MLB 2018

[Ginger Yellow]

Or maybe not.

[ursus arctos]

So, the weekend was not without it’s redeeming qualities after all

https://twitter.com/castrovince/status/1010995374641897472?s=21

[Hot Pepsi]

At this pace, the Reds could lose fewer than 100 games.

[ursus arctos]

That was a fun inning.

Excellent way to end the road trip.

[San Bernardhinault]

About to head out to my first game of the season. I really don't do this enough... Got the "expensive" seats in the section behind the padres dugout (although right at the back of the bottom tier, so no fly balls coming my way).

[San Bernardhinault]

Padres are always poor when I'm there in person. They were better than usual in yesterday's 6-3 defeat, hitting pretty well, getting players on second and third bases, but promptly fucking up.

Good crowd. Two dogs - a rottweiler and a dalmatian. An absolute ton of families and kids, including at least 2 who can't have been over 3 months.

7pm game means it's also the dinner date. Beer might be shocking at $13 a pint, but if I'm going to spend that on a beer it's good that I can get a choice of about 20 local craft beers on draft (as well as the usual ABI products). The missus had a monstrously big and pretty strong Mai Tai from the local Cutwater spirits that lasted her 8 innings. Hot dogs are always too small at the ballpark, but there's excellent neapolitan pizza, and soft-serve served in a comedy plastic baseball helmet. There's also decent Mexican food, BBQ, etc. Having crowds in the ground for basically 1/3 of the days of the year means that the concession business is worthwhile and you can get decent quality.

Game played out at a nice pace - not too much time fucking around with pitching changes during innings, meant that it was done in almost bang on three hours. And the Padres were wearing their brown kit, which was nice.

I love the atmosphere at baseball games. The result really doesn't matter that much (particularly if you're the Padres with no hope of getting in the play-offs). It's just great being there.

[Hot Pepsi]

Minor league report:

Spikes are an appalling 4-10 and just broke a 7 game skid. They’ve had so many good years that they’re bound to have a dud.

This is why my interest in minor league baseball is fading. The local teams are not controlled locally for the sake of providing a good team for the locals to watch. They serve the big league team and the minor league players are underpaid so that aging major leaguers can be overpaid.

And at the park, I seem to be one of only about 100 people really interested in the game. It’s all about the fireworks and the junk food.

I kinda wish we had an independent league team instead, but those teams’ existence is always perilous. And the in game atmosphere is often cheesy.

Baseball is the one American sport that would do well with a European football setup where the clubs are independent and sell and loan their players rather than farm teams. Maybe there’d be ten teams in New York and ten in LA, but that’s ok.

[ursus arctos]

This is true, and why I think of the interwar Pacific Coast League as the epitome of baseball in what were then medium-sized cities.

[Hot Pepsi]

This is true, and why I think of the interwar Pacific Coast League as the epitome of baseball in what were then medium-sized cities.

Yeah. There was some of that in the Midwest too. Minneapolis Miller’s vs St Paul Saints used to be a really big deal.

[ursus arctos]

Double headers with one game in each city on every major holiday.

I would have loved to go to games in that era.

[Hot Pepsi]

Double headers with one game in each city on every major holiday.

I would have loved to go to games in that era.

Yeah, that would be cool.

I know the Mets and Yankees did that during one of the first interleague series to much fanfare, but I don’t know if they’re still doing it or if that’s been replicated in Chicago or any of the other places where it might be possible. I haven’t paid close attention.

I think a wide open system would work better in baseball than it does in European football because there’s no champions league or massive overseas TV revenue to make the rich richer. Maybe the Yankees would still be a massive brand, but their current largess is largely based on an exclusive right to share a territory of 20+ million people with only one other major club. If they had to compete for attention with a bunch of other teams, they’d not be so rich. And I think fans in Long Island would love to have their own team, as would Brooklyn (of course), North Jersey, Connecticut, etc.

And if there comes a day when everything can be cheaply broadcast in HD over the internet with decent production by the clubs themselves, the tyranny of cable TV and the networks will be usurped. As it is, some minor league baseball can be streamed, but the production value, even for AAA, is usually shit. But if the system were designed to encourage fans to care more about local teams, there’d be more of a audience for it and so more advertising money to pay for the broadcast. Even the USL has better streaming broadcasts.

[ursus arctos]

Cubs and Twins throwing haymakers this weekend in Chicago.

10-6 yesterday. Already 9-7 today after five innings.

[Ginger Yellow]

That was quite an inning for the Cubs.

[ursus arctos]

First to 20 wins

[ursus arctos]

OH-rioles

What a dumpster fire they’ve become this season.

[ursus arctos]

https://twitter.com/cespedesbbq/status/1013217965284708352?s=21

[Levin]

Did you all see what the Mariners were wearing yesterday?

[ursus arctos]

Back to the future, man

It was the 20th anniversary of the first Turn Ahead the Clock game

[Hot Pepsi]

Happy Bobby Bonilla Day!

http://www.espn.com/blog/new-york/me...payday-is-here

[ursus arctos]

Man, the Twins pitching is bad.

Cubs have scored 32 runs so far this weekend and we are only in the third inning of the third game.

[ursus arctos]

I am compelled to report that the Orioles have won the first game they played in July against an AL team.

The fight back starts now.

Cubs into double digits for the third straight game.

[Ginger Yellow]

I mean, even Lester hit a home run.

[Greenlander]

Minor league report:

Spikes are an appalling 4-10 and just broke a 7 game skid. They’ve had so many good years that they’re bound to have a dud.

This is why my interest in minor league baseball is fading. The local teams are not controlled locally for the sake of providing a good team for the locals to watch. They serve the big league team and the minor league players are underpaid so that aging major leaguers can be overpaid.

