I think this is your funniest line ever: But “BOOOOO” is one of those sounds that carries well ... and why ghosts have been using it almost exclusively for many years.
Just catching up to this. I was at that game. When you have 48,000 people in the park, and a player K’s for the fourth time, there won’t be cheers, just silence from 47K waiting for the next batter, the next pitch. That makes it easy for the 1K boo’ing to be heard. Seemed more noticeable hearing the replay on TV than from where I was sitting.
If one even considers booing Aaron Judge, they ought NOT watch sports indeed…SIMPLE AS THAT!!!
What Judge did during the regular season doesn’t automatically come into play during the playoffs! Sports doesn’t work that way. Never has, never will!
Don’t cheer if Aaron Judge strikes out, but certainly don’t boo! Otherwise, go elsewhere for entertainment; it would be better for you and all of the fans who truly “understand” the game!!!
I think we really need to question how great those New York fans are. Booing Judge and Scherzer is just low class. Those guys are hall of farmers who give it their all every time they step out on the field. Boo all you want, I guess, but spare me the narrative about how much smarter and better you are than fans in other cities.
I wonder how much of the Boos were from season ticket holders vs people who just forked out cash to see playoffs baseball?
I still remember an interview with Mike Schmidt (my favorite player as a Philly fan) in Sport Magazine (remember that mag) in the 80s asking about the booing. Schmidt said that a lot of fans at a game just go to one or two games here and there and think that players are robots and that they can press a button and order up a 3 run homer and when that doesn't happen they boo.
Regarding the Dodgers, I know RBIs aren’t terribly meaningful in a player evaluation sense, but damn it would have been nice if the Dodgers got a few RBIs last night.
A game like that is no doubt the reason why, for 100 years, people felt RBIs were so important.
I’ve never quite understood the backlash against RBI as a meaningful stat. Yes, you need context with it to understand how many opportunities the hitter had, and without that it’s not much good in comparing player A to player B.
But in another sense, if you’re just talking about impact on a game or series, it makes no sense to ignore it. If player A goes 1-4 with a single that drives in 2 runs, he had more impact on that game than player B who went 1-4 but that hit was a double with 2 out and nobody on, and the next guy up was retired.
That’s not to say it’s a predictive stat for future performance, but it is meaningful.
This is actually a perfect example of why it is contextual. One for four with a double is a little bit better than one for four with a single. The big difference is what the guys ahead of him did. In the first example, they got on base. In the second example, they made outs. It is not at all as if the players had a different game. The 2nd guy could have gone 3-4 with a double and still not gotten an RBI.
Runs are contextual too of course, but they were never one of the "big three" stats for offensive performance in the past. The backlash is bigger for RBIs because of the outsized importance we put on them.
Don't get me wrong, I still look at RBI leaders and stuff, but they are dependent on so many other things. First, where you hit in the lineup. Certain spots in the batting order have yearly tendencies to have more or less RBIs. Second, of course, is what team you play for. If you have the same year in the same lineup spot as someone on the Dodgers (who, despite a bad few days, led the MLB in RBIs this year. By a lot. They were as much ahead of the 2nd place team as the second place team was ahead of the 7th place team, and the 7th place team was about that far ahead of the league average) but you happen to play for the Tigers or A's instead, you RBI number is not going to look nearly as good.
With his stats on three-strikeout games, Joe makes a compelling case that this is not a slump and just one of those things. I wonder, however, if his struggles appear more stark if you run his swing and miss rate in recent games compared to what it is overall? It has just looked like strike one, strike two, strike three, all by swing and miss. Alarming. Almost as if he has not seen the ball. It has reminded me of Robert Redford in his slump period in The Natural, where both his successes and failures are so extreme and divorced frm realism (which is actually what captured my imagination watching it as a child).
One way to look at it is they are booing the result, not the player. I remember them booing Jeter when he was slumping only to cheer like crazy the next time he came up.
It's interesting to me that there is what I would call "local cheering," which is cheering that play. No matter whether you're a fan of a player, if he's on your team, and he contributes, you cheer. But with the boos, it's always assuming the meaning is global, personal. About the player, and not the play. It's kind of weird. Now, I'm not saying that in the recent cases of Scherzer and Judge, fans were flipping years of history on its head and booing the plays and not the players. But I am saying that what I really won't be able to excuse is if Judge is booed when he's announced in the starting lineup or is booed when he strides to the play, and not just after his individual failures.
