| ||||||||||||||||||||
| Alex Pavlovic |
| @PavlovicNBCS |
GOOD CHEAPER OPTIONS: CHARLIE MORTON, TIJUANA WALKER, JAMES PAXTON, JOSE QUINTANA, COREY KLUBER, CHRIS ARCHER
https://theathletic.com/2193379/2020/11/12/keith-law-universal-dh-rule-changes-mlb-2020/?source=user_shared_article
I’ve long supported the universal designated hitter because pitchers can’t hit and I am not here to watch players try to do things they can’t do; I go to the ballpark, and I turn on the TV, to watch the best players in the world do amazing things. Pitchers hit a collective .128/.159/.163 in 2019, with 431 sacrifice bunts — the most boring fucking thing that can happen in a baseball game — so they made outs in 86 perspective of their trips to the plate that year. Nobody comes home from a game and raves about the easy outs the pitchers made at the plate.
There are two common arguments against the universal DH, both of them, in my view, fallacious. One is the appeal-to-nature argument that somehow excusing pitchers from hitting means they’re only doing “half” of their jobs, which falsely assumes that the rules of baseball, where all players must both take turns at bat and play a position in the field, were written by God on the third tablet that Moses dropped when he came down from Mount Sinai. Baseball is a game, like football or Catan, with rules made up by humans, and there is nothing sacred about them. They can and should be changed over time, especially since the people playing baseball today are both larger and more skilled than those who played the game in the 1800s, before there was even an American League and it could require four strikes for a strikeout and nine balls for a walk. The average fastball velocity has been creeping up for decades, and we have more pitchers throwing 100+ than ever before.
Remember how pitchers in 2019 made outs in 86 percent of their plate appearances? That’s higher now than it was in the last year before the DH came to the American League, when the figure was 83 percent. Pitchers are getting worse at hitting, probably because pitchers are getting better at pitching. With strikeout rates of full-time hitters increasing, there’s no rational reason to think pitchers, who barely get to spend any time working on hitting as a skill and get far fewer chances to face live pitching in games, will ever get any better as hitters. Being a pitcher is, in and of itself, a full-time, time-consuming job, even on days when you’re not going to the mound, leaving relatively little time to work on improving as hitters — and that’s before we even consider the risk of injury that most teams don’t want to endure.
https://theathletic.com/2174651/2020/11/11/where-things-stands-with-the-warriors-a-week-out-from-a-transactional-tornado/?source=user_shared_article
The question to Myers: Are they more in search of an immediate component of a title team or is this more about 2022, 2023, finding the guy three years from now who will be the best player?
“The easy answer is both,” Myers said. “But, ideally, if there was a player that you knew would win you a championship (now), you could forego the future. But that’s hard to even say. It’s not so clear. There’s no Tim Duncan, where he’s a senior and he was great and you’re going to win now and win for the next 20 years.
“So you kind of have to guess on both ends of that question. We could argue who’s the win-now guy. We could think it’s a guy. You could. You could be wrong. Most of these guys aren’t seniors. I know there’s a narrative about who is (a win-now guy) and who isn’t.
“But I think you owe it to your organization to build toward the future if there’s not an obvious win-now guy. If the win-now guy helps you win four more regular-season games, what’s the point of that? When you’re talking win now, for us, you’re really talking about win now in the playoffs.
“We saw last year some guys who did that. I don’t know that the teams expected them to do that. We didn’t know Eric Paschall could do what he did. Now he hasn’t done it in the playoffs. But he was the 41st pick. It’s one of those deals where you have to hope to get both — not sacrifice the future in picking just for a guy who is better than another guy for a year.”
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
No comments:
Post a Comment