One of the things I try to watch out for, in myself as a fan\/commentator is to try remember there are things I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n
I remember reading Bill James\u2019 Baseball Abstracts, all those years ago, and I remember him saying \u2018I\u2019m just getting to the point where I\u2019m finding out all that I don\u2019t know about baseball.\u2018<\/p>\n
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One of the main ones that I don\u2019t know and the manager knows, is the status of all his players. As George Springer said, everyone is dealing with something at this time of year. Teams tend not to share what players are dealing with, because they don\u2019t want to the other team to know that player can\u2019t play at 100%. And it leaves us fans in the dark too.<\/p>\n
Last night I read dozens of comments complaining about John taking Chris Bassitt out of the game after just an inning, but we did hear that Bassitt has been dealing with a blister and that he was going to be limited to shorter outings while doing so. The team didn\u2019t talk about it a lot, but this one we heard about. But he comes out after an inning, and we read 75 comments calling for John\u2019s firing.<\/p>\n
Kirk comes out of the game, again people complain, but then, it is normal to pull him for a pinch runner. And, well, he\u2019s a catcher, they are always dealing with aches and pains. John didn\u2019t know the game would go for 18 innings, but it likely is good for Kirk to miss some of those innings.<\/p>\n
The one I did complain about was Straw in for Barger. I didn\u2019t understand it, but then I don\u2019t know what Barger might be dealing with. I don\u2019t know that there is anything. But then Barger\u2019s played more baseball this year than ever before. It seemed weird, but there could have been something happening that I don\u2019t know.<\/p>\n
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Anyway, I\u2019m always leery of jumping on a manager, when he has more info than we do. We tend to jump on the manager, because we know we couldn\u2019t hit a curve ball, or throw one, but we can make decisions. But then often we don\u2019t have all the information that a manager has.<\/p>\n
This does amaze me, Kirk\u2019s throw to second, he had his best \u2018pop up\u2019 time and best \u2018arm strength\u2019. I don\u2019t know how you do your \u2018best\u2019 anything this deep into a season.<\/p>\n
I haven\u2019t heard anything about how George Springer is doing. I get the feeling he was having pain in his side or abs before that last at-bat, and then the bad swing aggravated it. The trainer didn\u2019t seem surprised that George was in pain, and there wasn\u2019t much discussion before taking him out of the game.<\/p>\n
I saw complaining that Lauer \u2018only\u2019 threw 68 pitches last night, but then he hasn\u2019t thrown more than that many pitches since August. I thought Lauer was a warrior last night, going longer than I thought he could.<\/p>\n
Another record last night:<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"One of the things I try to watch out for, in myself as a fan\/commentator is to try…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":257207,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[13193,136292,376,370,139230,363,18123,99],"class_list":["post-257206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mlb","tag-alejandro-kirk","tag-barger","tag-chris-bassitt","tag-george-springer","tag-lauer","tag-mlb","tag-ohtani","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=257206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/257206\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/257207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=257206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=257206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=257206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}