2018 MLB Postseason: The Hunt for <insert team color here> October

[Digby]

9 hours ago, Brass said:

EDIT: Wow! Despite his best efforts, Kimbrel didn't blow it. Meh series. Was hoping for more of a "showdown" between the two teams. At least that last inning made up for it.

 

We're on to Houston.

 

It's the lack of incorrigible turds on these two teams in this era! At least the pans to the crowd made up for it on that index.

 

No, in truth, despite the narrative that this Boston team folds like a deck of cards in the big games (including from me) (but clearly still absolutely true for David Price), I am deeply unimpressed by the postseason showing of the Yankees these last couple of seasons. Boone has no idea how to manage his pitchers. Stanton looked out of his depth. Judge is as advertised, but the rest of them seem a ways off from being true contenders no matter how many home runs they hit in the regular season.

 

9 hours ago, Bucfan56 said:

What an absolute snore fest of a series that was. I hope we’re not subjected to too many more of these Boston-New York wank fests. 

 

Boston is winning the World Series again this year and it’s not going to even be close. They outspent everyone else and it shows. Moneyball be damned to hell. 

 

I'll give you JD Martinez, but it's an odd time to bring up that argument when Boston got 1.2 innings out of their $30 million pitcher, and they were carried through the series by the likes of Christian Vazquez and Brock Holt and Andrew Benintendi.

 

8 hours ago, SabresRule7361 said:

Mookie Betts for once didn't choke in the playoffs. Good for him.

 

I mean, Betts was fine, particularly in the field, but underperformed at the plate. Do you even watch these games?

 

[Kramerica Industries]

4 hours ago, Digby said:

No, in truth, despite the narrative that this Boston team folds like a deck of cards in the big games (including from me) (but clearly still absolutely true for David Price), I am deeply unimpressed by the postseason showing of the Yankees these last couple of seasons. Boone has no idea how to manage his pitchers. Stanton looked out of his depth. Judge is as advertised, but the rest of them seem a ways off from being true contenders no matter how many home runs they hit in the regular season.
 

 

I said before the end of last season that, if the Yankees moved on from Girardi, I didn't have much of an opinion in either direction, just that if they were going to make the move, they better have a good replacement in mind.

 

That replacement, as it turned out, was someone with zero coaching experience. Not just zero managing experience, but zero coaching experience at all. And Cashman thought it was a good idea to hand the keys to the car to a complete novice when the Yankees (not some kind of small-market team last I checked) were transitioning into being an (expected) World Series contending team.

 

I mean, who didn't see massive blow-up potential here? People talk about him and Alex Cora, and obviously since both of them were hired in the same off-season and both teams have the same expectation, but there's a huge difference between the two. Cora was the bench coach for the Astros last year. Coaching experience - check. He was the bench coach of a team that went to the World Series, and he was working hand-in-hand with a manager who, despite working for an analytics-heavy franchise, had to trust his eyes and gut repeatedly with pitching decisions as the playoffs went on because the Astros bullpen kept getting worse and worse the longer their playoff run lasted. So Cora walked into the Red Sox gig knowing the rigors of postseason baseball from the coaching perspective, and knows when you have to disregard the numbers, disregard the long-term vision, and just do what you need to stop the bleeding immediately and deal with the fallout later

 

Boone never had that kind of background. He was a broadcaster. Good for being around the league, hearing ideas, and stuff like that. For in-game decision-making? Not so much. And, trust me, these last two games put it on a grand marquee, but Boone's pitcher management was questionable as hell this entire season. I feared that his decision making was going to hurt the Yankees at some point during the playoffs. Alas. It did. Twice.

[TrueYankee26]

2018 world series logo has pennants, I am worried the Sox will win the WS again.

[dont care]

14 hours ago, SabresRule7361 said:

Like ANOTHER Boston sports team contending for a championship is that much better an alternative than the Yankees.

 

be careful what you wish for

Doesn’t matter because you’ll find something to complain about either way.

[Kaz]

21 hours ago, SabresRule7361 said:

The playoffs just got a lot less interesting without the Yankees.

[Wings]

21 hours ago, SabresRule7361 said:

Save for the NL WC game, Sunday night in Atlanta, and the 9th-10th innings of game 1 at Milwaukee... the boringest LDS ever.

 

The playoffs just got a lot less interesting without the Yankees.

 

 

You must be president of the networks. 

[SFGiants58]

22 hours ago, SabresRule7361 said:

The playoffs just got a lot less interesting without the Yankees.

 

 

All that means is that we're spared an NLCS full of Judge-Altuve size comparisons. For that alone, I am thankful. 

 

Number 28 will have to wait, preferably until 2020. It'll be nice to have a Yankee-free decade in the World Series.

[Unocal]

58 minutes ago, SFGiants58 said:

 

 

All that means is that we're spared an NLCS full of Judge-Altuve size comparisons. For that alone, I am thankful. 

