8/18-8/20 Red Sox vs. Yankees Series Thread

Could be Porcello or an extra if today is washed out by rain.

Bears repeating as we all grumble about the next pitch of a 3-0 count being called a K or just poor balls and strikes calls tonight. Despite Manfred's repetition of the lie today that umpires are right "90 percent of the time, it is demonstrably false and has been disproven in multiple ways. Freakonomics did a great episode on this not long ago. One clear data set are replay stats, which showed umps getting these calls reverse almost 50% of the time. citing a study that showed on close, but clearly outside the zone pitches umpires were wrong 36+% of the time. The sample size? More than 12,000 MLB games and 1.5 million called pitches with all data provided via pitch f/X. Here's the study, titled "Decision Making Under the Gambler's Fallacy." Oh, and on that episode, titled: "How to Make a Bad Decision," interviewed not only the researchers but MLB umpire Hunter Wendelstedt, who was surprised that MLB umps frequently fall prey to Gamblers Fallacy.

Of course, if you have rob umps, it really can't benefit NYY, especially in the late innings, sooooo....

They're expected to dodge thunderstorms all night, but they should be able to get the game in. The bad break wold be a delay early that's so long that they need to take Pomeranz out, since we have the SP edge and the MFY's have the even deeper bullpen.

Sale, BTW, is locked into his start tomorrow so that he can pitch the finale of the early September series. Fortunately, the forecast for tomorrow is good.

Meanwhile, if you flip-flop Porcello to pitch Sunday on 4 days rest and Fister to go Monday on 6, that means that Porcello's turn comes up in Toronto August 30 and Fister's comes up to start the final series in NYC. However, the law of the conservation of Doug Fister starts against the Yankees can be broken by replacing him with someone better in the interim.

Porcello has no significant 4 / 5 day rest split this year, but in his career he's been worse on 5 days. Fister likes 5 better than 4  -- his two good starts this year were the two on 5 days rest. He's been worse on 6+ days rest, but the latter is always a sketchy stat since it includes the first start of the season or coming off of rehab or a callup. In fact he seems to have been very good on 6 actual days ... two of his last 3 starts on 6 days rest were tremendous - 9 3 0 0 0 9 in 9/26/14 vs. the Marlins, and 7 4 0 0 1 4 on 6/25/15 against the Braves.

Has to be Porcello, who had a 5.01 ERA in his first 18 starts and 3.61 since.

Today's commemorative 1967-ish stat.

Highest OPS+ in a debut season, age 19 or younger, 1905-present, minimum 150 PA or 375 PA (doesn't matter). All were 19.

137 Tony Conigliaro, 1964
118 Bryce Harper, 2012
117 Mickey Mantle, 1951
114 Cesar Cedeno, 1970
108 Ken Griffey, Jr., 1989

(In 1904, Sherry Magee had a 122 and Johnny Lush had a 119. Magee is my candidate for the best player 1900-1960 not in the HOF; he's more qualified than a lot of guys the Veteran's Committee let in.

I had never heard of Lush until now, even though he's the youngest pitcher to have thrown a no-hitter and the youngest regular position player in MLB history, playing 1B on the same Phillies team as Magee at age 18. He had 5.8 career WAR pitching and 3.7 hitting, all by age 24. When he retired.)

Edit: more Lush facts.

I am completely sucked in at this point, my tagline notwithstanding.

I'm seeing two movies tonight (Ernst Lubitsch double bill at the Harvard Film Archive) and three tomorrow (indie sci-fi Majorie Prime at the Regent in Arlington and another HFA double bill, Lubitsch and Renoir) and will be watching both games when I come home at an average time of midnight. So my next post in this thread will be after the fact. I hope!

Isn't Monday's game at Cleveland as important as Sunday's game against MFY's?

Considering we have Chris Sale to pitch a wild-card game, that's a more difficult,
but not impossible march to the AL title. I think Houston might be an easier(not easy)
opponent than Cleveland. We'll get Cleveland if we win the division.

There's no reason to start thinking about that now.  They shouldn't be subjecting themselves to the luck involved in a single game for any reason on purpose.  They should go all out for the division win regardless of matchups.

Or it could suck if they decide to do a double-header Saturday or Sunday.

While I'm at it, the batting order I'd like to see tonight, which has a 0% chance of happening:

Nunez 4
Bogaerts 6
Benintendi 7
Betts 9
Devers 5
Ramirez 3
Young 0
Vazquez 2
Bradley 8

Based on Benny's career platoon splits, you'd bat him 9th as a second lead-off guy. They persist in August. But they are:

.455 / .526 / .909 vs RHP
.308 / .412 / .538 vs LHP, including two rockets for outs off of Montgomery.

Not a skip but a swap; he'll go on Monday on 6 days rest.

How lucky was Montgomery in his last start? He allowed 14 balls in play fair and 7 were hard.

It turns out the ratio of hits to hard hit balls as measured by BIS, for qualifying SP 2012-2016, is 1.08. It's quite possible that BIS defined Hard so as to make the number of hard-hit balls equal to the number of hits. That is the way you'd want to do it.

None of those 7 -- 5 lineouts to the deep OF, and two deep FB -- fell for hits. That game is a rout if 5 or 6 of them fall in (giving him the expected total of 7.6 hits), since each ball hit deep to the outfield that gets turned from a hit to an out is worth about a run. And Devers / Chapman would have never happened.

I was thinking that the Sox were a lock for the number 2 or 3 seed in the playoffs. This might not be the case anymore.

The Sox are only 4 games back of Houston for that number one seed and Houston still has McCullers out. The Sox could catch Houston for the top seed in the AL and face the wild card in the first round in the playoffs (Maybe the Yankees)