Bright side; It really frees up October. Maybe I'll learn a new language or something.

You know what the Yankees should have done?

They should have traded Frazier and Bird to the Dodgers for Kershaw, the skinny guy Ferris Buehler or whatever his name is, and the fat Asian guy with the good ERA.

The Dodgers probably need a young outfielder, am I right?

Good career record.

I had been dismissive of Strasburg, maybe because  of all the early hype.

This joke is already tired.

NFL scores occur in MLB every day.

But I thought the other 29 teams were farm teams for the Yankees.

As long as the playoff games aren't in London, you go with what you've got and hope to turn it over to the bullpen in the sixth inning with a lead.

Maybe the fifth inning.

Heck, maybe the fourth inning.

That's the direction baseball is heading, anyway.


Bumgarner is the best SP who the Yankees could conceivably acquire.

Game Three of the ALCS? He won't last 5 innings at Target Field.

The strategy for beating the Twins is simple: Score 15 runs.

44-49 career record.

Kind of makes you appreciate the boring player who's slightly above average for a long time.

Red Sox fan writes about the Red Sox

Lupica writes to the non-existent audience of baseball fans who are counting out the Red Sox:

"The Yankees are playing this season the way the Red Sox played last season. Maybe better, considering what they’ve had to overcome with injuries. They might not win as many games as the Red Sox did last season. But they might come close. Injuries haven’t stopped them, because nothing has."

What?

What are we talking about?

The Yankees have to win 108 games in 2019 because the Red Sox won 108 games in 2018?


"The Red Sox aren’t going to catch the Yankees this season. But they do have a chance to catch the teams ahead of them in the AL Wild Card race -- the Indians, A’s, Rays -- and get another shot at their top rival the way the Yankees got their shot at the Red Sox last October. The team that won everything in 2018 now just looks to win that."

The Red Sox can still win the AL East.

As for "having a chance" to get the second Wild Card ... they're two games out.

With 65 games to go.

So, yeah. It's in the realm of possibility.


" 'You only get only so many chances to win in this game,' Frank Cashen said about his Mets back in 1987, when they were trying to repeat as World Series champs and then didn’t even make the playoffs that year."

The '87 Mets, huh?

Dwight Gooden, Darryl Strawberry, Mookie Wilson, Buck Showalter, Bobby Grich, and Wee Willie Keeler.

"The key to winning baseball games is having a team with good baseball players," Lee Elia once told me in a postgame steam bath on Chicago's south side in 1982.


"There was no Wild Card for the Mets back then, no one-game playoff lifeline. But there is for the Red Sox. Now their fans and everybody else must ask themselves -- after what has so often been a mediocre and disappointing regular season despite the life they’ve shown lately -- if the Sox can get good enough, starting now, to secure the AL Wild Card Game at Fenway."


I believe.

Ya gotta believe.

You convinced me.

Also, if I didn't believe, it would be at my own risk.

Not sure what I'd be risking, but I'd rather not take any chances.


"Can this year’s Red Sox look like last year’s Red Sox two months from now? We’re going to find out. They are four behind the Indians in the loss column, two behind the A’s, one behind the Rays. What feels like a 65-game pennant race for the defending champs starts now. You only get so many chances, Frank Cashen said. The Red Sox still have this chance: Proving that they got counted out too soon."

Nobody counted them out.

Maybe a few drunks dialing WEEI.

Yeah, why is Harold Baines in the Hall of Fame?

"Under the Baines standard, Larry Walker, Fred McGriff, and others would stroll into Cooperstown. There are even more unlikely names that have to be looked at in a new light now. Forget even about never-Hallers like Bobby Abreu (60 rWAR to Baines’ 38), Brett Gardner (40), or Placido Polanco (41.5). And forget about clearly better steroid-era candidates swept up in writers’ desire to pretend performance-enhancing drugs don’t exist — even if players from that era were never tied to PEDs. Andruw Jones, Jeff Kent, Scott Rolen, Lance Berkman, and dozens of others are more deserving."

First guy I thought of was Willie Wilson ... just in terms of the worst player who conceivably had a better career than Baines.

Wilson got 2% of the HOF vote and then instantly fell off the ballot.

Baines never got more than 6.1% of the vote.

Hard to imagine Frazier doing worse ...

Legendary