Monday Bantering

The Red Sox are World Series Champions.

I’m glad for Steve Pearce and David Price. Beyond that......oh well, it is done.

In our World Series prediction thread we had many picking the Red Sox.

We had some guessing Red Sox in 5: erik.t, JaysfanDL, macdo, ritzkiss and SixspFan.

But only one picked Pearce to be MVP. That’s macdo. Pretty amazing to pick him as MVP.

This starts the long off season. Rogers Hornsby has one of my favorite quotes: People ask me what I do in winter when there’s no baseball. I’ll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring.

But that doesn’t mean we are shutting down for the winter (though when I wake up in the morning and look at a blank screen, I think we should).

But it should be an interesting winter. We have a lot of news coming, there roster decisions that have to be made and lots going on.

And, at 1:00 eastern, the Blue Jays will have a press conference ‘introducing’ Charlie Montoyo to us all. We will have an open thread.

Kevin Pillar will be part of an ‘All-Star’ team touring Japan. They are going to play 7 games in Japan.

Juan Soto and Ronald Acuna Jr. will be part of the MLB roster. You can see the complete roster here.

Back in the old old days, MLB players would ‘barn storm’ in the off season. travel across the country and play for people who didn’t get to see major league baseball. Of course, back in the 1920s and 30s, the MLB only had teams in the North Eastern part of the US, in part because they had to travel by train, in the pre-airline days. This seems like the 21st century version of that.

I’m sure you all noticed this, but Justin Smoak is a finalist for the AL Gold Glove at first base. I don’t know if he deserves the award. He doesn’t make errors, but then he doesn’t have a ton of range. I don’t know how you vote for first basemen.

You can see the whole list of finalists here.

I thought Marcus Stroman would get a chance to keep his crown but I guess he didn’t play enough.

John Lott, back a few day ago, had a profile on Rickey Henderson, who was a Blue Jay for a couple of months and was on base when Joe Carter his the World Series home. Predictably Ricky isn’t a fan of analytics (find me a former player who doesn’t whine about them).

“The biggest learning process is based on the bench,” he said. “You don’t get out on first base and then try to pick up what you’re gonna learn because it’s gonna take a lot of pitches for you to learn what you want to get a good jump on. So I studied from the bench a lot. When I get on the base path I know what he’s doing and what pitches I really want to go on …

“We never really understood what times (pitchers’ times to the plate) was about. Nowadays, I get the guys on the clock. They go, ‘Okay, this man is 1.29, 1.3, you can’t run off of him.’ You ain’t never gave the man a chance to run off of him. Did he find something on the pitcher that he’ll get a better jump and make the time a lot higher? They shut them down before it gets (to that point). So that’s when I go back and say you’re not giving a guy a chance (to develop) his instinct, what he can do. I think if I was on the base path and you tell me (under) a 1.3-something I can’t run, then I’ll be puzzled too.”

It takes a certain level of dumb to complain about having information. Ricky was a great basestealer, but I don’t think there is anything wrong with players knowing more.