2016 MLB Regular-Season Thread

Of course it's fine to be happy when someone doesn't get murdered. But he lingered around solely because he is Peter Gammons and he could Get A Minute Alone With John Rocker. Which is what Rocker did when he hand-picked Peter Gammons to conduct the first softball-filled interview after the SI piece.

ESPN SHOWS ROCKER SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY

That experience inspired Gammons to write this:

Peter Gammons

He was writing suckupy prose for months before Rocker returned to Shea--suckupy prose that has proven to be abject bullshit. There's no extra layers to Rocker. He's just a racist dipshit.

Speaking of racism, guess which Boston Globe writer knew about but didn't bother to report when the Winter Haven Elks Club refused to admit then-Red Sox coach Tommy Harper?

 

I read that he's the first player to ever reach base seven times without registering an official at-bat, and I read that he's the first player in 100 years to accomplish the feat. Not sure which is correct, but either way, it's one of those fun quirks of baseball.

 

Last year, Harper became the XX player in history to score four runs without an official at bat, or something dumb like that. Pretty sure he walked four times then.

 

Thanks for posting that, YF. Not to cross threads, but is that the same thing your daughter has?

 

Yes. I don't think our daughter's condition is as bad though. We're hoping the one surgery she had last week will do the trick.

 

Elias also says Harper's 13 walks were the most ever in a series. Kinda surprising since Bonds once walked 232 times in a season. By comparison, Harper has 30 walks in 31 games.

 

I'm pretty fascinated to see where Arrieta's season goes from here. His ERA is 1.13, but his FIP is 2.78. That's not terrible of course - it makes him Madison Bumgarner, essentially. But he's been walking the ballpark lately and struggling to get past five or six innings. We'll see.

 

The Curse of Screamin' A ...

 

He wasn't nearly as wild as the calls made it look yesterday. That's six calls touching the zone that he didn't get, and a couple more that most of the time a pitcher gets. It probably isn't a coincidence that the Cubs were playing their fifth-string catcher and not one of their elite pitch-framers that normally gets all those calls.

And he's probably a *bit* better than his FIP suggests His cutter is incredibly hard to square up, producing more weak contact than the average pitcher does on balls in play.

All that said, yeah, he's not pitching like a 1.18 ERA pitcher and will probably end up on the other side of 2 before the season is over.

 

Didn't he walk Harper three times? Seems like he was trying to do that.

 

Thanks. You saved me the Brooks Baseball trip.

How is his velocity?