The 2010 Baseball Thread

I think its tough for the Yankees and Rays you either want the AL East face the Rangers with Cliff Lee and a returning Hamilton or the wild card to face the Twins with no Morneau a few injures.
 
Twins and Rangers both have a poor away records. HFA might be enough to edge a series against either of them TBH.
 
I really don't know what to think of the Yankees right now, I mean the quality is there in terms of bats and in theory the rotation should be good but there are some really random performances right now. The only sure thing in the rotation right now is CC, after that you either get no hit stuff or 100 pitches by the 5th inning. I just hope they pick up when the games start to matter again.

The contract's up at the end of the season are interesting too, will Mariano return again if he can out with a ring? Same for Pettitte. Is Jeter really worth the money he will be asking?
 
The Yankees better not start Burnett or that's a loss almost instantly.

I take back my Twins prediction. I think it will be either the Rays or Yanks winning the AL. Texas can't beat either IMO, unless Lee has two great performances. Same for the Twins with Lariano.

I can't see past the Phillies in the NL.
 
MrMarcello said:
The Yankees better not start Burnett or that's a loss almost instantly.

I take back my Twins prediction. I think it will be either the Rays or Yanks winning the AL. Texas can't beat either IMO, unless Lee has two great performances. Same for the Twins with Lariano.

I can't see past the Phillies in the NL.
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lee has been unspectacular as a ranger but he's had very good games, era wise, against the rays. don't under-estimate the ranger :D. hamilton the mvp is back, vlad is pumped, and michael young is jacked up for his post season debut. GO RANGERS!
 
gbgary said:
lee has been unspectacular as a ranger but he's had very good games, era wise, against the rays. don't under-estimate the ranger :D. hamilton the mvp is back, vlad is pumped, and michael young is jacked up for his post season debut. GO RANGERS!
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That's why as much I would have like the AL east I like the Twins more the Yanks I think will beat them with no Morneau. The Rangers are a good team now with Hamilton back I think Lee will be great in the play offs.
 
The Phillies have to be favorites, they are loaded on the mound and at the plate
 
I wonder how the Twins and Rangers would fair in the AL East? Four of the top seven AL teams were in the East this year. Its about time they restructured the divisions IMO.
 
mjs020294 said:
I wonder how the Twins and Rangers would fair in the AL East? Four of the top seven AL teams were in the East this year. Its about time they restructured the divisions IMO.
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Why? They're geographically created. They do such to limit travel as much as possible. And teams like NY and Boston wouldn't be pleased to be in the same division as Oakland and Seattle and those long, arduous road trips.

What I would propose is MLB do something radical: create a first and second division with a promotion/relegation system (could keep AL as second division and NL as first division, as the latter is the older league). This gives clubs like Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, Seattle, etc., something to actually play for beyond May.

Scenario 1: Add 2 more clubs to give 16 for each league. No divisions just one table; each club plays another club 10x for a total of 150 games (15x10) [Problem here is the reduction of 12 games = lost revenue]. Top four clubs in NL (D1) make the postseason and each round is a seven-game series. Bottom three clubs drop. AL (D2) top finisher wins automatic promotion. Next four clubs (2nd v 5th, 3rd v 4th) compete in a seven-game series with the winner earning promotion.

Scenario 2: Contract 2 clubs to give 14 for each league (bye-bye Kansas City and Oakland). No divisions just one table; each club plays another club 12x for a total of 156 games (13x12)[Still a reduction in games but the players would approve]. Same playoff scenario as above.

And either make the DH universal or eliminate it.
 
So Playoffs

ALDS-Texas Rangers vs Tampa Bay Rays
ALDS-Evil Corporate entity vs Minnesota Twins
NLDS-Atlanta Braves vs San Francisco Giants
NLDS-Cincinnati Reds vs Philadelphia Phillies
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My predictions:

ALCS - Minnesota Twins vs Tampa Bay Rays

NLDS - Atlanta Braves vs Philadelphia Phillies

World Series - Tampa Bay Rays vs Philadelphia Phillies


World Champs - Philadelphia Phillies
 
cliff lee is dominating and so are the Ranger hitters. hope i'm not jinxing them but it looks like game one may go to the Texas. heard a stat this morning that the team that wins game one wins the series 80% of the time. GO RANGERS!
 
I know where the Yankee's 31st 2011 draft pick is going next year.
 
The Rays never had any momentum. It would have been a different ballgame if they had taken advantage of the bases loaded and only one out in the first.
 
gbgary said:
that draft is several months away.


Rangers win game one 5-1. total dominance.
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But the Free Agency period isn't, its obvious the Yankees are going for Cliff Lee and he is Type A, therefore the Rangers will get the Yankees 31st draft pick.
 
What an incredible achievement, would anyone be unhappy to see that guy get his ring?
 
