2017 Texas Rangers Thread

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Pegasus said:
Another Gallo HR tonight. This one a la Dave Kingman skyrocket. #35. He keeps this up he may get to 45 this season.

Lol only 2.5 out of second WC. We can hope. :)
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Yeah he's definitely exceeding my expectations this year bta he's getting his act together as he always does, just takes him awhile. His BA is creeping up slowly but surely and that's hard to do this late in the season. Give him a full off season and some time to reflect on this year and I think he'll do much better next year, especially BA and RBI wise. Won't be long and you'll be seeing him regularly hitting 50 HRS or more... :sohappy
 
Uncle Siggy said:
Yeah he's definitely exceeding my expectations this year bta he's getting his act together as he always does, just takes him awhile. His BA is creeping up slowly but surely and that's hard to do this late in the season. Give him a full off season and some time to reflect on this year and I think he'll do much better next year, especially BA and RBI wise. Won't be long and you'll be seeing him regularly hitting 50 HRS or more... :sohappy
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Since the ASB Gallo is batting .250 Now that is slugger realm of being. Kind of Crush Davis territory. Kind of the territory I would expect Napoli to be at. If some dude is slugging 40 or so HRs a year and bats around .250, I think managers can live with that.

I think his BA for August is upwards of .290. The kid is drawing more walks and not chasing bad stuff. Once he figures out when pitchers are going to sneak in a change up, he will do much better.

Edit: https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/split.fcgi?id=gallojo01&year=2017&t=b

Actually he is batting .263 since the ASB and .298 for August.
 
Pegasus said:
Since the ASB Gallo is batting .250 Now that is slugger realm of being. Kind of Crush Davis territory. Kind of the territory I would expect Napoli to be at. If some dude is slugging 40 or so HRs a year and bats around .250, I think managers can live with that.

I think his BA for August is upwards of .290. The kid is drawing more walks and not chasing bad stuff. Once he figures out when pitchers are going to sneak in a change up, he will do much better.

Edit: https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/split.fcgi?id=gallojo01&year=2017&t=b

Actually he is batting .263 since the ASB and .298 for August.
Click to expand...

Did you see Nelly's blast last night into the upper deck, the ball is either carrying really well this year or these guys are just monsters or both... :biggrin2
 
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Pegasus said:
Since the ASB Gallo is batting .250 Now that is slugger realm of being. Kind of Crush Davis territory. Kind of the territory I would expect Napoli to be at. If some dude is slugging 40 or so HRs a year and bats around .250, I think managers can live with that.

I think his BA for August is upwards of .290. The kid is drawing more walks and not chasing bad stuff. Once he figures out when pitchers are going to sneak in a change up, he will do much better.

Edit: https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/split.fcgi?id=gallojo01&year=2017&t=b

Actually he is batting .263 since the ASB and .298 for August.
Click to expand...

It seems like his surge is somewhat tied to him playing an easier defensive position less to think about, when he plays 3rd he struggles at the plate. That being said I don't want to see him in the OF full time cause that is what wore/broke Josh down ending his career so early...
 
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Pegasus said:
Since the ASB Gallo is batting .250 Now that is slugger realm of being. Kind of Crush Davis territory. Kind of the territory I would expect Napoli to be at. If some dude is slugging 40 or so HRs a year and bats around .250, I think managers can live with that.

I think his BA for August is upwards of .290. The kid is drawing more walks and not chasing bad stuff. Once he figures out when pitchers are going to sneak in a change up, he will do much better.

Edit: https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/split.fcgi?id=gallojo01&year=2017&t=b

Actually he is batting .263 since the ASB and .298 for August.
Click to expand...

Now why in the heck was Bush clear out at almost SS position instead of staying out of Joeys way???
 
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Pegasus said:
Since the ASB Gallo is batting .250 Now that is slugger realm of being. Kind of Crush Davis territory. Kind of the territory I would expect Napoli to be at. If some dude is slugging 40 or so HRs a year and bats around .250, I think managers can live with that.

