MLB 2022 Season Thread

[L-Jam3]

If and when they expand two more teams, I hope they return interleague games to the two weeks around Memorial Day. I'm not a fan of interleague games every day. This feels like the third time in a few recent years the Phils open the season with an AL team.

[brian]

Good luck topping this National Anthem for the rest of the season.

[DSafetyGuy]

Well, things went downhill quickly, as Jack Morris couldn't make it through a couple innings of Opening Day without using coded language about the Tigers' biggest free agent acquisition.

[Rex]

I watched exactly one pitch of the Yankee game and it was the only one that mattered. that is what peak efficiency looks like.

[Steve of phpBB]

Well, things went downhill quickly, as Jack Morris couldn't make it through a couple innings of Opening Day without using coded language about the Tigers' biggest free agent acquisition.

Lol. Just wait until Javy runs into an unnecessary out at third base.

Damn I miss him. He was the one player I thought the Cubs had a chance of bringing back.

[EnochRoot]

I'm not one to applaud the Yankees for their business practices (forcing players to be clean shaven, hair above the collar), but I'm breathing a sigh of relief Aaron Judge turned down the Yankees seven (!) year deal worth $214m (plus the $17-$21m (pre)arb deal he would make this year, that'd make the offer essentially 8 years, 235 million (or, $29.375m a year). That offer would've taken him until his age 37 season. How many of those seven years would he had played above his AAV, and how many years would he had played below it?

Judge wanted 10 years? I'm legit curious: have there been any 10 year deals to players who first had college careers?

[Rex]

Watched one pitch of the Mets game, and once again, it was the only pitch that mattered.

[mister d]

Totally agree on Judge given his age and body type. But … now that I have kids I also get the face-of-the-franchise stuff a bit more. Not sure she could name a second Yankee but wore 99 in softball.

But he’s unvaxxed so whatever.

[EnochRoot]

Totally agree on Judge given his age and body type. But … now that I have kids I also get the face-of-the-franchise stuff a bit more. Not sure she could name a second Yankee but wore 99 in softball.

But he’s unvaxxed so whatever.

The whole 'face of the franchise' stuff...If Anthony Volpe has a 120 OPS+ and plays a legit SS he will be - by default - the next 'face of the franchise.'

Judge is the face of the franchise because the team isn't that good.

eta: your daughter will be alright!

[rass]

Just caught a bit of the BOS/NYY game and I think my new goal for my hair is “Hirokazu Sawamura”.

[L-Jam3]

So the Phillies two new additions are on a pace for a combined 162 home runs and zero errors. Everything will turn out A-ok.

[bapo!]

Fifteen years ago, when I was debating whether or not I wanted to sign up for this g-dforsaken place, one of the factors that pushed me over the edge was the existence of a couple of cold, heartless, numbers-driven baseball guys. I felt like I shared a kinship with them. Flash-forward to 2022, and I read this shit:

Totally agree on Judge given his age and body type. But … now that I have kids I also get the face-of-the-franchise stuff a bit more. Not sure she could name a second Yankee but wore 99 in softball.

But he’s unvaxxed so whatever.

I don't recognize this place anymore. I don't recognize myself. Actually, I don't recognize baseball. I see that Charlie Morton pitched well a couple of nights ago, and that makes me smile. I miss baseball. I wish I could still post in these threads. But I can't. I can only wish you a happy a happy season, as long as two of you are on either side of second base.

Yours in Shohei,
Brad/bapo

[Giff]

10 run differential = very close these days in Anaheim.

[mister d]

Fifteen years ago, when I was debating whether or not I wanted to sign up for this g-dforsaken place, one of the factors that pushed me over the edge was the existence of a couple of cold, heartless, numbers-driven baseball guys. I felt like I shared a kinship with them. Flash-forward to 2022, and I read this shit:

I still land where I always would have, just with some softness in the lead-up.

[brian]

I'm not one to applaud the Yankees for their business practices (forcing players to be clean shaven, hair above the collar), but I'm breathing a sigh of relief Aaron Judge turned down the Yankees seven (!) year deal worth $214m (plus the $17-$21m (pre)arb deal he would make this year, that'd make the offer essentially 8 years, 235 million (or, $29.375m a year). That offer would've taken him until his age 37 season. How many of those seven years would he had played above his AAV, and how many years would he had played below it?