Ofcourse, I have no doubt the Rangers will bid for him. It's just the fact that a few months ago the Yankees were willing to give up their best prospect (Montero) and a few other good prospects just for a essentially a Cliff Lee rental (ofcourse they would have offered him an extension).

The Yankees have a hole in their rotation, and depending on if Pettitte continues it might grow larger and the free agency market is not deep with starting pitcher talent this year. A player of the caliber of Lee, left-handed will mean he gets big bucks.
 
gbgary said:
unless the Rangers out bid them (and he wants to be here). not holding my breath on that one.
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They can't afford 20m per year for a pitcher and he didn't want to go there to begin with. He wanted to be traded to the Yankees but when they didn't want to part with the players/prospects required, he accepted a move to Texas just to get out of Seattle. But he's pretty much already a Yankee IMO unless the Mets, BoSox, Cubs, ChiSox, or Angels offer ridiculous money. Look at how he pitches against NYY - he puts his best stuff out there then sucks against KC and Baltimore. He's a big game pitcher.

I still think it was stupid the Phillies traded him but I guess it worked out that they got Oswalt later.
 
Halladay is a special special pitcher, he took his chance, I really cant see past the Phils
 
gbgary said:
Rangers absolutely drill the rays today and go up 2-0 in the series. color me a little surprised. GO RANGERS!
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Not seen the game but it reports suggest there was a key bad call, which seems to be a theme for the Rays. The MBL will do anything to get the AL game best for the ratings.

Hope its over quick, we have visitors for two weeks and the wife will kill me if I watch sport the entire time.
 
mjs020294 said:
Not seen the game but it reports suggest there was a key bad call, which seems to be a theme for the Rays. The MBL will do anything to get the AL game best for the ratings.

Hope its over quick, we have visitors for two weeks and the wife will kill me if I watch sport the entire time.
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the issue was a strike out call on a held up swing by michael young. next pitch was a homer. turned out it didn't matter.
 
I'm glad the Yankee's won the wild card :lol: Then again, the Rays are just shit right now.
 
si.com put up an article today, listing the umpiring errors so far in this postseason...and how it really is getting to a breaking point.

Bad Calls in Baseball

steal.jpg


The replay discussion in baseball has grown so ubiquitous, so overbearing, so boring that — like the revenue/payroll disparity in baseball — it’s simply no fun to talk about anymore. Everybody knows about the problem. The problem never seems to get fixed. After a while, the talk feels as pointless as complaining about the humidity in St. Louis in July.

But, as boring as it is, Thursday was a banner day in baseball’s grand losing battle to umpiring legitimacy. In the Tampa Bay-Texas game, the umpires seemed to miss a checked-swing third strike call against Michael Young. Given a reprieve, Young homered, and soon after Tampa Bay manager Joe Maddon was tossed, and the Rays lost.

In the Minnesota-New York game, the home plate umpire seemed to miss a strike-three call against Lance Berkman.* The next pitch, Berkman crushed a double that gave the Yankees the lead they would never relinquish. Soon after, Minnesota manager Ron Gardenhire was tossed.

*Though Yankees fans and others will point out that the umpire probably missed a call on the second pitch of that same at-bat, calling a strike on a pitch that was probably at least a couple of inches outside.

And in the Atlanta-San Francisco game, second base umpire Paul Emmel appeared to miss a clear tag on Buster Posey on a stolen base attempt. Emmel wasn’t the only one to miss it… the television announcers did not mention it even though they showed several replays (they seemed more interested in the quirks of Posey’s awkward slide — they picked up on it a few innings later) and Bobby Cox, who has never been shy about coming out of the dugout, stayed put. There wasn’t even an argument on this one, though Posey was clearly out. Soon after, Posey scored the only run of the game.

A banner day, yes. Of course, this came a day after the umpires clearly missed a catch/trap call that should have ended the Twins-Yankees game, and the umpires missed a hit-by-pitch against Carlos Pena in the Rays-Rangers game. There were probably other misses, but those were the lowlights.

I don’t want to sound like Chicken Little here, but I think baseball has a real problem on its hands… a very serious problem. And it goes beyond all the replay talk. I don’t want this to sound too monumental or anything, but, what the heck, you can read this next sentence in your John Facenda voice: Baseball is facing a serious legitimacy issue. Anyway, I think so.

It’s a different kind of legitimacy issue from the gambling problems of the 1910s or the shameful color barrier before Jackie Robinson or even the steroid issue. It’s different… but it’s still dangerous for the game.

Legitimacy for a sports league simply means this: People have to believe in the fairness and authenticity of the sport. This is why the BCS is so unpopular — nobody believes in its legitimacy. The NHL and NBA regular seasons have legitimacy issues because so many teams make the playoffs. The Tour de France has legitimacy issues because, as we have only recently learned, contaminated meat is causing positive drug tests. Golf tournaments without Tiger Woods over the last few years have had legitimacy issues because Woods was so much better than anyone else. NASCAR has legitimacy issues when nobody really understood their scoring system. And so on.

