The 2023 Running Baseball Thread

Andrus is a classic Hall of Very Good player: Came up early and was able to put together a lot of counting stats (did you also know he's the active leader in both stolen bases and caught stealing?) while earning a great contract that made him a target of criticism over the back half of the deal. He'll also be a classic example of how 3,000 hits is the greatest separator between HOFers and non-HOFers. Andrus is still only 34 and can still be a plug-and-play one-year middle infield stopgap for a few years...but nowhere near long enough to collect another thousand hits.

 

Concepcion, Vizquel and even Jimmy Rollins have better cases than Andrus, imo.

 

Oh I'm not arguing he's a Hall of Famer. Not even close! But he's been (or maybe was) a very good player for a long time.

 

Really want him to be one of those guys who bounces from one team to the next for each of the next several years so I can tee up Mojo Nixon references.

 

I know the home opener is a cash cow and all, but I do not like clubs postponing games a day ahead, then sitting through rainless days so they can open in the sun.

 

Giants' Kade McClure calls Fernando Tatis Jr. a 'cheater' after giving up home run to him

To be fair, he's not wrong.

 

Rainout insurance is quite the thing.

 

Hall Of Fame prankster, though.

 

Crossthread!

Climate change led to at least 500 more hone runs between 2010 and 2019, according to Dartmouth College researchers.

Climate change is leading to more home runs, study finds
Global warming, home runs, and the future of America’s pastime in: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society - Ahead of print

 

More home runs never killed anything. Except a few middle relievers' careers.

 

At risk of being a Debbie Downer, I hate shit like this.

Climate change is serious business. Baseball, love it though I do, is not.

Wasting time on how climate change affects baseball detracts from meaningful climate change discourse on the serious shit.

I’m someone who believes climate change is the most serious challenge mankind faces, but even feeling that way, my reaction when I saw this was:

1. Eyeroll
2. Who cares? (Do the math. If 500 HRs over a decade are spread around 28 teams, it’s 1.7 more HRs per team per season. A pittance in almost any era and that’s before you even get into the weeds of emphasis on launch angle over that period, etc.)

And most important …
3. If I feel this way about this report as someone who is decidedly not a climate change denier, how are those who are deniers reacting?

This sounds counter-intuitive to how I feel, but I do think there’s such a thing as over-doing it on climate change. Tying climate change to everything under the sun has a boy who cried wolf effect.

It’s too serious a topic to waste it on this. It just muddies the water.

 

That horse left the barn when it was blamed for too dry/too wet/too much record hot/too much record cold/too many summer storms/too many winter storms. Basically anything except for San Diego weather.