Judge wanted 10 years? I'm legit curious: have there been any 10 year deals to players who first had college careers?

Bryce Harper if you're being technical

[A_B]

Bobby Bonilla spent a semester in college.

[sancarlos]

Judge wanted 10 years? I'm legit curious: have there been any 10 year deals to players who first had college careers?

Bryce Harper if you're being technical

Yeah, Bryce Harper played that one year of Junior College. The JUCO world series is held each year in my hometown, Grand Junction, Colorado. My father used to go to all the tournament games, before he moved away,. Harper's team made the tournament, and after that year's JUCO World Series, my dad told me to remember the name of Bryce Harper. He said he was the best juco player he had ever seen.

[A_B]

Judge wanted 10 years? I'm legit curious: have there been any 10 year deals to players who first had college careers?

Bryce Harper if you're being technical

Yeah, Bryce Harper played that one year of Junior College. The JUCO world series is held each year in my hometown, Grand Junction, Colorado. My father used to go to all the tournament games, before he moved away,. Harper's team made the tournament, and after that year's JUCO World Series, my dad told me to remember the name of Bryce Harper. He said he was the best juco player he had ever seen.

Did he hand you a copy of the Sports Illustrated with Harper on the cover as he gave his hot take?

[sancarlos]

Judge wanted 10 years? I'm legit curious: have there been any 10 year deals to players who first had college careers?

Bryce Harper if you're being technical

Yeah, Bryce Harper played that one year of Junior College. The JUCO world series is held each year in my hometown, Grand Junction, Colorado. My father used to go to all the tournament games, before he moved away,. Harper's team made the tournament, and after that year's JUCO World Series, my dad told me to remember the name of Bryce Harper. He said he was the best juco player he had ever seen.

Did he hand you a copy of the Sports Illustrated with Harper on the cover as he gave his hot take?

Not a hot take, asshole. He was going by seeing Harper dominate the pitchers in that tournament he watched, not a magazine cover.

[Rams Fanny]

Troy Tulowitzki played 3 years at CSU Long Beach

[Reaper]

Judge wanted 10 years? I'm legit curious: have there been any 10 year deals to players who first had college careers?

Bryce Harper if you're being technical

Yeah, Bryce Harper played that one year of Junior College. The JUCO world series is held each year in my hometown, Grand Junction, Colorado. My father used to go to all the tournament games, before he moved away,. Harper's team made the tournament, and after that year's JUCO World Series, my dad told me to remember the name of Bryce Harper. He said he was the best juco player he had ever seen.

Dave Winfield got a whopping $23M for his ten-year contract at age 29, after a pretty significant career as a Minnesota Gopher. But guys in the '80s seemingly didn't age as quickly as they do nowadays.

[wlu_lax6]

B.T.W. did anyone else realize that former swamp citizen oilcanboyd picked up a World Series ring?

[A_B]

Judge wanted 10 years? I'm legit curious: have there been any 10 year deals to players who first had college careers?

Bryce Harper if you're being technical

Yeah, Bryce Harper played that one year of Junior College. The JUCO world series is held each year in my hometown, Grand Junction, Colorado. My father used to go to all the tournament games, before he moved away,. Harper's team made the tournament, and after that year's JUCO World Series, my dad told me to remember the name of Bryce Harper. He said he was the best juco player he had ever seen.

Did he hand you a copy of the Sports Illustrated with Harper on the cover as he gave his hot take?

Not a hot take, asshole. He was going by seeing Harper dominate the pitchers in that tournament he watched, not a magazine cover.

Look man all I'm saying is that the name was already pretty prominent. If you went to an AAU tournament in 2002 and came away thinking..."This Lebron Guy might just make it" it's basically the same thing.

[govmentchedda]

B.T.W. did anyone else realize that former swamp citizen oilcanboyd picked up a World Series ring?

Shinin

[Ryan]

Did anyone watch any of the Apple TV games? I'm seeing a lot of negative reviews but I want to make sure it's not just "get the fun chatter and women out of my baseball"

[wlu_lax6]

Did anyone watch any of the Apple TV games? I'm seeing a lot of negative reviews but I want to make sure it's not just "get the fun chatter and women out of my baseball"

Caught some on Friday. I did not like the play-by-play lady on the Nats-Mets game, but feel like baseball is a hard game to do a strong job. This generation of baseball folks are too cutsy. I used to love to turn on the O's and have found both TV and radio for them unlistenable. Nats radio guys are pretty strong, but generally just see the current group weak.

