Hey, Mom! The Explanation.

Here's the permanent dedicated link to my first Hey, Mom! post and the explanation of the feature it contains.

Thursday, March 28, 2024

A Sense of Doubt blog post #3327 - Welcome Back: Baseball Returns 2024



A Sense of Doubt blog post #3327 - Welcome Back: Baseball Returns 2024

I love Baseball.

I consider it like a religion, and so that's why I capitalize the word as it by rule of grammar would not capitalized because it's a common noun.

I often reprint lots of baseball content as I did in last year's opening day post linked below (from March 30, 2023).

Baseball starts two days earlier this year, and I am doing something differently this year.

I listed all of the Baseball links from the last year, starting with, as I mentioned, last year's March 30th first day of Baseball post.

Now, following the list of posts from this blog, I took many links I have been saving and presented a series of Baseball news and features going back to last season. Instead of reprinting all those articles, O added images and used QUOTEBACKS to snatch key content and provide links.

All the links come from a draft blog post I use to store links that I want to share on the blog based on what I see and read on the Internet. I have been using this post to store links for at least a year and maybe longer. There was some stuff, also, that I had stored in my email: tons of links that I wanted to share on the blog. I figured this was a good thing to do to assemble these all in one place.

Well, there's A LOT of links in that draft post. More than I could ever share, at least not while I keep finding more. And so, for this post, I decided to round-up these links and the content therein. Seems like a way to trim down the BIG sports category in that draft post of assembled links. I may need to do more of this "round-up" sharing method.

So that's what's in this post.

Welcome back Baseball. 

I missed you, and I love having you in my life.

Thanks for tuning in.

Opening Day with my Dad in 2017:




The last year of Baseball posts:


Thursday, March 30, 2023

Thursday, April 6, 2023

Tuesday, July 25, 2023

Friday, July 28, 2023

Thursday, August 10, 2023

Wednesday, October 25, 2023

Thursday, November 2, 2023

Thursday, March 7, 2024

Saturday, March 16, 2024




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.





"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.






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.



AND A FEW MORE LINKS ON FANTASY AND ROOKIES AND WHAT NOT


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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2403.28 - 10:10

- Days ago = 3191 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. 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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