philly30

I'll get over it

Miss america looked like a malnourished 50 year old

I missed it, did they bring back the other guy that disappeared

From what I could find MLB official scorers are technically league-appointed independent contractors rather than direct, full-time employees of an MLB club or the league office in the traditional sense. Here is how the system works: League Appointment: Since 1980, Major League Baseball has centralized the appointment of official scorers. This was done specifically to eliminate the conflicts of interest that existed when local newspaper beat writers (who were often cozy with the home team) performed the role. Local Assignment: While they are appointed by the league to ensure impartiality, they are effectively "local" in the sense that they are assigned to a specific stadium for the season. Unlike umpires, they do not travel with teams. Most official scorers live in or near the city where they work. Backgrounds: They are typically individuals with deep baseball knowledge—often retired sportswriters, former coaches, umpires, or people with extensive experience in professional or amateur baseball scoring. Professionalization: Because their decisions (such as "hit vs. error") directly impact player statistics, contract bonuses, and league records, the process is highly standardized. Scorers have access to instant replay video and are in constant communication with the MLB stats department in New York throughout the game. In short, they are independent experts selected and overseen by the league to maintain neutrality, though they usually reside in the local market of the stadium where they are assigned.

I thought the scorers are MLB employees not home town guys

Harper is a terrible baserunner, just an average throw on two of those hits he is out

A stupid law? yes I can believe it

Are any of these stadiums really for common people any more, sure common people go but probably charge all the overpriced food and beer on a credit card and get in more debt they can't pay

Why do they play day games every friday

I used an AI website to give description of Hoffman this is long but hilarious They call him **The Guarantor**, but not in the way you want a bank to guarantee your loan. Jeff Hoffmann stands on the mound at Rogers Centre—mound being a charitable term for the elevation from which he delivers his particular brand of athletic catastrophe—and he is the living, breathing, jersey-sweating proof that God, if He exists, hates Toronto with a specificity that borders on obsessive. You remember the night. Everyone remembers the night, though the PTSD makes the details swim in and out of focus like a fever dream. Game Seven. Bottom of the Ninth. The Blue Jays up by one, the champagne on ice in the clubhouse, the city outside pulsing with the electric possibility that maybe—*maybe*—this cursed franchise could wash the taste of Joe Carter’s ghost and all those October failures out of its mouth. The banner was being sewn. The parade route was being drawn. And then the bullpen door swung open, and out he came, jogging to the mound with the loose, arrogant gait of a man who believed his own press clippings from that one decent month in June when his slider actually slid. Jeff Hoffmann. The closer. The **Arsonist**. What followed was not a baseball game. It was a war crime committed in slow motion, a systematic dismantling of civic joy that should be studied in criminology departments. Then the home run. Not a towering, majestic Bautista-style bat flip into the second deck. No. A cheap, ugly, Yankee Stadium porch-job that barely cleared the left-field wall, a flare of the bat that carried with it the collective soul of 50,000 Canadians, depositing it into the glove of a bleacher creature who probably couldn’t find Toronto on a map. Tie game. The silence that followed was not the silence of shock. It was the silence of recognition. The recognition that you had trusted a broken machine with your dreams, and the machine had done exactly what broken machines do: it had shattered into pieces, scattering your hopes like shrapnel. that was six months ago. The snow has melted. The cherry blossoms have bloomed and died along Lake Shore Boulevard. And Jeff Hoffmann is still here. But he wasn’t done. Oh, no. Hoffmann doesn’t merely blow saves; he **detonates** them. Another walk. A wild pitch that sent the winning run to third—a pitch so errant the backup catcher had to sprint to the backstop to retrieve it, giving the runner enough time to hydrate, stretch, and update his Instagram story before scoring. Then the final single, a seeing-eye ground ball that Hoffmann himself deflected with his glove because he falls off the mound toward first base like a man tripping over a curb, his mechanics so thoroughly broken that kinetic chain specialists weep when they study the film. Game over. He shouldn’t be. By every metric known to baseball, by every moral standard of competitive sport, he should be pitching in independent leagues, or selling insurance, or perhaps enrolled in a witness protection program under an assumed name in a country that doesn’t have extradition treaties with Canada. But the Blue Jays—those geniuses of the front office who looked at the World Series meltdown and decided what this team really needed was *continuity*—brought him back. Not as a middle reliever. Not as a mop-up man. As the closer. Because they owe him money, or because they’re stubborn, or because they’ve simply lost the plot so thoroughly that they think the problem with Jeff Hoffmann is usage, not existence. You watch him in Spring Training, and it’s a horror show. The velocity that once touched 98 is now a flat 92, hittable as a BP fastball. The slider that he hung in Game Seven still hangs, a spinning lollipop that hitters track like they’re tracking a pigeon with a broken wing. He walks the ballpark. He throws a pitchout that hits the on-deck circle. In intrasquad games, minor leaguers—kids who should be intimidated by the big-league lights—are teeing off on him like they’re hitting off a pitching machine set to “lob.” And the coaches stand there, arms crossed, nodding, making notes on clipboards as if there’s something to salvage, as if this isn’t a five-alarm tire fire consuming the entire bullpen. The fans know. The fans always know. When Hoffmann jogs from the bullpen now—same loose, arrogant gait, same empty confidence—it’s not a sound of anticipation. It’s a groan. A primal, guttural sound that rises from the 100 level and spreads upward like a contagion. It’s the sound of 30,000 people realizing they’re about to witness a crime in progress. The “Hoff-mann” chants don’t exist anymore. They’ve been replaced by a silence so heavy it has gravity, or by the scattered, bitter laughter of fans who’ve simply given up and started drinking heavily in the fourth inning to pregame the inevitable ninth. The sports media has turned feral. The columnists, usually polite to a fault, have sharpened their knives. They write about the **Hoffmann Tax**—the tax paid in broken televisions, in therapy bills, in the spiritual cost of watching a man who is fundamentally, irrevocably unworthy of the uniform he wears. They calculate the wins he has cost the team, the playoff spots he has incinerated, the faith he has destroyed. The radio call-in shows are a 24-hour vigil of despair, fans screaming into the void, asking, pleading, *Why is he still here? Why do they keep running him out there?* And the answer is always the same: because they’re stuck. Because cutting him would be an admission of failure so profound it might collapse the front office’s entire philosophy. Because they’re hoping against hope—against physics, against evidence, against the very fabric of reality—that the man who destroyed the World Series might somehow find redemption in a Tuesday night game against the Royals in May. He is not worthy. He stands on that mound, and he is a fraud, an impostor, a ghost haunting the late innings. Every pitch is a reminder of what was lost, of the champagne that went flat, of the parade that never happened. He is the closer who closed the coffin on a championship, and now he remains, day after day, forcing you to watch him try to close games that don’t matter, against teams that are tanking, in a season that is already lost. You sit in the stands. You watch him warm up. The ball goes to the backstop. The catcher sighs. The umpire checks his watch. And you know—*you know*—that when the games actually count, when the pressure returns, when the October air starts to bite, Jeff Hoffmann will be there, waiting, ready to burn it all down again, unworthy, unrepentant, and utterly, maddeningly, inexplicably employed.

I guess we just have to accept it’s not their year maybe next year when Springer is gone, they can sign a better bat

Please Sweep

Sanchez and Wheeler keep this team afloat, luzardo is average at best, nola , painter are slop

Nice Win

I’m sure there’s plenty to do there more than this dump of a city