Baseball 2019

More strikeouts and more home runs this season.  For how long will this continue?  Will Major League Baseball actually do something next year to keep the ball from flying out of the ballparks so often?(see my previous posts for my suggestions).  Will the strategies that once made baseball so beautiful return:  the sacrifice bunt, the hit-and-run, et al.?  One can only hope.

Meanwhile, the Yankees are in the post-season and the Mets are not; there are many differences between the two teams and the two managers and bullpens are one of them.  Until I can study the stats in more detail I will just say that if the Mets had converted half of the saves that they blew then the Mets would have won the National League East.

A surprise pleasure came at the end of the season:  Buck Showalter teaming with Michael Kaye in the final Yankee telecasts.  Showalter was informed, intelligent and interesting; Michael Kaye was, as usual, trying hard to remember the score and the inning and getting them wrong more often than not.  My favorite story of Buck's was how when he was a minor-league third base coach in the Yankee organization he was a factor in a triple-play in which, as Showalter said, "the ball never touched leather."  As I was trying to figure out how that was possible Buck explained that there were men on first and second, nobody out and a 3-2 count on the batter.  Buck signaled to the baserunners to run on the pitch.  The batter hit a sky-high popup and the infield fly rule was called, batter out; the runner from second base had to return to second and as he was doing so the runner from first, head down, passed the runner from second on the base path so the runner from first was out and, finally, at that moment, the popup came down and clonked the runner from second on the head and he was out!

Showalter was full of insights into the game -- something relatively uncommon among baseball announcers since the death of Ralph Kiner -- including details of where to play the infield and the shift, depending on the score and the number of outs; whether to give an RBI on a double-play and where to place cameras in case of challenges.  I think Showalter would make a great announcer, though few managers make that transition (Joe Girardi, former Yankee manager, is one who did, at least for the time being), perhaps because teams might worry that a former manager might be too critical or might give away managerial secrets.