intentional wok

Agreed. Nearly every other team has less talent in their rotations. Latos' ceiling at this point appears to be SP7/8 for the Blue Jays and this means good MiLB depth. For other teams, Latos' upside could mean a a lot more utility, even a decent starter in MLB for a few starts. There's way more utility there for those teams and they didn't even bother.

Love the ginger Fresh Prince do and metro lumberjack beard combo.

Awfully short thread suggests to me plenty of BJMBers got some last night. Eh? EH???

Especially considering if it doesn't work out it's not like he just goes in the garbage. He can be a reliever again the very next day. Very little downside here. He's hardly a lock to be lights-out in the pen anyway. It's not like subtracting Osuna from the back end.

I'm reserving 2017's first regular season GDT. I already know how I'm going to start it.

Maybe they told him he'd be a reserve player this year and that they wouldn't be offering an extension. It makes more financial sense for him to put up actual numbers somewhere considering he had only one more season in Cincinnati anyway.

Also worth mentioning that Sean Rodriguez will be out 3-5 months for surgery following that bad car accident. Not sure how much this influenced the Phillips trade, though. edit: SOURCE

No, moron. They're a nut.

I prefer football to basketball, but NBA broadcasts are about a million times more watchable than NFL games. Football is a really interesting, fun game underneath all the waiting around and commercials, but wow is watching a game ever a fatty experience.

For a second I literally thought, yeah but you don't live in a city with an MLB team-- oh wait.

me: Baseball Football Basketball Hockey nothing Soccer

I don't think "being at the same disadvantage" is as much of an equalizer in baseball as in other sports. Baseball isn't a head-to-head game, so each team will need to execute separately and we know how much baseball is subject to chance to begin with. Maybe citing no more 100-game winners is a bit much (since you could still win 100 games), but I'd argue making extra innings that much more precarious really removes more player skill than necessary. These are supposed to be world class ball players and now they're working with rules that are less designed to make things fair than they are to be marketable. I totally agree with fatcow when he says if the rule isn't good enough for "important games" then it probably doesn't bring much to the game anyway. I think this proposal is much closer to a baseball shootout too. It's almost a gimme scoring opportunity. Equally pulling personnel off the ice doesn't make the game any less of a game of hockey, but removing a player from the baseball field means you're opening up an exploitable gap. But I actually think it's worse than a shootout since in hockey you can't score goals in bunches. Home runs will be particularly devastating since it'll just be gifting an extra run to teams. It's a lot harder to recover from a two-run deficit than a one-run deficit. If a team hits a lead off homer in the top of the inning, it'll be awarded an extra run because of the guy on second that they didn't earn. Suddenly the home team has to do a lot more than small ball their way into a tie, and the disadvantage starts looking more lopsided. Or what if the away team small balls the run in for a one-run lead and the home team hits a lead off home run the next inning, winning the game because of the free runner the MLB placed for them?

I'd support slashing some games off the schedule. I think it would be good for competition if guys got 10 or more off-days per season. Maybe 144-game seasons. That's three more days off per month for recovery. MLB can just work its schedule so that there are very few blank slate days.

I'm not saying this rule is convoluted. I'm saying that's where it will get. There will probably be more rules to follow this one to offset starting an inning with a RISP. Something like 'no bunting'. I mean we're looking at a scenario in which making a throwing error on the first batter of an inning will cost you the game. Pretty good chance we start seeing good teams get screwed over too. Doubt we see any 100-game winners when extra innings wins become even more of a coin flip. Meat of the order coming up? You're doomed. Can't even get out of the jam with a double play either. This might even increase IBBs too. Groundballers will be boned. Hope you have some guys in the pen with a 27/9 K-rate. Mound visits and pitcher changes probably go up too since strict matchups will probably be the best way to escape the immediate disadvantage.

I stand corrected. Still, I think the MLB proposed rules changes will just result in more convoluted layers of rules to make up for everything that it messes up.

What are you basing that on though? A more palatable product usually does increase a fanbase. Manfred probably has some decent research to back up his overall campaign of speeding up ball games. But while Manfred is probably right, I also can't get on board with something that changes so many fundamental rules about the game. We're going to be breaking what already works and then, eventually, we'll probably start seeing new proposals to offset some of the stuff some of the new rules broke (something like 'no bunting in extra innings' -- sort of like how blocked and returned PATs only count for two points rather than a TD because of how much easier it is). It may be good marketing but I think it damages baseball, which IMO is nearly a perfect game and the purest of all the four major NA sports + soccer.

I'll be taking suggestions from the peanut gallery too.

The Trop is a basement apartment. I wouldn't want to sit in foul territory in that drabness for a whole year.

If this happens, I'll change my username! Stakes!

I'd argue those are the same things and not worth removing the intentional walk no matter how you frame it.

Don't automate baseball plz. Even just one wild pitchout is worth the negligible amount of time they want to save. Baseball is exciting when routine stuff is taken for granted and goes way wrong.

Yes. Automating the game like this is terrible. The only automation baseball needs is in the officiating. Making players throw the ball around is part of the game because anything can happen while the ball is in mid-air. Here's an example: when Martin dinged the ball off Choo's bat in last year's ALDS. Not an intentional walk situation, but a good example of what can happen when routine stuff gets taken for granted.

Money. I think upping the pace-of-play and slicing off some downtime would likely attract more fans and money. But at a certain point how much of the game has to be compromised for other people to enjoy it? I don't think it's necessarily a case of 'either you like it or you don't' as you said above. For example, I think NFL football is really cool, but I just cannot f***ing stand the amount of downtime and commercials. I would absolutely watch more NFL games if I didn't feel compelled to spend more time browsing the internet on my phone during the games than actually having my eyes on the screen.

I'd say a whole hour is a big difference. That could never be achieved without slicing off two or three innings from a standard game though. But lots of recent proposals make for incremental savings of time and really aren't worth dissecting things from the game (limiting relievers, removing the pitch out, etc.). I completely agree that at some point it needs to be acknowledged that the game is just the game.