I think his BA for August is upwards of .290. The kid is drawing more walks and not chasing bad stuff. Once he figures out when pitchers are going to sneak in a change up, he will do much better.

Edit: https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/split.fcgi?id=gallojo01&year=2017&t=b

Actually he is batting .263 since the ASB and .298 for August.
Click to expand...

Uncle Siggy said:
Did you see Nelly's blast last night into the upper deck, the ball is either carrying really well this year or these guys are just monsters or both... :biggrin2
Click to expand...

Epic blasts are leaving ballparks nearly every night in this summer of the long ball, and everybody has favorites-a Cody Bellinger moon shot here, a Joey Gallo walk-off there. I thought no home run accomplishment in 2017 could surpass a guy named Scooter clubbing four in one game until Matt Olson, Franklin Barreto and Jaycob Brugman of Oakland each mashed his first major league tater on the same day. That hadn't happened since three members of the Kansas City Packers-that's right, of the Federal League-thumped round-trippers 103 years ago.

The overall numbers are staggering: MLB batters this season are hitting a whopping 1.26 long balls per team per game (through Aug. 10), by far the most in history-a higher rate than in the days of Barry Bonds or Babe Ruth or any expansion season. Home runs now account for 14.5 percent of all hits, which is the highest proportion ever and up from 10.1 percent in the previous three years. All of which raises the question: What the heck is going on out there?

I know for some of you, steroids will leap to mind. But while the cat-and-mouse game of doping and enforcement will probably never end, chemicals are almost certainly not powering this surge. Common sense says it would be nearly impossible for any new substance to be strong enough and spread fast enough to cause such a massive, sudden jump in home runs while remaining untraceable. More important, power has increased across MLB rosters-there's no handful of high-octane supersluggers breaking away from the rest of the game, as happened when anabolics were common but unevenly effective. No player this year is close to being on pace to break Bonds' single-season record of 73 homers. That indicates a more universal cause, and the latest research has found one: The baseball itself has changed.

Ben Lindbergh of The Ringer and sabermetrician Mitchel Lichtman sent a group of balls to Washington State University's Sports Science Laboratory for testing, including 17 from the first half of 2015, just before home runs started to soar, and 10 from 2016. In research published in June, they found small but significant differences, all in directions friendly to home runs: On the whole, the newer balls were bouncier and smaller and had lower seams. The combined effect would have been enough to make baseballs travel an average of 7.1 feet farther. In another June study, Rob Arthur of FiveThirtyEight looked at air resistance to balls by tracking how MLB pitches decline in speed from point of release to crossing the plate. He found that baseballs have been generating less drag since 2015, to an extent much greater than would be likely from random variation. I would add this: Eight pitchers have gone on the DL with blisters this year compared with six total from 2010 to 2015, according to STATS LLC, suggesting that something about gripping baseballs has changed pretty abruptly.

MLB insists its balls aren't juiced, but its specifications leave a lot of wiggle room. One study conducted at the University of Massachusetts Lowell in 2000 notoriously found that two baseballs could both meet MLB's game-ready standards yet differ so much in composition that one would travel 49.1 feet farther than the other when hit. I can't tell you if it's intentional, but the numbers say that increased bounciness and tighter seams are goosing today's baseballs.


Meanwhile, researchers have studied other possible causes for the home run surge, from batting orders to global warming, without finding much. But there's one more factor worth watching: With Statcast data on launch angles and exit velocity now flooding screens, teams and players are more aware that fly balls tend to produce better outcomes for batters than ground balls. So far, new homers are mostly coming from the increased zoom of batted balls, not a major shift in their launch angles. But sometimes change accelerates because of a friendly environment. Baseball left its dead ball era, for example, not only because balls got bouncier in 1919 but also because they got cleaner in 1920, when MLB outlawed the spitball, and easier to see, when teams began regularly substituting fresh balls into games after Cleveland's Ray Chapman was killed by a pitch. And then Ruth showed the world how to treat those shiny new orbs.

