Several Dodgers Arrested After Friday Night s Game

Rios can’t hit if he is a statue in the batters box!

I just wanted to remind everyone that Verdugo is still really really good, he Is hitting .440/.462/.640 over his last 7 games and has already a .8 fwar in 20 games played and has a 146 wrc+ . He continues to play with so much energy and conviction you now have the Red Sox in 1st place, he Is in the top 10 in the AL in runs, hits, average, doubles, Rbis, and he leads MLB in OF assists this season with 3 and leads all of MLB in OF assist since 2020 with 10. He’s a great player and I really wish the Dodgers were able to get Mookie without giving up Alex, just imagine a Verdugo, Belly, Mookie OF……

Wow….that is a little drastic. But there are factors that need to be addressed. The injury bug has hit this team hard so far. And Knebel left with an arm issue last night. They miss Bellinger and Taylor. They hit a couple of balls really hard that the Padres made great plays on. But the hitting definitely needs to improve like yesterday. Rios looks worse up there than Beaty did, And of course, Kershaw picks last nights game to have his penchant for giving up solo homers return.

Dodgers need a colon cleansing!

Blow it out and eat some simple execution foods. Most of the team has earned some slack but I am ready for Matt Beatty to swap out Edwin Rios. He looks like a deer in the headlights. DJ and Edwin can go to the alternate site and work on contact with the ball.

Eager for the team to get healthy again. These are the times that test fans souls! We shall prevail.

I’m usually in my brainstorming mode and tend to spew out random thoughts when I first wake up and have my morning coffee, and Bluto’s hypothesis in yesterday’s post made my thoughts wander. So, not exactly topical to last nights game, but there it is.

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Ok, but you’d have to isolate the influence of a pitcher’s actions. Maybe there’s a way to measure the size of leads from first base before the jump and look at trends through the years, or perhaps compare times between a runner’s initial jump and reaching 2nd base.

Even better would be something measuring the quality of the initial jump by time/distance of jump before the pitch is thrown. You would expect this to have an inverse relationship to the effort by the pitcher to keep the runner off balance or guessing with throws to first, etc.

I really don’t know. Interesting hypothesis, but separating out the influence of the pitcher and measuring it specifically presents challenges. Right now it would just correlate with the other trends that depress SB attempts.

Here’s another hypothesis: The reduction in SB attempts reflects, in part, the changing demographics in baseball.

Jackie Robinson was a disruptor, not solely because he broke the color barrier, but because he brought an increased level of athleticism to baserunning.

From the late 50s on, there was an increased emphasis on baserunning and stolen bases. It peaked in the 80s with the likes of Tim Raines, Vince Coleman and, of course, Ricky Henderson before there was a general decline in base stealing and more emphasis on home runs as a driver of run creation.

I remember watching games when I was young in the 80s when the crowd would actually boo a pitcher because they would just continually throw over the 1rst. It was a separate battle of keeping the runner off balance much like pitching is the art of keeping the hitter off balance. A pitcher would try to plant doubt in the head of the runner to limit his lead or have him guess wrong and either dive back to the bag when the pitcher actually made his pitching move to the plate (a pitcher who is able to pull this off is great at holding runners on), or the runner would guess wrong and be caught in a rundown.

There has been a general decline in the number of black Americans who play as children and rise through the ranks to become professional players. Without engaging in a discussion on genetic determinism, athletic actions that put a premium on speed – track and field sprinting, the wide receiver position in football, a base stealing specialist in baseball – correlate with black Americans.

The general decline in black American participation in professional baseball involves complex social factors. Currently, professional rosters consist of white Americans from generally middle to upper middle class enclaves with the support mechanism and the facilities to cultivate a sport that requires intensive skill development from a young age. On the other hand, there is a predominant influence by the Dominican Republic, where baseball is considered a means to upward mobility and out of poverty, and there are facilities and academies set up by MLB teams to cultivate and identify talent.

If MLB had more players on rosters who have the talent to steal bases, you would expect more base stealing. Part of this general decline in base stealing, I would argue, is because there are fewer players with that particular athletic skill in baseball.

If Manfred wants to improve the game, both in terms of the action on the field, but also in terms of diversity and making it more representative of American demographics, he shouldn’t be worried about making the bags bigger. What he should do is set up baseball academies in predominantly black enclaves in the United States and develop young black American talent. This would be better for baseball and better for America. He rather virtue signal and pull the ASG out of Atlanta and actually hurt black Americans who live there.