Love it. There's only so many teams who can be the Earl Weaver "pitching, defense, and the three-run homer" Orioles.
Wut? There’s no nuance in this statement. Javier didn’t stay fat because the team and him agreed it was going to hurt any of those metrics. That’d be insane.
I was talking about losing weight in the off-season versus in season. The reason players never try to lose weight during the season is because you lose strength when you cut weight. Anyone who has ever bulked and shredded can tell you that..
Position players tend to lose significant amounts of body weight in season. Pitchers less. It’s a grind. But he’s not getting shredded for a bodybuilding competition he’s trying to go from overweight to slightly less overweight. Javier has plenty of stored energy to lose. He wasn’t going to suffer in the slightest. But to be fair to Javier since I don’t know his nutrition, training regimen, or health status, I’m not going to say he should have lost weight in season but he absolutely could have lost weight without any kind of negative impact to any of the metrics you listed. In fact, the most likely outcome is he would have seen positive improvement in all three of those areas.
It's nice to see a fresh perspective from Joe on more can be done more with this team than what Dusty did.
Players may lose weight but it's not intentional. Losing weight generally reduces strength in the short term especially in professional athletes who are near the peak of performance. That is why drastic changes are normally done in the offseason.
One of the best rites of spring. Not only is everyone in the best shape of their life but we are going to play aggressive baseball! I’m here for it though!
This isn’t a drastic change, it’s 10lbs from a guy that is already overweight. That could be as simple as removing one low hanging fruit from his diet. You can absolutely lose fat with no reduction in strength or performance. That is not a legitimate reason why he wouldn’t have lost weight in season.
You just made me flash back to playing Earl Weaver Baseball on my buddy's IBM. Man those were the days... We had a 6 man league, each team drafted 2 teams a NL roster & AL roster. We designed our own parks and played out a 162 game schedule. Most guys let the PC play out most of the games. I remember drafting Lance McCullers dad. He had a great ERA that season, I think it was 0.76 or something ridiculous like that. Ok sorry for the flash back derail.
Which probably means Altuve getting thrown out on the bases even more (love the guy, but man that's a bugaboo of his). I'll take smart base running over aggressive base running any day of the week (Bagwell comes to mind as a perfect example).
Jim Palmer, Mike Cuellar, Dave McNally...etc... Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson, Boog Powell, Paul Blair...etc....
The best kind of baseball has pitchers who can move the runners with no DH in either league. Back when baseball was a contact sport.
Unless a key guy sustains a season ending injury, I try not to let ST affect my expectations at all. Every spring is the same. Spring Training doesn't mean anything. I am told that every year. It doesn't, does it?
