..Randy Arozaena is the second coming of Rickey Henderson. That is all.
..The Jays have lost the first two of this series maybe disappointing, because I thought we were similar level teams, but there are positives
..Jays are better, clearly, relative to performance last year against the Rays. Painful two losses but Jays wouldn't be consistently playing this close to them per last year.
..The Rays are a really good team. They are laters of depth & interchangeable players; boy does it work.
Those were two tough games to watch. And it's only May! Did anyone watch the Tampa broadcast? They were convinced that something fishy was going on with the way the Jays hitters were handling Glasnow. They worked themselves up into a tizzy about how unhittable pitches were being fouled off or left alone....they didn't come and say we were cheating, but it was fairly implied.
Funny that googling “Montoyo fucking bunt fuck” (ahem) last night came up w a certain Athletic article from 2 years ago on the same subject. Trying the bunt? Fiiiine. (Especially w Santiago pulling it back to swing at first - I was so excited that the bunting “experiment” was over) then W 2 strikes? Yeah sorry there is no excuse that makes sense.
I had no problem with the bullpen management on Thursday. Attrition will force you to do some undesirable things.
My biggest problem with Friday is this some bad choice has been made over and over, and apparently nobody above Montoyo has said "never do that again".
My guess is that there are aspects of the job that are the manager's to do as he sees fit, which the front office won't interfere with. Like, they may put limits on how many pitches guys can throw and give data to use for shifts and stuff, but they're not fully micromanaging every aspect. I don't know if it's a respect thing or what. They obviously want to keep their relationship with him a good one, so I can understand some give and take. But I doubt they have data they're feeding to him that tells him this is good! So... yeah. It's odd.
Though also worth noting: clearly this is based a lot on which situations happen to come up, so maybe meaningless without way more data, but BR has Charlie at 2 sac bunt attempts for the year so far. TLR has 9, Francona, Snitker, Matheny all have 7. So maybe they have done something? Last year he did it 8 times in 60 games, and by rate did it the third most. This year he's tied for 15th.
Observations & comments after Saturday game:
..Randy Arozaena is the second coming of Rickey Henderson. That is all.
..The Jays have lost the first two of this series maybe disappointing, because I thought we were similar level teams, but there are positives
..Jays are better, clearly, relative to performance last year against the Rays. Painful two losses but Jays wouldn't be consistently playing this close to them per last year.
..The Rays are a really good team. They are laters of depth & interchangeable players; boy does it work.
Those were two tough games to watch. And it's only May! Did anyone watch the Tampa broadcast? They were convinced that something fishy was going on with the way the Jays hitters were handling Glasnow. They worked themselves up into a tizzy about how unhittable pitches were being fouled off or left alone....they didn't come and say we were cheating, but it was fairly implied.
Funny that googling “Montoyo fucking bunt fuck” (ahem) last night came up w a certain Athletic article from 2 years ago on the same subject. Trying the bunt? Fiiiine. (Especially w Santiago pulling it back to swing at first - I was so excited that the bunting “experiment” was over) then W 2 strikes? Yeah sorry there is no excuse that makes sense.
I called it stupid like 12 times in the piece you're commenting on.
Anyway, it's dumb but it's also fine.
Yyyyesss ... I was half-assedly complementing and remarking that you wrote on the subject a couple years ago.
Ohhhh. Well than my apologies!
NP - tone lost in the pixels! - I’m a happy subscriber, big fan, love the podcast, and look fwd to more
I had no problem with the bullpen management on Thursday. Attrition will force you to do some undesirable things.
My biggest problem with Friday is this some bad choice has been made over and over, and apparently nobody above Montoyo has said "never do that again".
My guess is that there are aspects of the job that are the manager's to do as he sees fit, which the front office won't interfere with. Like, they may put limits on how many pitches guys can throw and give data to use for shifts and stuff, but they're not fully micromanaging every aspect. I don't know if it's a respect thing or what. They obviously want to keep their relationship with him a good one, so I can understand some give and take. But I doubt they have data they're feeding to him that tells him this is good! So... yeah. It's odd.
Though also worth noting: clearly this is based a lot on which situations happen to come up, so maybe meaningless without way more data, but BR has Charlie at 2 sac bunt attempts for the year so far. TLR has 9, Francona, Snitker, Matheny all have 7. So maybe they have done something? Last year he did it 8 times in 60 games, and by rate did it the third most. This year he's tied for 15th.
All fair. And hopefully that trend continues, but, there were a lot of swear words directed at my TV during the 11th inning.
Oh same.