The postseason is all about small sample sizes. And right now, Judge's two-game sample size looks really bad. That happens when you're a slugger.
It doesn't help that down in Texas there's another slugger who's having a heck of a playoff series so far. While Judge is 0 for 8 with 7 SOs and a walk, for an OPS of .111, Yordan Alvarez is 4 for 8 with 2 massive HRs. His OPS is a mind-blowing 1.931. Again, small sample size, but Alvarez is scaring the you-know-what out of opposing teams right now.
I imagine that more than a few Yankees fans are more than a little jealous.
I tell myself these days the the regular season means more to me than the postseason. It does, of course, in any evaluative sense.
So if Judge strikes out every time up, it doesn’t dent his historic season (although note that both Ruth and Maria hit exactly 62 home runs, including postseason). The Dodgers this season (much as I hate to admit it) are perhaps the very best team of all-time, whatever happens in a fluky series with the Padres. And if my team gets lucky and wins it all, that’s really excellent. It’s fun to win in slots, and I’ll cherish the experience.
Of course, MLB and the sports media pushes very hard in the other direction. Sometimes I feel we’re expected to wipe out a long season in favor of a couple of cold-weather coin-flips. But so far I’m actually holding up fine. The playoffs are a blast, and If my team gets hot, I’ll enjoy the he** out of it, but the regular season is the reason I’m here.
I'm really not a fan of these five game series. It's already a crapshoot. You have a couple of bad Aaron Judge (or any other key player) games, or a couple of poorly pitched games, or a couple of unlucky breaks, and you're out. At least with 7 game series, a couple of bad games isn't the end.
I think this is your funniest line ever: But “BOOOOO” is one of those sounds that carries well ... and why ghosts have been using it almost exclusively for many years.
Just catching up to this. I was at that game. When you have 48,000 people in the park, and a player K’s for the fourth time, there won’t be cheers, just silence from 47K waiting for the next batter, the next pitch. That makes it easy for the 1K boo’ing to be heard. Seemed more noticeable hearing the replay on TV than from where I was sitting.
Any list you can share with Bo Jackson is probably pretty good...
If one even considers booing Aaron Judge, they ought NOT watch sports indeed…SIMPLE AS THAT!!!
What Judge did during the regular season doesn’t automatically come into play during the playoffs! Sports doesn’t work that way. Never has, never will!
Don’t cheer if Aaron Judge strikes out, but certainly don’t boo! Otherwise, go elsewhere for entertainment; it would be better for you and all of the fans who truly “understand” the game!!!
I, for one, am just happy to see Miguel Sano get some recognition for his accomplishment.
I think we really need to question how great those New York fans are. Booing Judge and Scherzer is just low class. Those guys are hall of farmers who give it their all every time they step out on the field. Boo all you want, I guess, but spare me the narrative about how much smarter and better you are than fans in other cities.
I wonder how much of the Boos were from season ticket holders vs people who just forked out cash to see playoffs baseball?
I still remember an interview with Mike Schmidt (my favorite player as a Philly fan) in Sport Magazine (remember that mag) in the 80s asking about the booing. Schmidt said that a lot of fans at a game just go to one or two games here and there and think that players are robots and that they can press a button and order up a 3 run homer and when that doesn't happen they boo.
Regarding the Dodgers, I know RBIs aren’t terribly meaningful in a player evaluation sense, but damn it would have been nice if the Dodgers got a few RBIs last night.
A game like that is no doubt the reason why, for 100 years, people felt RBIs were so important.
I’ve never quite understood the backlash against RBI as a meaningful stat. Yes, you need context with it to understand how many opportunities the hitter had, and without that it’s not much good in comparing player A to player B.
But in another sense, if you’re just talking about impact on a game or series, it makes no sense to ignore it. If player A goes 1-4 with a single that drives in 2 runs, he had more impact on that game than player B who went 1-4 but that hit was a double with 2 out and nobody on, and the next guy up was retired.
That’s not to say it’s a predictive stat for future performance, but it is meaningful.
This is actually a perfect example of why it is contextual. One for four with a double is a little bit better than one for four with a single. The big difference is what the guys ahead of him did. In the first example, they got on base. In the second example, they made outs. It is not at all as if the players had a different game. The 2nd guy could have gone 3-4 with a double and still not gotten an RBI.
Runs are contextual too of course, but they were never one of the "big three" stats for offensive performance in the past. The backlash is bigger for RBIs because of the outsized importance we put on them.
Don't get me wrong, I still look at RBI leaders and stuff, but they are dependent on so many other things. First, where you hit in the lineup. Certain spots in the batting order have yearly tendencies to have more or less RBIs. Second, of course, is what team you play for. If you have the same year in the same lineup spot as someone on the Dodgers (who, despite a bad few days, led the MLB in RBIs this year. By a lot. They were as much ahead of the 2nd place team as the second place team was ahead of the 7th place team, and the 7th place team was about that far ahead of the league average) but you happen to play for the Tigers or A's instead, you RBI number is not going to look nearly as good.
With his stats on three-strikeout games, Joe makes a compelling case that this is not a slump and just one of those things. I wonder, however, if his struggles appear more stark if you run his swing and miss rate in recent games compared to what it is overall? It has just looked like strike one, strike two, strike three, all by swing and miss. Alarming. Almost as if he has not seen the ball. It has reminded me of Robert Redford in his slump period in The Natural, where both his successes and failures are so extreme and divorced frm realism (which is actually what captured my imagination watching it as a child).
I was at the game, it was more collective groaning than actual targeted booing
One way to look at it is they are booing the result, not the player. I remember them booing Jeter when he was slumping only to cheer like crazy the next time he came up.
It's interesting to me that there is what I would call "local cheering," which is cheering that play. No matter whether you're a fan of a player, if he's on your team, and he contributes, you cheer. But with the boos, it's always assuming the meaning is global, personal. About the player, and not the play. It's kind of weird. Now, I'm not saying that in the recent cases of Scherzer and Judge, fans were flipping years of history on its head and booing the plays and not the players. But I am saying that what I really won't be able to excuse is if Judge is booed when he's announced in the starting lineup or is booed when he strides to the play, and not just after his individual failures.
The postseason is all about small sample sizes. And right now, Judge's two-game sample size looks really bad. That happens when you're a slugger.
It doesn't help that down in Texas there's another slugger who's having a heck of a playoff series so far. While Judge is 0 for 8 with 7 SOs and a walk, for an OPS of .111, Yordan Alvarez is 4 for 8 with 2 massive HRs. His OPS is a mind-blowing 1.931. Again, small sample size, but Alvarez is scaring the you-know-what out of opposing teams right now.
I imagine that more than a few Yankees fans are more than a little jealous.
I tell myself these days the the regular season means more to me than the postseason. It does, of course, in any evaluative sense.
So if Judge strikes out every time up, it doesn’t dent his historic season (although note that both Ruth and Maria hit exactly 62 home runs, including postseason). The Dodgers this season (much as I hate to admit it) are perhaps the very best team of all-time, whatever happens in a fluky series with the Padres. And if my team gets lucky and wins it all, that’s really excellent. It’s fun to win in slots, and I’ll cherish the experience.
Of course, MLB and the sports media pushes very hard in the other direction. Sometimes I feel we’re expected to wipe out a long season in favor of a couple of cold-weather coin-flips. But so far I’m actually holding up fine. The playoffs are a blast, and If my team gets hot, I’ll enjoy the he** out of it, but the regular season is the reason I’m here.
At times, Posnanski makes a comment that transcends baseball and is a zinger on the human condition. Here’s the one in this column:
“This is part of what makes us human — our ability to hold the boos in.“
I love this. Can we all take a moment and recognize we have a choice in our behavior? What a refreshing thought.
I'm really not a fan of these five game series. It's already a crapshoot. You have a couple of bad Aaron Judge (or any other key player) games, or a couple of poorly pitched games, or a couple of unlucky breaks, and you're out. At least with 7 game series, a couple of bad games isn't the end.
I would rather go back to a one-game playoff between two wild cards and expand the LDS to seven games.