Camera work was fine.

[wlu_lax6]

Apparently Ted Leonsis is in talks/first in line to buy the Nats...Hey Ted....DC people want you to buy the OTHER Big 4 league team you don't own....well and figure out how the get the Wizards up from mediocrity.

[A_B]

So it's not something that I would have ever considered, but there the Reds president was yesterday thinly veiling a threat to move the team. It' the reds! I feel as strongly about reds in Cincinnati as yankees in new york and red sox in boston. Just has to be a team there, right?

"If you want to look at what would you do with this team to have it be more profitable, make more money, compete more in the current economic system that this game exists? It would be to pick it up and move it somewhere else.

"And so be careful what you ask for."

[brian]

So it's not something that I would have ever considered, but there the Reds president was yesterday thinly veiling a threat to move the team. It' the reds! I feel as strongly about reds in Cincinnati as yankees in new york and red sox in boston. Just has to be a team there, right?

"If you want to look at what would you do with this team to have it be more profitable, make more money, compete more in the current economic system that this game exists? It would be to pick it up and move it somewhere else.

"And so be careful what you ask for."

I have to imagine MLB would never let that happen and would force a sale of the team first.

[sancarlos]

Not sure where they would move that would be better for them. Seems like Oakland to Las Vegas is fait accompli, so LV is unavailable.

(Can’t you just hear it… “Here’s YOUR Jacksonville Reds!!!!)

[mister d]

The fact that teams can move at all is bullshit.

[tennbengal]

So it's not something that I would have ever considered, but there the Reds president was yesterday thinly veiling a threat to move the team. It' the reds! I feel as strongly about reds in Cincinnati as yankees in new york and red sox in boston. Just has to be a team there, right?

"If you want to look at what would you do with this team to have it be more profitable, make more money, compete more in the current economic system that this game exists? It would be to pick it up and move it somewhere else.

"And so be careful what you ask for."

David Roth at Defector unloaded the chamber:

Reds President And CFO Asks Fans To Consider Whether Maybe This Is Actually All Their Fault

Opening Day is a big deal in Cincinnati, even and perhaps especially when it promises to be something like the highlight of the team’s season. The Reds are, as they have been for the last several decades, either a team stuck in the grim limbo between an unthrilling recent past and a potentially promising future, or a team built specifically for that endless middling present. They have made some feints towards doing the things and spending the money necessary to compete in the National League Central, and then backed off of them. The team spent this recent offseason, before and after the lockout, furiously jettisoning every veteran they could, even when getting off an undesirable contract meant adding a young All-Star to the deal. But, again, the Reds aren’t quite tanking. They brought Hunter Greene north with them from Spring Training and the former second overall pick was electric in a successful MLB debut; Nick Lodolo, a very different but similarly promising pitching prospect, will make his debut this week as well. It is difficult, as it has often been difficult, to see quite what the Reds are going for, although if it was revealed that owner Bob Castellini had placed a 10-figure bet on his team winning exactly 78 games it would honestly explain a lot.

But if the Reds are unlikely to see their season end with a parade, they knew that it would begin with one. After two years of pandemic suspension, the Findlay Market Parade that has been held on the day of the team’s home opener every year since 1920 returned. In a neat twist on that local tradition, Reds President and Chief Operating Officer Phil Castellini spent the hours leading up to Tuesday’s first pitch dousing that parade in his own salty piss. If that is admittedly kind of an unpleasant way to describe Castellini taking the time to tell those Reds fans who have been critical of his family’s ownership to take a moment and consider 1) that they themselves are pathetic and their concerns are of no significance, and 2) that maybe they would be happier, as the piggies they are, if they decided to enjoy the corncobs and kitchen trimmings provided in their trough, but also the whole thing was pretty unpleasant even before I described it that way. Anyway, Castellini did this on the radio, hours before Opening Day, in an interview with WLW 700’s Scott Sloan and Mo Egger.

