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Tellez sucks, doesn’t belong on the team.

"But Cole wasn't on the 2017 Astros team, bro!" We're going to see a lot more cognitive dissonance in the next few years when many of the Astros players inevitably change teams in Free Agency/trades.

Figured this deserved its own thread... MLB is set to test robo umps during spring training. https://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/mlb/2020/02/21/mlb-to-test-robot-umpires-in-spring-training/4830417002/ They're now using the “Hawk-Eye” system, which is supposed to be better than Trackman, obviously trying to avoid what happened in the AFL last year. This might be the one thing Manfred got right this offseason (despite some pushback from the umpires union).

40 years ago tomorrow...

Marshawn Lynch has 'fun, pretty substantial role' in HBO's 'Westworld.'

Si tu supieras cuanto te adoro!

Are they cute?

triggered

After 8 years of frustration (first college football, then all the injuries), it would be very satisfying to see him put something together. And so I hope he does well in the end.

Don't forget about Derek Fisher.

Overall health of the MLB > Strength of the Jays as a team

"If the 2019 postseason ball is representative of on-field production going forward, there is no guarantee that the 2020 ball will be any more predictable. And we may discover next season that 'random is the new normal,'" writes Dr. Meredith Wills, one of the data scientists who investigated the ball's composition, per The Athletic https://theathletic.com/1356835/2019/11/13/the-search-for-answers-about-the-2019-postseason-baseball/

It definitely has tainted the game. I read an interesting piece in The Ringer last month on this: "The more we learn about the ball's uncertainty ... the more we have to confront the fact that so many of the stories we've grown up with and cheered for and cherished are more unreliable than we want to believe." Not just melodramatic twaddle: On some level, of course, baseball fans know that context drives performance, results, and records. In 1961, for instance—the very same year that literary critic Wayne C. Booth coined the term “unreliable narrator” in The Rhetoric of Fiction—Roger Maris benefitted from expansion (he homered 13 times against the two new American League clubs) and an increased schedule length (the AL added eight games to reach 162) to set the new single-season home run record. This season, Pete Alonso set a rookie record with 53 home runs, which might merit some sort of ball-related asterisk—except he broke the previous mark of 52 set by Aaron Judge in the juiced ball season of 2017, which itself broke the previous mark of 49 set by Mark McGwire in the “rabbit ball” season of 1987. As these examples indicate, the ball has driven extreme outcomes before, dating all the way back to the 1910 season, if not earlier. Sometimes the changes were unintentional, the result of either mistakes or outside forces; home runs jumped in 1977, for instance, when the league switched from Spalding to Rawlings as the ball manufacturer. In 1918, home run totals dropped in the second half because the United States’ entrance to World War I precipitated a shortage of baseball-building materials. “The balls, now wound with inferior yarn and covered with lower quality horsehide, were even deader than before,” writes Glenn Stout in The Selling of the Babe. The baseball has been lying to us.

Reading this actually made me kind of miss them... Let's start the season already!

Miserable is the man who never smiled much after making those flashy plays and came across in postgame as very solemn and cross. So speak for yourself, Bob. Pillar was a fan favourite because Canadians like scrappy, come-out-of-nowhere underdogs who don't smile and wind up over-performing (like Mr. Dour himself, Jose Bautista) because Canadians are low-spirited socialists who are suspicious of fun.

Forget the Astros. What really threatens public trust in the sport is the baseball itself. The "juiced baseball" was a huge storyline last season, but the inconsistency of MLB's baseballs has been a thing for years. 2019: In April, Rob Arthur over at BP found that the ball had lower drag due to lower seam height, and that was later corroborated by MLB. Discussion heated up at the All-Star Game, when Justin Verlander said MLB had intentionally "juiced" the ball, citing its purchase of Rawlings in 2018, and it came back as a storyline in the postseason when balls appeared to have been "de-juiced." 2018: A committee concluded in an 84-page report that increased home run rates were due to "changes in the aerodynamic properties of the baseball itself, specifically to those properties affecting the drag"—but they couldn't determine why those changes had occurred. 2014: Following the lowest-scoring non-strike year since 1976, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred reportedly approached the players union about wrapping the ball tighter to make it fly farther. 2000: A study funded by MLB and Rawlings found that "two baseballs could meet MLB specifications for construction but one ball could be theoretically hit 49.1 feet further." The game's most essential piece of equipment—one that affects every pitch, every player, every team, every championship—is either being intentionally modified to produce certain results or unintentionally altered from batch to batch. Either MLB is lying, or the league just can't manufacture a consistent baseball. The latter might be worse, as it makes you wonder whether the baseball has ever been consistent. MLB senior VP Morgan Sword spoke to this in December, saying that the baseball world needs to "accept the fact that the baseball is going to vary" and that "the baseball has varied in its performance probably for the entire history of our sport." Baseball has a transparency problem, right down to its literal core, but will this change the way you guys see the game?

"If you don't know the facts, then you got to shut the f*** up!"

Another factor is also that a large part of baseball's appeal is how often it references its past, which is why MLB tries to maintain some continuity by not changing too many rules, so that comparisons can go on forever between players over 100-year time spans. I'm not saying I agree, but that's part of why they're so adverse. The NBA doesn't have that baggage/cachet (however you wish to see it). It is such a young league, and so many of their fans are young themselves, that it has no reason to make 80s or 90s basketball historically relevant to today's game.

God, some of you guys are so insecure—all this defensive oversharing—and so triggered by this story that it's actually been hard to read through this thread (the last few pages, especially), and I almost regret taking part in it. I say we go back to talking baseball, leave this s*** alone.

Jim is like the guy you went to school with that moved on and became a lawyer but still comments on your facebook on your birthday and sometimes has funny political posts but also has three kids and drives a minivan but wants to get a motorcycle but his wife wont let him and plays golf on the weekends and listens to Led Zeppelin and enjoys some sports but not all sports because he stays active but knows he should watch his diet more carefully then gets a divorce and becomes way more left-wing progressive later in life and becomes kind of racist but not really racist just likes to bring up white privilege amongst white people but it's still cool because he has a poor white friend and lives in the pacific northwest and smokes weed from time to time but he also is a Bernie supporter and loves on SJWs when he comments on reddit but he is also just more of a standard liberal and tried surfing that one time he went to Hawaii but didn’t like it much was just there more for the hiking and piña coladas but still enjoys grilling in the summertime when he's home and decided that he is going to get that motorcycle after all because hey, you only live once even though they are dangerous but he still wants his kids to be safe so he decides to buy a shotgun and keeps it unloaded in his basement but doesn’t really know how to use it and when he watches the Super Bowl he always gets office boxes but then loses every year and gets really angry about it and then decides to actually start watching his diet then gets in really good shape when he is 60 years old but he is still too old and cant get a girlfriend so he goes harder at the gym and starts taking steroids but tears a labrum in his shoulder when he’s benching too much weight one day so ends up gaining 50 pounds while in recovery and then gets drunk one day and takes out that motorcycle and skids off of a windy road in western BC and dies and it's really sad but he lived a full life anyway so you walk away from the funeral feeling okay about his death. You know, that kind of guy.

You completely ignored my point and just repeated what you had had said over the last five posts in this thread.