Great roadie. Excited for the first homestand and especially for AJ to come back. Expecting a long standing O.
If your Oakland, do you start to question things? I mean, 5 games into the season your already 4.5 back?
There's one or two others I really like, but I forget who they are during every offseason (Minnesota and?), but you are absolutely correct. No homer.
I'm sure an Angels twitter has a similar video, because Angel Hernandez does not discriminate with his sh!ttyness. @astrosrule
A's routinely suck in April/May and then go nuts the rest of the season. We saw it in 2018 and 2019 (not last year because there was no April or May). Better to be 4.5 back 5 games into the season than 30 or 60 or 150. Not sure the latest, but if the expanded playoffs nonsense comes back this year, it's all pretty irrelevant - they'll get in, and they'll get a 3 game series whether they win the division or not
Maybe he's trying to be computer-like - people are gonna have lots of complaints about the computer-strike zones too: The human strike zone is shorter and narrower than the strike zone hitters now see in the Atlantic League. Atlantic League pitchers are finding that they get high strike calls much more often now than they did with human umpires. In fact, they were getting so many that the league modified the zone, adjusting it down by a few inches because following the textbook definition of a strike was found to lead to nearly unhittable high strikes. "After the first five or six days, they lowered the strike zone. MLB came back in and changed it. They went below the breastbone and where that line is, the entire ball must be below it. So that part is fixed," High Point manager Jamie Keefe said. ... The new strike zone creates opportunities for pitchers. High Point righthander Michael Bowden's first pitch of a late July start was a high fastball, high enough that catcher Matt Jones had to bring his mitt above his eye level to catch it. It was taken for strike one. Seeing that called a strike, Bowden went back there for a called strike two. He elevated a little higher on his third pitch for a swinging strike. Six pitches later, Bowden had thrown an immaculate inning: nine pitches, nine strikes, three strikeouts. The new strike zone has been the downfall of other pitchers. Control artists who focus on widening the strike zone are much better off with a human calling balls and strikes. ... Adjusting to the unknown has been tougher. The strike zone is calibrated differently for each hitter in an attempt to draw a strike zone that reflects their batting stance when they are swinging (not their pre-pitch setup). So pitchers are throwing to a different zone from hitter to hitter, and those zones are not made available to the teams. There is no process for appeal. Players say some hitters seem to have been given much bigger (or smaller) strike zones than other similarly-sized batters.
Best part of the game was when an Angels fan yelled "Cheater" while Martin Maldonado was at bat. Maldonado was on the Angels in 2017.
I'll read your article in a bit, but as long as the zone is consistent (which robots would do) and players have a spring+ to adjust, I would think everyone will be ok with it. The high-ball, low-ball situation will be interesting though.
ya looking forward to the ump report. Watching the game was hilarious though, you never know what's getting called no matter where the pitch is. This is also the dude who sued MLB saying he was being not promoted cause of his race, wild stuff
