Game 106 - Yanks (Stroman) vs Boston (Crawford)

They kept calling it a "hidden ball" play...which it wasn't.

Gleyber's 2 RBI double was HUGE. Big diff going into the bottom of the 10th up 3 rather than 1...especially with the ghost runner.

Yep, the Red Sox player that was on 3B wasn't the only one that was caught napping. 

As you know it's a baseball broadcast, not the Johnny Carson Show. If they want to plug a movie that should be done before the game starts and not in the middle of a game. Those in game interviews are extremely annoying.

there you again with the semantics, shades of gray BS. “most likely” not a call. ok …

are you trying to prove how “smart” you are. makes you sound like one of those disgruntled, unknowledgeable fans that call into the michael kay show that la greca goes off on. for now, i’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. maybe just stick to the play-by-play and maybe skip the prognosticating.

and i’m sure judge, soto and the rest of his teammates weren’t thinking “oh shit grisham up. rally over, here comes a K on cutter away”. and yeah we all know what kind of hitter he is, but over his last 20 games, he’s hitting .254 w a .746 OPS and only a 16.6% K rate. i love snapshot fans (sarcasm).

oh and your excuse for getting it “wrong” was Jansen never made the “right” pitch. maybe you should have been behind the plate calling pitches instead of wong for surely then grisham would have swung over the cutter. and what does the ball not being caught have to do with it. doesn’t make your “most likely” more right.

1) I never claim "calls" unless I specifically say so, which I rarely do. That goes for when my guess is right and when my guess is wrong. In fact, people sometimes compliment me on a correct guess being a call, and I always tell them the same thing, that wasn't really a "call". I rarely make "calls".

2) Grisham's poor hitting performance isn't snapshot; it's who he is right now. in his last 1240 plate appearances since the start of 2022, he's .191/.300/.350/.650. If he were better than that, given his two Gold Gloves in 2020 and 2022, the Padres wouldn't have included him as spare part in the Soto trade. If he were even a moderately competent hitter, they'd have kept him to play center, as the very least as the left-hand part of a platoon. The Padres might have been contemplating moving Jackson Merrill off of short to center because they had an outstanding defensive shortstop in Ha-Seong Kim. But they had little actual evidence that Merrill could play center having played just 5 games in left and none in center in the minors, and traded Grisham well before they knew for sure he could. Still,  they were willing to let Grisham go in the deal because it is his last 20 games that is the "snapshot". He might hold those gains, but I wouldn't be that way. I hope he can while he's a Yankee.

3) When I said "swing over the cutter for a K" I was thinking swinging over the the cutter down and in under his hands, which he does quite a bit, not just with the cutter, but with the curve and slider. He's shortened up on his swing with two strikes recently to make better contact so it isn't as pronounced as when he was hitting .137 on June 29th. At that time, he had K'd 29 times in 89 PA. In the last 20 games that you mentioned, it's just 12 in 72, a much lower K rate than the last two seasons as well as earlier in the year. That has improved his ability to make contact, hence the tolerable batting average, but the cost has been in his HR power: 6 in 89 PA before, 1 in 72 PA in the last 20 games. In the final at bat last night, I envisioned Jansen getting to two strikes, which he did, trying to get him to chase low or away once or twice, and then coming with the cutter 3-4 inches off the plate inside with some drop to gete a swing over.

It didn't happen, and it couldn't happen, because Jansen and the Sox didn't risk a hanging cutter that he could drive to right with a 1-run lead. The strategy they chose, to pitch him down in the mddle and away and up, brought the Monster into play, and O'Neill's failure to play the wall correctly cost them the game-tying double on what should have been the final out of the game. Grisham did OK with the cutter on the corner a bit above the waist there, but shouldn't have been a hero because O'Neill should have had that ball. Here's a heat map on Grisham's slugging percentage per pitch against righties: Grisham slugging heatmap vs. righty pitchers. As you can see, the areas down and in are blue. VERY blue. The areas were the last pitch wound up, whether Jansen intended to throw it there or not, aren't really "hot", but they're a lot better than the very blue zones starting waist high and down, inner 3rd and further in. Did I know this, precisely, before he came to bat? No, of course not, but I had the memory of him swinging over breaking pitches in, or in and down, quite a few times from watching him all season. Could I write all that down in the play-by-play? Of course not. The PBP moves too quickly for that. I said "over a cutter" because that's what Jansen throws almost 90% of the time. That was my best guess about what he'd try to strike Grisham out with, and he never tried it.

4) As for calling the game instead of the actual catcher, I do that in an at bat or two every game, commenting with annoyance after the Yankee bench/catcher/pitcher (or with glee when the opposition bench/catcher/pitcher) makes a stupid pitchcall to a hitter's strength or in the wrong situation and gives up a big hit because of it. I've been watching baseball for over 55 years now, and I can usually tell on those relatively few occastions when the pitchcall is stupid as opposed to the pitch being poorly executed. But I usually also compliment them multiple times a game when I see a well thought out, effective sequence, especially one that results in a K or a ꓘ, especially of a tough hitter with men on base. The players, managers and coaches are the professional and deserve deference most the time, but they do get things wrong in just about every game. Not many, but a few. I'm not going to pretend I don't see it. 

5) As for disgruntled fans calling in the Kay, those are ALWAYS hindsight. My guess was before it happened. I gave a guess and it turned out wrong, but the pitch I was guessing never actually happened.

6) I'm going to insert opinions/guesses in my PBP call ocassionally. I don't do it most at bats, unless it's too expressive anger/shock at a bad call by an ump, or an ARGGG at a Yankee player for missing one or more hittable/crushable pitches. You can either read it or not. If you want a PBP call free of an occasional opinion, there's always Gameday.