And at the park, I seem to be one of only about 100 people really interested in the game. It’s all about the fireworks and the junk food.

I kinda wish we had an independent league team instead, but those teams’ existence is always perilous. And the in game atmosphere is often cheesy.

Baseball is the one American sport that would do well with a European football setup where the clubs are independent and sell and loan their players rather than farm teams. Maybe there’d be ten teams in New York and ten in LA, but that’s ok.

I read an interesting article recently by a fan of Triple A Charlotte bemoaning that very issue. If I can find again I'll put it here but the gist was why should the good folk of Charlotte have any affinity with the Knights when the White Sox can swoop in at any point and nab a player for the big league.

Mind you comparing it with the English football leagues is not so far off either. The only real difference is that individual MiLB teams don't have a handful of players that remain season in and season out. Last season Daytona had an almost entirely different team after the all-star break and results showed it as they barely won again. Maybe a rule that only so many players can be shifted up or down and within certain windows would help foster some sort of local allegiance.

I didn't quite realise how bad the money issue is for minor leaguers and how so-called professional sportsmen live off peanut butter jelly sandwiches. The nuber of articles and the lack of empathy for those young kids is quite startling. Even worse the concensus being that's how it should be and all part of paying your dues. I can sense the logic from the top being that so many of them won't make it but are needed to act as team mates/ fodder for those that do why pay them a living wage, They'll always be another one along next year. Maybe the parallels with the lower league football isn't so far fetched at all.

How many minor league clubs would be able to run at all if they were repsonsible for the wage bill though.

The issue that equal parts infuriates and I've grown to love about baseball is the length of the season and the sheer number of games though. Apart from couple of teams at either end everyone else seems to graviate around .500. SB sort of sums it up when he says that even in the majors the result doesn;t always matter. It sometimes seems like today's not important we can make it right tomorrow or even next week or we can bomb and get the first draft picks. On the other side though every day is a fresh start, both teams start afresh and a heavy thrashing one day doesn't mean it'll happen the next. I kinda like that.

[Janik]

The nuber of articles and the lack of empathy for those young kids is quite startling. Even worse the concensus being that's how it should be and all part of paying your dues. I can sense the logic from the top being that so many of them won't make it but are needed to act as team mates/ fodder for those that do why pay them a living wage, They'll always be another one along next year. Maybe the parallels with the lower league football isn't so far fetched at all.

Or parallels with US college sport? I was under the impression that fewer baseball players bother with college, in part because the extensive minor league system offers an alternative route to keep playing and (hopefully) develop towards the big league. That might be a driver why people are less concerned about such players being paid minimally, i.e. they are being paid at all when their Football equivalents are not.

[Hot Pepsi]

“How many minor league clubs would be able to run at all if they were repsonsible for the wage bill though.“

They would make it up by selling players to higher leagues. It would put a lot more pressure on them to develop players.

There’d have to be an academy system, possibly (hopefully) scrapping the current absurd pay-for-play/travel team youth system.

The bigger problem would be the territorial imbalance. A disproportionate number of baseball players come from the south and California, but a lot of the fans and their money are in the north. So there’d have to be a way to convince a lot of southerners’ kids that their best bet is to sign with teams in the north. If low-rung teams were solely reliant on their local talent, the teams up north wouldn’t have much while there’d be lots of talented kids riding the pine for teams in Florida. That’s how college baseball already is, largely.

The downside to this “European” system vs our school and university-based development system is that, whatever it’s hypocrisies and corruptions, our system does actually create some incentives for the players, their families, and coaches to care about their non-sports education. As far as I can tell, kids who sign with football academies at 12 or 13, or play major junior hockey in Canada, are not really incentivized or encouraged to care about school at all. That may be ok for the small percentage who make it to the big time, but not for the overwhelming majority who don’t. I’m sure all of their parents were told their kid has a shot at fame and fortune, when whoever told them that knew that, for the most part, their role is just to make up the numbers so the tiny number of real prospects have somebody to beat.


The thing you mention about teams completely turning over during the season is why some minor leagues have separate first-half and second-half pennant races. The winners of both make the playoffs.

Minor league fans can’t really get attached to players year to year,* but because there are a lot of games, they can often at least get to know the team across a single season. While it does happen, there isn’t usually complete (or, in some cases, even much) turnover in a given year. And AAA players will often be back year after year, at least for a few years.

That’s also why both MiLB and MLB teams like for the minor league affiliates to be near the big league city. The Red Sox and Braves have had the most success with that. So most of the fans of their minor league affiliates are fans of the big league team and will follow the players through the system. But geography and economic reasons prevent that from always working out and a lot of minor league teams are not anywhere near the big league team.

So as a result of all of that, not many minor league fans really pay attention to the players. In fact our local newspaper - which appears to be going down the toilet for lots of reasons - isn’t covering our minor league team this year. They used to do game reports and some human interest pieces about players and staff but I haven’t see word about the Spikes on the website this season.

Apparently they find they got more website hits from worthless articles about college football recruiting and reprinting click-bait or completely irrelevant out-of-market news from other papers owned by McLatchy.

Perhaps that says more about the plight of local news than baseball. But I think it might show that I was one of the only people reading those articles.


* Minor league hockey and minor league soccer in the US are less like this. There’s a lot less up upward mobility (though some) of players in those sports and so their rosters don’t turnover as much. The big league teams don’t have as much control over their affiliates. Minor league hockey players are also unionized and, at least at the AHL level, offer a decent enough wage that players can have a nice career playing at that level, perhaps supplemented by offseason coaching and a few weeks in the NHL now and again. And when they’re done, if they’ve played a few years for the same team, they’ll have some local contacts and even a bit of minor celebrity that will help them get a regular job.