If baseball does adopt a balanced schedule, I’d actually be in favor of eliminating divisions altogether and just relying on seeding for each league.
MLB Pseudo-Season 2020: Roger, Dodgers
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If baseball does adopt a balanced schedule, I’d actually be in favor of eliminating divisions altogether and just relying on seeding for each league.
Maybe in the past but these days you got the Cubs trying to trade Bryant for no reason and the Red Sox shipping off Betts and Price and the Indians last year dismantled for no good reason I can see. Seems like even teams that are in place to go for it all are still not willing to go for it all. It's not just the really bad teams refusing to spend anymore because they want to rebuild.
Jason
What about pennant drives? That would go away without divisions and also more teams in the playoffs.
Jason
From the sound of it, maybe the Yankees are not so innocent as we thought. Beltran went to Houston from New York and told the Astros their sign stealing techniques were "behind the times." What were the Yankees doing?
Where exactly was management in all of this? Seems like they are trying to find a single scapegoat for what went on.
Well, Jeff Luhnow and AJ Hinch are already sitting out a yearlong ban...
Coming out of that ban, they are going to want to try to shift the blame away from themselves as they look for employment.
Been thinking about the sign stealing broohaha and what an advantage for a hitter if he knows what pitch is coming. And I had an epiphany. The advantage is in inverse correlation to the quality of the pitcher. Mariano Rivera only threw one pitch - his cut fastball, so every hitter knew exactly what he was going to get on every pitch and they still couldn't hit him. Makes all the pitchers who have bitched about or sued the Astros look a little crybaby-ish, don't it.
I agree it's pretty ridiculous that some pitchers are whining about it...from exactly one game against the Astros. No matter your feelings about sign stealing, that's such a small sample size that can easily (and probably is) chalked as a bad pitching day regardless.
Sure, but I just meant about pitchers who faced them once.
Except now you know you weren't having a bad pitching day. If I were in that position I'd be rightfully pissed, whether I'd pitched against the Astros once or ten times during the 2017 season.
It would be interesting, also, to see the home/away splits for the whole team. This all is still just the tip of the iceberg. Rookie Betts had his MVP season in 2018, the year the Red Sox are alleged to have been doing the same stuff and no one in the MLB media has said anything about that. The sad thing about this is the same thing that was wrong with the steroid era - cheating works! I guarantee you that players are still juicing and other teams are stealing signs - they're just better at it than the folks who've been caught.In fairness, though, look at Marwin Gonzalez's numbers:
See an outlier?
Can't wait until rumors start coming out that MLB knows all about the sign stealing the Astros and most other teams are doing and is ok with it as games are being fixed.
Should be spectacular.
GO ASTROS!!
The number of playoff teams wouldn’t have to change.
On top of all the other cheating bullshit, Astros pitcher Francis Marte has been suspended 162 games for PEDs. You'd think that major-leaguers would have the wherewithal to mask their steroid use. Marte is definitely NOT the only player using PEDs but he's the only one caught three times, I think.
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