Baseball value

Sunday 8/23/26

The Giants are a bad ball club, but I still thought that was a great win (which meant their second series win in a row) for the Red Sox last night, coming back from 2-0 in the bottom of the ninth and walking it off, especially after what could have been a really demoralizing eighth inning when they had the bases loaded with nobody out and failed to score. That showed resiliency. Was also nice that the Sox did this against the knuckle-dragging Giants pitcher who said that he morally opposes being gay. How stupid do you have to be to think/say that? Cretin.

The game was nationally televised, and the announcers were talking about how Giants announcer Mike Krukow should be in the Hall of Fame, though this almost never happens. It's rare at that. Along these lines, though, Ned Martin should have been--should be--a Hall of Famer. It's never sat well with me that he isn't.

Caleb Durbin made an outstanding play at third in the game in which he dove and then got the force at second (runner was safe at first). He should be the AL's Gold Glove winner at the hot corner. Watching him field his position has been a pleasure.

The Red Sox now have the highest run differential in the AL. As I've said here repeatedly, run differential is a telling stat.

This year's American League is feeling like last year's AFC.

You wonder what would happen if Roman Anthony came back and was productive. I'm not a huge Anthony believer. I have no reason to be. Other people point to last year and say, "He was so great!" because they're fixated on one stat up there on the dashboard--which is often OPS and in this case is exactly that--whereas I saw a guy with little power who struck out a ton.

Ditto Garrett Crochet. I really didn't expect to see him again this season, but I also expected, of course, that they'd be well out of it. How could you not have expected that given where they were at? But it feels like he's very..."around."

Regarding that bases loaded, nobody out situation in the eighth inning: that's where strikeouts kill you. I believe--though, again, it's pretty much just me--there's huge value in guys who can put the ball in play. Maybe not what people who don't know the game think of as analytics value, but baseball value.

You used to hear phrases like, "Doesn't show up on the stat sheet" as indicating the valuable things players did that helped you win games. Now, if it's not on the stat sheet, it might as well not happen, whether it would help you win or not. What I mean is, it's the stat sheet that is god.

People in today's benighted world could never understand how a Marty Marion won, and should have won, the NL MVP in 1944. They can't comprehend what a shortstop like that could mean to a team. The surfeit of intangibles, the heady plays that won games, won a pennant. The smarts. The plays that turned what would have been losses into victories. The "little stuff." The thing about little stuff is that a lot of it adds up into big things. This is true in both baseball and life.