, a new magnitude for Acuña’s still-rising star that could definitively lift him above contemporaries such as Juan Soto, Fernando Tatis Jr. and Vladimir Guerrero Jr., even as age saps some of the stolen base enthusiasm.
Since Abbott’s masterpiece had come on a day game on a Saturday, an evening of celebration in New York was inevitable. Mattingly recalls that they headed to one of his favorite chicken wing restaurants downtown for a few beers and a few cocktails. Abbott concurs that he had “a bit of a headache” the next morning.
“I was blown away by the reaction,” he said. “I was signing autographs, taxi cabs were honking, and people were running across the street, and I’ve been so heartened that people have remembered that game.”
But the legacy of Jim Abbott is about much more than just that September day in 1993.
By pitching from the mound in the iconic Yankees pinstripes and by playing for a decade in MLB, Abbott became a role model to disabled children all over the country. He can’t say how many he has helped, but he says that in every town or city there were always young families who came to be inspired by his story. “I wouldn’t be able to guess the numbers, they’re sort of staggering, but I think of the kids a lot, and the look in their parents’ eyes.”
"I'm proud that I've been around long enough to say that," Hinch said of reaching 1,500 games. "You need opportunity, and I've been given a lot of opportunities. ... You look at guys around the game and how long guys get to manage and how difficult these jobs are to get or to keep. I'm very thankful for that."
The final six games will elevate Hinch to 1,508 games in his managerial career by the end of the season. The Tigers, unable to pass the first-place Twins, set a short-term goal of catching the Cleveland Guardians for second place in the AL Central. The gap, as of Monday morning, is half a game, with Cleveland finishing the season with three games in Detroit.
It's not just Hinch.
His players want to catch Cleveland.
"That's the goal to finish," Skubal said. "You want to win the division, but if you can't win it, you want to come in second. It'll be a fun series at the end of the season. There's kind of a lot on the line there."
NEW YORK -- The average time of a nine-inning major league game dropped to 2 hours, 40 minutes in the first year of the pitch clock, a 24-minute decrease in a season of change that resulted in a spike in batting average and the most stolen bases in nearly 40 years.
Left-handed hitters benefited from the new restrictions on defensive shifts, runners took advantage of the slightly decreased distance between bases, and average fastball velocity set another record.
The average game time dropped to its 1985 level after passing 3 hours for the first time in 2016. It reached a record 3:10 in 2021 before the introduction of the PitchCom electronic pitch-calling device helped bring it down to 3:04 last year. Over the objections of the players' association, MLB instituted a pitch clock set at 15 seconds with the bases empty and 20 seconds with runners on base.
CHICAGO -- The Cubs took a big step toward contending for a championship and changed the outlook for a franchise coming off back-to-back losing seasons.
It didn't end the way president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer would have liked. But he sees something bigger taking shape.
"The shell of a really good team is there," he said Tuesday. "Obviously, we have to make additions and we have to find ways to improve. But I feel really good, given where we were a year ago. The number of pieces we have that are contributing players on a really good team is there, and we just need to supplement that."
The Cubs finished second in the NL Central at 83-79 and missed the playoffs by a game after faltering down the stretch in a season full of big swings. They went from being 10 games below .500 in June to 12 above in early September, only to go 7-15 the rest of the way.
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Jung, the 12th overall pick in the 2022 draft, split his first full season as a pro with High-A West Michigan and Double-A Erie. He hit better in Erie, slashing .284/.373/.563 compared to .254/.377/.465 against High-A arms. There’s optimism that Jung will transition to third base well enough to play it in the MLB, and he’s hit well over 21 plate appearances during spring training.
McGonigle, a 1A-round compensatory pick last year, is the top shortstop in the system, but it’s going to take a few more seasons for the 19-year-old to reach Detroit. The quick left-handed bat is going to play at every level and he has sneaky power. Defensively, he’s likely to stay at shortstop. The Tigers don’t have a ton of options there and Magoo is solid for his age.
Santana, another IFA that’s been around for awhile, can play everywhere on the infield, but he might be an option at designated hitter in this lineup. He has a very good eye (21.7% walk rate) and good power in his bat, but the consistency isn’t there yet. He struggled in Single-A last year, slashing .156/.365/.312.
Detroit has several second-base prospects, at different levels of the farm. Lee came over from Philly in the deadline deal for Michael Lorenzen. He only played eight games in Detroit’s system before dealing with an injury, but he doesn’t strike out very often and could get the call to Double-A this year.
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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2403.28 - 10:10
- Days ago = 3191 days ago
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- Days ago: MOM = 3561 days ago & DAD = 216 days ago
- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I post Hey Mom blog entries on special occasions. I post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day, and now I have a second count for Days since my Dad died on August 28, 2024. I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of Mom's death, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of her death and sometimes 13:40 EDT for the time of Dad's death. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.
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