One of the things I try to watch out for, in myself as a fan/commentator is to try remember there are things I don’t know.
I remember reading Bill James’ Baseball Abstracts, all those years ago, and I remember him saying ‘I’m just getting to the point where I’m finding out all that I don’t know about baseball.‘
One of the main ones that I don’t know and the manager knows, is the status of all his players. As George Springer said, everyone is dealing with something at this time of year. Teams tend not
to share what players are dealing with, because they don’t want to the other team to know that player can’t play at 100%. And it leaves us fans in the dark too.
Last night I read dozens of comments complaining about John taking Chris Bassitt out of the game after just an inning, but we did hear that Bassitt has been dealing with a blister and that he was going to be limited to shorter outings while doing so. The team didn’t talk about it a lot, but this one we heard about. But he comes out after an inning, and we read 75 comments calling for John’s firing.
Kirk comes out of the game, again people complain, but then, it is normal to pull him for a pinch runner. And, well, he’s a catcher, they are always dealing with aches and pains. John didn’t know the game would go for 18 innings, but it likely is good for Kirk to miss some of those innings.
The one I did complain about was Straw in for Barger. I didn’t understand it, but then I don’t know what Barger might be dealing with. I don’t know that there is anything. But then Barger’s played more baseball this year than ever before. It seemed weird, but there could have been something happening that I don’t know.
Anyway, I’m always leery of jumping on a manager, when he has more info than we do. We tend to jump on the manager, because we know we couldn’t hit a curve ball, or throw one, but we can make decisions. But then often we don’t have all the information that a manager has.
This does amaze me, Kirk’s throw to second, he had his best ‘pop up’ time and best ‘arm strength’. I don’t know how you do your ‘best’ anything this deep into a season.
I haven’t heard anything about how George Springer is doing. I get the feeling he was having pain in his side or abs before that last at-bat, and then the bad swing aggravated it. The trainer didn’t seem surprised that George was in pain, and there wasn’t much discussion before taking him out of the game.
I saw complaining that Lauer ‘only’ threw 68 pitches last night, but then he hasn’t thrown more than that many pitches since August. I thought Lauer was a warrior last night, going longer than I thought he could.
Another record last night:
