Apparently, MLB used balls that were livelier when Aaron Judge was chasing his very important "NY Yankees-only most home runs in a season." It was a stupid thing to care about. It's funny that they got bounced in the post-season.

I am so. fucking. sick. of baseball going out of their way to make things easier for the fucking Yankees.

This should be the biggest scandal in sports, but I don't care enough to trawl Twitter to see if people are losing their minds or not. You can't have one set of balls for one team, and one set of deadened balls for everyone else and call yourself a legitimate sports product.

I have a football take too, and all this adds up to hockey probably becoming my #1 sport because it seems to not be fixed.

Four hours not being nearly enough to get a game in is an absolute abortion. I realize that as you get older, the time you have to watch this stupid game decreases, but it's absolutely infuriating how much time playoff baseball takes.

I think this is what I hate about sports at this point in my life. The sheer "eff you, oink oink piggie piggie" part of it. NFL puts a game on that I wanted to see at 7:30AM my time. The delays in baseball is completely due to these guys dawdling. 30 seconds per pitch if you're lucky. I guess it's good that they are going to try to put a pitch clock in.

The Orioles were all of us. America won it's.first battle in a long time this weekend.

The Orioles just faced the Yankees in a three-game series with Judge on 61. I'm not on Reddit but being on Twitter made this go straight from "who cares, the Orioles are out and I just want them to get a winning record" to "the Orioles preventing Judge from hitting 62 is my own personal World Series." Up to this year I haven't paid attention to baseball since about 2005, so I'd forgotten what Yankees fans are like, but BOY HOWDY a few days of people demanding the O's throw every pitch straight down the middle so Judge gets a shot brought it all back home.

O's won two of three and ensured their first winning record in a while, Judge struck out six times and never homered, I like baseball again!

I guess you kind of have to keep it because a man provides for his family. I don't know what it would go for in an auction. However, having participated in many online auctions, I'd rather eat the ball than go through one again, right? Judge probably deserves just to keep it and he's not a bad guy. I dunno. What would you do? You gotta sell it, right?

Would you keep baseball 62 if you caught it or throw it back?

I hate Redditors. Reddit's baseball subreddit is, you guessed, filled from dick to crotch bursting with them.

I also hate the New York Yankees. I don't hate their right fielder, Aaron Judge. He's hit 60 home runs. All the baseball subreddit has been are stupid updates about how many home runs Judge has been hitting lately and inane factoids and moronic massaged statlines.

Each Redditor on the baseball subreddit can have a little graphic ("flair") showing their favorite team. This allows me to introduce you to the "Aaron Judge Paradox."

If a Redditor has Yankees flair and posts a topic about Aaron Judge, I block them for being a garbage, obnoxious homer. Get a fucking life.

If a Redditor has flair for a different team and submits a post about Judge, I block them for being a sniveling, pathetic, karma-farming douchebag front runner. Quit kissing ass, shitboy.

This means I block ALL who submit topics about Aaron Judge and therefore all Redditors. And if you think I have a problem with that, I suggest you read the first sentence of this post.

You are correct. You can position your defense wherever you want for the most part. There was no rule against having 7 guys around first, a pitcher and a catcher, I don't think.

So teams did that. They figured out that batters have tendencies - there is so much data available to teams - so they will shift. A left-handed batter is more likely to hit balls to the right side of the field, so why not move extra guys there.

And players did not adjust to this. I am not saying that it's easy to bunt to opposite field. I couldn't do it. But very, very players tried. (Plus there is the argument that - "that's what they want us to do!! We'd rather Bryce Harper try to bunt, than beat us with a home run!" which.... hey, the great, great majority of players couldn't do it, or wouldn't do it.

And teams did not adjust to this and try to find and develop players that can hit to all fields.

So everyone is giving up and there's going to be a rule that says you have to have two infielders on opposite sides of second base, feet on the dirt.

what's the rule about the infielders have to be touching dirt before a pitch is thrown, no shifting positions until the windup or something, supposed to enable more base hits from lefties. Couldn't they just hit better? This is me not attending any games this year (the stadium is in the big bad city) and talking like an armchair third base coach.


THE
SWING
BATURBATUR!
AARDVARK

Oooooooo. Uh.

The average game is like three and a half hours. It used to be two. The only difference is pitchers taking like 30 seconds between each pitch and batters stepping out of the box after each pitch. There are no more commercials now than 50 years ago. It's almost all on the players.

A pitch clock -one of the changes - is going to be the single greatest rule put in any and all sports in my lifetime! I will personally watch a lot more baseball.

Annnmd now they're changing the rules to make the game more exciting, because Americans with money don't have the attention span they used to have.

I blame leaded gasoline

They had a bunch of defensive errors and then it was just one of those games.

I could only get the Red Sox feed and they had an announcer that:

1. His voice was LITERALLY SHAKING I don't know if he just tried to run a marathon and was out of shape and given a mic, but christ I can't stand bad-voice baseball announcers

2. He did the thing I hate when my teams is blowing the shit out of someone. He talked about all the times the **Red Sox** beat up on another team really badly. "It's 25-4 but remember in 1990 when the Red Sox scored blah blah blah" Just shut the fuck up and take your humiliation.

So the Red Sox just phone it in last night?

Cutting, spitting on, or using knuckles on the ball have all been banned.

Cutting, spitting on, or using knuckles on opponents is also frowned upon.

The screwball is not banned, sir, it's just a pitch that goes toward a righty when a right handed pitcher throws it and vice versa with lefties.

I think that spit wasn't necessarily used per se, but it became a catch all term for adding goop or glaze or sunscreen to the ball. Scuffing or cutting the ball would also fall into the category. I'd have to check but I think Aardvark is right, because messing with the ball's aerodynamics caused unpredictability, it was easy to demand it be illegal.

The knuckleball is also unpredictable when thrown correctly but it's still legal.

The spitball was very difficult to control and a lot of players were getting hit. Same with the screwball so they banned them

I was talking with a friend about "spitting" on balls the other day.

Now I am by no means a MLB expert here, but wasn't spitting on the ball by the pitcher before he throws banned? If so, why? These guys move moisture onto the ball whichever way they can.. spitting in their hand acting like they are coughing, wiping their sweaty brows after removing their had and smearing the sweat onto the ball, etc.

So I ask.. if it is indeed banned, then why? It's obviously been a part of the game for years. My friend thought perhaps because the image just doesn't look good.. directly spitting onto the ball.

What's your opinion?

Edit: Also, very cool to see that Blue Jays player knock that ball out with a very Babe Ruth like stature.

I am enjoying this season a great deal.

The commish screwed with the balls. They were dead. Dead balls! The commish had a press conference where he said he absolutely did not screw with the baseballs... and then two days later, home run rates were up all over baseball. The damage was done and it was another stupid decision by the dumb cock, but that's just commissioners in sports in 2022. They're all stupid wastes of space.

The umps were all doing the ump show thing to, but I will admit it's been a couple weeks since it was egregious. An u,p actually apologized for this nonsense:



Tell me that ump isn't a serial killer. I dare you!

The big find this year for the Toronto Blue Jays is Alejandro Kirk, a 5'8", 245 pound catcher and designated hitter, who is as "locked in" at the plate right now as any player I can recall. His plate appearances are can't miss televi-- can't miss pirated streams for me right now.

This is why I pound that reload key fifteen million times a day here. BEST RESPONSE VIDEO EVER!

Also, the Yankee fans are serious asstrash for doing that to the Ind...Guardian players.