What’s remarkable about this sentiment, which is surely widely shared among big league owners if generally expressed in more carefully coded self-congratulatory executive mewling, is not how belligerently Castellini expressed but how readily the familiar rhetoric about “growing our own” and “discipline” being the remedy for the team’s unwillingness or inability to spend on big-league talent slid into something much more like gloating. When asked about the team’s decision to ditch erstwhile cornerstones and their cornerstone-grade contracts instead of adding to last year’s 83-win team—a question softened somewhat by noting that the team did add Tommy Pham and “sneaky good addition” Hunter Strickland—Castellini is instantly on edge. “Add to it with what?” he says, before treating listeners to some extremely tense dead air. The team had been spending beyond its revenue, the owner’s son continued, and while it might have been nice to spend more on the pursuit of one of those expanded playoff spots the owners just bargained into existence, it simply wasn’t realistic. “I’ve got five kids,” Castellini noted by way of explaining why the team had to trade some of its best players. “They’re all fans.”

Asked by Egger why fans, like his own children, should show faith in the family’s ownership, Castellini got to the point:

“Well, where are you going to go?” Castellini asked fans. “Sell the team to who? That’s the other thing: You want to have this debate? …. What would you do with this team to have it more profitable, make more money, compete more in the current economic system that this game exist? It would be to pick it up and move it somewhere else. Be careful what you ask for.”

Castellini went back and forth with himself on this topic for a while, without ever quite resolving the friction between saying “we can’t expect to get and retain the fandom if we don’t win” and his objectively correct if notably rude observation that those fans will finally be stuck with whatever baseball, winning or otherwise, their team’s ownership deigns to provide.

On its own, this fits the classic political definition of a gaffe, which amounts to accidentally saying something true at an inopportune moment. In context, though, that feels too generous. The last half-decade or so in baseball has been marked, even before it was interrupted by the lockout, by an increasingly militant approach from owners. What those owners want is not new, and is elemental—they want more money, more control, more deference, more of everything than they already have. It is not really a position that can be reasoned with, because it is itself not just unreasonable but unreasoning.

But when these demands are delivered through fatuous management jargon, and with the whinging bad faith that is the native song of the Beleaguered American Job Creator, it can sound like something other than what it is. It is almost to Castellini’s credit that he dropped the familiar rich-guy grievance and got straight to the ruder thing beneath it. The result sounded like what it was: a man with money and leverage telling everyone else—and the fans who have clamored for Castellini to sell the team are the same ones partying in the streets on Opening Day and paying to watch the team play at Great American Ballpark—to leave him alone until they had some of their own.

Also arguing against this being a gaffe is the fact that, when asked later that day by broadcaster Brandon Saho whether people had perhaps taken his comments the wrong way, Castellini essentially said it again, with extra vinegar on top.

The answer is, are you going to abandon being a Reds fan?” Castellini told Saho. “The point is, how about everyone settle down and celebrate, and cheer for this team … the point is, stay tuned, and be a fan.” In that answer, Castellini also reiterated a point that he made on the radio, which is that his family’s ownership “isn’t going anywhere.”

Again, it was sort of a taunt, and sort of a threat, but very obviously both a fact, and something like the point.

[EnochRoot]

Roth missed the point that Rob Manfred is exactly the commissioner all 30 owners want, which is someone who encourages you to say the quiet parts out loud.

[Steve of phpBB]

The fact that teams can move at all is bullshit.

Especially if the team accepts any public funding or special accommodations for the stadium. I think that commits a team for at least 50 years.

[L-Jam3]

What the fuck? He was at 80 pitches!

[Ryan]

Which is like 50% more than most starters have gotten so far. Lockouts kill.

[sancarlos]

Owners in all leagues bitch to high heaven about current years' operating profits or losses, but that conveniently avoids the fact that all of them will extract a huge capital gain when they someday decide to sell the team.

[degenerasian]

Yeah it sucks but shorted spring training, first outing of the season and injury prone. He did great. I get that we want to see perfect games, but his health is very important to the Dodgers rotation.

[Ryan]

The MLB app always brings you back to the top of the schedule after you quit out of any box score and I want to punch it in the dick.

[EnochRoot]

Vlad Jr is having a good night. First HR he hit was aided by Aaron Hicks who played it out of his glove and it bounded over the wall onto the granite embankment behind the wall. His next two HRs were absolute no doubters though. Second one ricocheted off the far wall bullpen wall in left-center, and his third one was a missile that reached the second deck in left.