I have no idea if baseball umpires are worse these days than they used to be… I suspect they’re probably not worse. I suspect they’re probably better. But that doesn’t matter. Times have changed. Technology has changed. Every game is on television somewhere. Every television game has multiple angles. You could be a brutal umpire in the days of Casey, and all people could really do was yell, “Kill the umpire!” They had no replays to use as proof. These days, there are so many hours to fill on sports channels, and there is infinite space on the Internet, and people are killing the umpires on Twitter night after night after night. And they have the images to back them up.

And this is the point — it doesn’t matter how good umpires were before all these new technologies, just like it doesn’t matter anymore if you have the fastest horse and buggy in the county. We SEE the missed calls now. And those missed calls are embarrassing the game. More, they are making the results of these games questionable. Why was gambling an issue? Because it made the results questionable. Why were steroids an issue? Because they made the results questionable. And here we are in 2010, and umpires are missing hugely important calls, loads of them, and games are being influenced by these blown calls, and baseball folks are just standing by and saying that the human element is part of the game? No, that can’t last.

See, sooner or later, people aren’t going to stand for it. I suspect some people already are just shaking their heads in frustration. The more bad calls, the more people are going to turn off to baseball. The more times a fan’s team gets cheated, the more likely he or she is to simply stop caring. “Bad calls are a part of baseball,” might be a good enough answer for some traditionalists, but there aren’t enough traditionalists to keep ANY game popular and vibrant. You really can’t have playoff games, World Series games, perfect games sullied, ruined, altered by terrible umpire calls while baseball gurus just sit back like the wrestling referee who doesn’t happen to notice that one guy brought a metal chair into the ring.*

*Even as I write this now, they are showing the blown stolen base call over and over and over on TBS — five or six times in a row. Baseball can’t have this.

What can be done? Well, yeah, we probably have to delve back for a moment into that tiresome talk about replay. There are numerous problems with replay in baseball. Nobody wants the pace of the game slowed even more. Nobody wants more of those life-draining delays while umpires gather together to talk. Nobody wants baseball to turn into a conditional sport, where you have to wait for the appeal before unleashing your cheer. And frankly there are some calls — like ball and strike calls — that probably do not fit replay as we have it now. The Berkman call, frustrating as it may have been for Twins fans, is probably not reversible yet, not until ball-strike technology gets better.

But to me it’s a simple reality: You just can’t have these missed calls and maintain your authenticity. You just can’t. Not over time. And replay seems the most viable answer.* So if baseball has to give up some time and a bit of tradition to get the calls right, then I think sooner or later — sooner — they will have to do that.

*It may not be the only answer, though. I was talking to a baseball insider who says that baseball could fix a lot of these problems by rethinking how umpires do their job. He thinks umpires could work together better as a team (could the third base umpire have helped out on that Buster Posey stolen base), he thinks they could be positioned better, he thinks they could be trained better. I’m skeptical… but I’m also for any answer that will get us the right calls much more often.

Here’s what I do know: While some people talked about Tim Lincecum’s remarkable pitching performance after the Giants game, I kept thinking that Posey was out. While some people were talking about the shocking Rangers upset of the Rays, I kept wondering if the Rays might have come back in that game had the umpire called Michael Young out on that check swing. While people talked about the Yankees’ dominance and the Twins having lost 11 playoff games in a row, I kept wondering if the game might have been a little different had the umpire rung up Berkman.

What-ifs are great for sports. They’re not great when the umpires are the ones sparking the what-ifs. Twenty-five years later people in St. Louis STILL blame umpire Don Denkinger for the Cardinals loss to Kansas City in the 1985 World Series. That’s a part of baseball history. Now, because of better technology, more replay angles, we’re getting multiple Denkinger moments every single day. Sooner or later, people will have had enough. There were a couple of managers and a lot of fans on Thursday who decided that they had already had enough.

Joe Posnanski » Posts Bad Calls in Baseball «
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Umps have been pretty bad this postseason the Berkman AB it was a strike but Pavano got allot of outside calls when Pettitte didnt.

What do people think of TBS I think they have been dog shit when Berkman hit that homer they couldn't sound more bored.
 
I was listening to ESPN radio (I haven't forked out for mlb.tv this season) for the first time and the commentary was great, to then watch the TBS highlights is like night and day. They sounded so down whenever the Yankees got a hit, shit that Berkman call sounded like a pop call :lol:

Watching gameday though, your right. Pettitte was getting nothing outside for the first 3-4 innings and Pavano was getting everything. I guess it evened itself out in the end.
 
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