Godot the spring, working on the player capsules, hoping for something truly significant to happen…
I’ll be headed back to Greenville, SC this week for an email marketing conference, which, TBH, I didn’t think would actually happen. I’m hoping that once I’m away from the worst part – the airports; no direct flight this time – and back with my fellow email geeks, it won’t feel so surreal.
But that’s where I was on March 11, 2020 so I’m pretty sure there will be some serious déjà vu all over again.
I only bring this up in hopes of reverse-jinxing things on this front since the odds of a “this can’t wait ’til you get back” work request are about even. Like, say, we need you to email everybody about this pandemic thing.
THREE NATS NAMED TO BA TOP 100
A year after getting shut out, the Nats have not one, not two, but three players in Baseball America’s 2022 Top 100 List. Keibert Ruiz comes in at #11, Cade Cavalli moved up to #27, and Brady House is #59. Odds are pretty good though that by the time the Boys in Durham decide on their pre-midseason edition (or is that the post-preseason?) Ruiz will have graduated from the list, and if the MASN/WaPo Commenters have their way, so will Cavalli.
TOP LISTS BESIDES BA AND MLB PIPELINE
We’re still waiting for an equivalent “third way” to re-emerge with the retirement of John Sickels from the prospect game. I’ll give a shoutout to ProspectsLive.com, which I’m still evaluating but have liked so far (read: paid to read more detailed stuff) in finding scouting reports beyond the Top 10’s currently available from BA. I’ve also liked 2080baseball.com, but it feels like the pandemic has slowed them down, if not shut them down (i.e. no reports newer than 2019).
Mr. Boss has the skinny on another service, Prospects1500.com, which, for my money is too fantasy-focused, but Todd has a good point that they’ve done a good job of aggregating video on “our guys.” And I’ll be honest, when I’m researching injuries, the fantasy guys often seem to have the intel.
“SUDDEN DEATH” EXTRA-INNINGS
“Purists,” a.k.a. those who like automatic outs and letting the lineup determine pitching changes, all seem to hate the man-on-2nd in extras rule, even if their claim that “it’ll just be a sacrifice followed by an intentional walk” has been demonstrably false in the minors. Because most of them tend to ignore the indys, they’re probably unaware that the Frontier League was using a HR derby to break ties in 2021. But I think it’s pretty safe to presume they hated that even more.
Given the smaller rosters and the threat of losing a pitcher or two at any given moment, this year the Frontier League is trying something new: a sudden-death tiebreaker. Put simply, it’s one inning with the free runner, which if it fails to produce a winner, then gives the home team a choice: bat with a runner on first and nobody out and try to score a run to win, or defer to the visitors with the same conditions and get three outs without the run scoring.
The upshot: No game lasts more than 10½ innings (8½ in a doubleheader), which has long been cited as a goal to reduce workload.
Of course, it may be heresy to suggest, but we could just start having ties in the regular season like they do in Japan. Would that really be so bad? Especially in the minors, where they claim that wins and losses are secondary to development.
Something to think about…