Brewers/Pirates Series

[MickeyDavis]

True. Part of it is home court/field advantage is much less in baseball.

Baseball is a very high variance sport in a 5-7 game window. Even the best players in history can have results that are all over the place in a short 5-7 game timeframe. Ohtani posted a .385 OPS in 5 games in World Series last year. Did he choke? No, that's baseball. That made me decide to look up Babe Ruth, who posted an OPS of .426 in the World Series in 1922 in his prime at age 27 when the Yankees got swept by the Giants. Just for random trivia, his OPS the next year against the Giants in the WS was 1.556 and the year after that it was an absurd 2.022.

Way back in the old days, they'd do a 9 game series just between the top teams from the NL and AL. Realistically, baseball playoffs should be a 13 game series or something absurdly long like that. Baseball playoffs are very exciting, but they almost shouldn't exist given the nature of the sport.

I'm much more impressed by what teams do over the course of a long 162 game season than I am by a team getting hot at the right time and winning the World Series. The Brewers very likely won't win it all this year (just as any team with the best record generally doesn't win it all), but the regular season so far has been one of the most impressive seasons I've ever seen from an MLB team all things considered and my memory of baseball goes back to about 1989.

Enjoy the ride. A World Series would just be a cherry on top. The real joy is in watching this team over the course of a 162 game season.

Baseball should definitely be like soccer from that standpoint. Crazy that a 162 game grind comes down not even 20 games, at most, if you have a top 2 record.

Think about the one time the Brewers made the world series. 162 games and only 2 from each league made the playoffs. The Brewers entered the final 4 game series against Baltimore up 3 games on them. And dropped the first 3 games. Fortunately they won the final game. There were several times the Brewers won 90+ and didn't make the playoffs before they were expanded

[ReasonablySober]

I listened to BP's Five and Dive podcast for the first time this morning and I've never heard someone get more worked up or go out of their way more than Craig Goldstein did to damn the Brewers with faint praise. It was ten minutes of loudly yammering about how it doesn't matter what the Brewers do, he'll never get to a point where he admits they're better than the Dodgers. And maybe the Mets. He doesn't see what makes the Brewers successful working in the post-season. He also had to mention according to BP's proprietary all encompassing stats DRC+ and DRA- the Brewers offense and defense both sit outside the top ten.

So I guess **** results!

It's their cognitive dissonance I referred to earlier. How can the Brewers possibly be good when we, the Illuminati, said they wouldn't or couldn't be?

Screw them with rusty screws.

The guy doubled down on today's episode. The crux of his argument being that there's no way you could predict "90th percentile outcomes" from so many different players, namely Turang, Frelick, and Collins.

Collins I'll give him. Even though Fangraphs dove deep into his success and how he's basically just doing what he's always done (exhibit elite strike zone awareness), no one really anticipated it on this level.

But Frelick and Turang? Come on. They were first round picks. In Turang's case, he was looked at as a legit #1 overall draft prospect as a prep heading into his senior season. He's turning into the player scouts thought he would be. He's supposed to be this guy. Same with Frelick.

I think the problem with the quote "projection guys" is they truly are numbers over everything else. If you told me a random guy had a 62 wRC+ as a rookie and was never special in the minors, I might not bank on him ever being anything in the majors. But if you told me that same player was a couple seasons removed from being regarded as one of the best prep shortstops in recent memory and a guy considered to go #1 overall...yea, I wouldn't consider a .750 OPS in his third season as some shocking outcome.

[VooDoo7]

I work in hospitality, can confirm.

People really do make promotions incredibly difficult as a business owner. They always want more no matter what. Its why we almost never give any discounts or run any deals. People suck too much.

I'm concerned that Costco's very generous return policy will be ruined eventually by people sucking. "Yes, let me return this used mattress after 12 years..."

I once saw someone return a real Christmas tree...after Christmas was over. They complained that too many needles had fallen out. The thing looked like it hadn't been watered in weeks. Costco returned it. I shook my head and said out loud "you gotta be sh*tting me".

[Ripster72]

I'm concerned that Costco's very generous return policy will be ruined eventually by people sucking. "Yes, let me return this used mattress after 12 years..."

I'm employed at a Costco. There's no way that I could work the refunds counter.