hype!

A's have won 6 straight, and 8 of 9.

And the Twins 12 in a row??!

Baseball has been weird this year. I blame the Solar Eclipse interacting with Saturn's Moons.

The best pitching is mostly on the IL and weather has been very weird.

jfc at all the conversation about Judge getting tossed. bad umpire strikes again isn't news. it may be an actual story if they lost

They invest so much money in pitching I would expect big changes. Less heat more offspead. Gonna have to find guys who throw strikes deceptivley. Big money on high heat is a potential big loss.




How did Marino Rivera survive all those years?

To be fair, the average MLB pitcher trying to pitch like Maddux basically turns into Ross Stripling.

I also might be looking at it wrong. Randy Johnson was fine. Maybe they are spinning it too hard.

edit - injuries aside. deGrom was insane when I watched him with Mets. Some games he was simply Unhittable, crowd chanting mvp. Like 40k people laughing in amazement. I've never seen anything like it.

these guys went from absolutely abused to babied so much and they're still dropping like flies. they pull the 100 pitch limit out of their ass bc it's a nice round number and act like everybody's body is exactly the same. Even into the 80s pitchers would throw 15-20 complete games, often times doing dumb **** like throwing 160 pitch complete games in 8-2 games. Now the rare time an ace throws a 1-0 120 pitch complete game shutout they act like he carried a car over his head across the infield.

Josh Hader going for worst FA reliever contract ever. 14 games in to a 5 year contract. Already 3 losses and a BS.

Jose Caballero had a cool line today: 0 fer 2, 3 runs, 4 steals. lol

95 mph sliders aren't good for your arm, who knew?

All reliever contracts are bad basically.

Unless your name is Mariano Rivera, no one deserves 20 million a year for how volatile the position is.

80's pitchers did not throw 100 mph all the time, other than Nolan Ryan.

I believe Duran is the new standard.

Mason Miller imo.

Faced the Yankees twice and even Soto couldn't touch his fastball.

The east-west motion in sweepers necessary to get whiffs and soft contact wreak havoc on the arm from the shoulder to the fingertips. The velocity necessary makes it exponentially worse. Average pitchers from the 80s would get mashed today. Hitting is too sophisticated to get away with just junk.

That's the baseball gods smiting him for the **** he pulled in San Diego last year.

But he did get his big contract so I guess he's not really very smitten.

Without looking at the numbers Wagner and Hoffman were better from that era, but I guess the volatility of relying on heat more than Mo bumps Mo a little closer to the Wags and Hoffman for the big contract.

Rivera was better than Hoffman.

Yeah no **** you didn't look.

Rivera = 56.3 WAR

Hoffman + Wagner = 55.7 WAR

That is not a typo.

When you factor the postseason too, Rivera is quite literally better than Hoffman and Wagner's careers combined.

exactly.
It's insane how consistent he was for almost 20 years. So many relievers are either fickle from one year to the next or have a few greats seasons then totally flame out. Rivera was basically a robot.

He's also routinely pitch double the workload in the playoffs and cut his ERA dpwn by 70 percent.

WAR actually severely underrates someone him bc in the playoffs he's pitching more high leverage innings and pitching in a higher percentage of his teams games. Imagine if all of the sudden in the playoffs your best hitter could get 10 abs a game and bat in all high leverage spots.

Same goes for legit top of the rotation aces especially when pitchers would go deep into games. At the other end it overrates the value of backend guys whose team can have a world series run without them even starting at all or maybe making one short start across 3 series.

WAR doesn't tell the picture on Rivera, but most closers are pretty replaceable by players on their own roster, making the edges really thin on their values, let alone by a replacement player.

just for fun, I looked up these stats at baseball-reference.com:

Complete Games Pitched in 1987: 561
Complete Games Pitched in 2023: 35

times sure have changed