 

Number 28 will have to wait, preferably until 2020. It'll be nice to have a Yankee-free decade in the World Series.

 

I can't wait until we have a Boston-free decade in the World Series.

 

Like we REALLY need to see Fenway over and over and over again in October.

[See Red]

23 hours ago, SabresRule7361 said:

Mookie Betts for once didn't choke in the playoffs. Good for him.

 

Uh, he hit .313 in the 2017 ALDS compared to .188 this year.  Be smarter.

[SFGiants58]

3 minutes ago, SabresRule7361 said:

 

I can't wait until we have a Boston-free decade in the World Series.

 

Like we REALLY need to see Fenway over and over and over again in October.

 

Darling, the Red Sox last made the World Series in 2013 with a markedly different team. This decade, they’ve had:

 

-one decent year (2010)

-one spectacular collapse (2011)

-three last-place finishes (2012, 2014, and 2015)

-two first-round exits (2016 and 2017)

 

October has been relatively Red Sox-free over the past decade. Besides, their playoff appearance number is not close to the Yankees’ number of appearances over the past two decades.

 

I get that you don’t like Boston fans and media. Maybe you should do something about that.

[The_Admiral]

I think forgot that the 2013 Red Sox bookended their world championship with last-place finishes but in my defense those three years were the ones where the Cubs told everyone to go home nothing to see here, so I wasn't really in my usual baseball rhythm then.

[FiddySicks]

Yeah I’d take the Yankees over the Sox any day of the week. I’ll agree with the whole “be careful what you wish for” statement in that as much as I hated the Yankees and their fans, Boston fans (Actaully, Boston people in general) as a whole are WAY more obnoxious than New York fans. Them having the stage for the past decade and a half made that crystal clear. 

[Unocal]

How badly do you think FOX is going to cross their fingers for a Boston/LA WS?

[Unocal]

Am I the only not not excited about this upcoming ALCS?

[dont care]

1 hour ago, SabresRule7361 said:

Am I the only not not excited about this upcoming ALCS?

Bet you will still watch and complain.

[PrimalCookie]

1 hour ago, SabresRule7361 said:

Am I the only not not excited about this upcoming ALCS?

Why don’t you just not watch if you’re so unexcited? Or do you just like complaining about anything and everything?

[pmoehrin]

One thing I will say with regards to the Milwaukee Brewers in the vein of people talking about how important it is to build a team from the ground up through homegrown talent.

 

The Brewers are a small market team with hardly any homegrown talent on the roster, and they're in the NLCS.

 

Yelich, Cain, Wade Miley, Travis Shaw, Aguilar, Chacin, Knebel.

 

None of these players came up through the Brewers system. All of them except for Cain and Chacin were brought in through trades after they reached the Majors.

 

Whether or not the Brewers will be able to keep this team together remains to be seen, but the Brewers right now have a GM in his early 30's in David Stearns who just pulled a division title and what is up to now an NLCS berth seemingly out of thin air with a small market club. I could think of 29 other teams that would be interesting in talking to someone like that if they had a GM opening. It would not surprise me to see him as the GM of a team like the Yankees, or the Dodgers one day.

 

Contrast that with the Braves who got almost nothing in return for trading away guys like Kimbrel, Simmons, Upton, and Heyward. But they did such a great job with developing talent internally they were able to retool entirely and put themselves in as good if not a better situation then when they had all of those players on the roster.

 

What makes for a good team? Having a roster filled with good players. How you get them though is almost irrelevant. Its proven itself over and over again in pretty much every sport, and yet you still have people trying to come up with these six sigma type systems on how to run a team. And it just doesn't work, because no one method is superior to everything else when it comes to building a team.

[Quillz]

5 hours ago, SabresRule7361 said:

Am I the only not not excited about this upcoming ALCS?

I think it will be quite good, actually. And the fact it won't be a 7-game Boston-New York series means we've already won.

 

Of course I'm a Dodgers fan, but I'm realistic. I think whoever wins the ALCS is winning the World Series. I'd still pick Houston over Boston, though.

[FiddySicks]

13 hours ago, SabresRule7361 said:

How badly do you think FOX is going to cross their fingers for a Boston/LA WS?

 

Former Marlins GM David Samson said that he expects the league to not only just “cross their fingers”, but to “Do everything in their power” to make sure that happens. Now he may have been speaking in jest, but it sure didn’t seem like it. 

[Kaz]

4 hours ago, pmoehrin said:

Contrast that with the Braves who got almost nothing in return for trading away guys like Kimbrel, Simmons, Upton, and Heyward.

To be fair they did get Shelby Miller from the Heyward trade who was then flipped after an all-star season for Ender Inciarte and Dansby Swanson.  Sean Newcomb is a solid return for Simmons.

 

The Kimbrel/Upton trade didn't amount to much though.