We are just at the beginning of a potential fly ball revolution, with hitters such as J.D. Martinez, Daniel Murphy and Yonder Alonso improving quickly and immensely by elevating. I suspect the seam height on baseballs will continue to flow and ebb, but hard-hitting uppercutters will keep pushing home run totals skyward.
 
Uncle Siggy said:
On the whole, the newer balls were bouncier and smaller and had lower seams.
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That could have an effect. I remember Darvish mentioning MLB baseballs were larger than in the Japanese league. I really thought there were specific dimensions but noticed from the rules there is some small fudging on dimensions:

Under the current rules, a major league baseball weighs between 5 and 5 1⁄4 ounces (142 and 149 g), and is 9 to 9 1⁄4 inches (229–235 mm) in circumference (2 7⁄8–3 in or 73–76 mm in diameter).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_(ball)

I can see the smaller ball having some advantage to some pitchers, but do see how the lower seams are advantageous to batters.
 
Pegasus said:
Yeah the rotation had the wheels fall off the cart this week.
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Pitching has been an issue all year nobody can get an out when they need to, change the pitching coach or change half the pitching staff???

Might as well play the yunguns now to let them see what they can do cause they have to be figuring out who is going to play 1st and CF (this wouldn't be an issue if they had traded for Hamilton as I suggested) next year. They may also contemplate some trades using players the only hit .200, HRs or "K". They have way too many of those "all or nothing" type players in the lineup right now and guys who are always hurt...
 
Uncle Siggy said:
Pitching has been an issue all year nobody can get an out when they need to, change the pitching coach or change half the pitching staff???

Might as well play the yunguns now to let them see what they can do cause they have to be figuring out who is going to play 1st and CF (this wouldn't be an issue if they had traded for Hamilton as I suggested) next year. They may also contemplate some trades using players the only hit .200, HRs or "K". They have way too many of those "all or nothing" type players in the lineup right now and guys who are always hurt...
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The rotation is always going to be an issue until the new stadium is built. JD knows this and that is why he will keep the younger sluggers up to improve and keep turning out re-treads and spare parts for the rotation.

JD is looking 5 years out now. Really he has no choice.

Expect Beltre to be gone to a contender this off season. We might get something in return. He stated he wanted to be on a WS contending team before he retires. JD made special mention of this in an interview.

We will probably be like the White Sox next year.
 
Pegasus said:
The rotation is always going to be an issue until the new stadium is built. JD knows this and that is why he will keep the younger sluggers up to improve and keep turning out re-treads and spare parts for the rotation.
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If you can't hit your spots or do hit your spots but are predictable as to when you hit them or predictable in what pitch you throw in certain situations how's the new stadium going to solve those problems???

If you're thinking the new stadium will play smaller then they really are screwed when teams like the A's and Royals come to town and the Rangers have guys that only hit HRs or K. They only have 2 guys that can really run the bases. If they had traded for Hamilton you would have 3 guys that would be creating havoc on the bases all thru the game and would probably raise the team BA at least 10-15 points cause the rest of the team would be seeing better pitches to hit. And your whole OF issue (DD in LF, Billy in CF and Mazara in RF) would be solved and in good shape for the next 7-10 years... (Some days I would just love to kick JD where the sun doesn't shine)...
 
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Pegasus said:
Expect Beltre to be gone to a contender this off season.
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Yeah I'm thinking the same thing but that decision won't be made until free agency is played out, if they get Darvish back and Ohtani then next season takes on a whole new meaning if not then another sub.500 season and Adrian gone. If they do trade him then who do you plug in at 3rd? Joey? (Not when he's better defensively at 1B and LF) Middlebrooks? (He's 30 and not hit his weight since 2012) Profar? (He's a natural middle infielder, maybe move Rougie to 3rd and Profar at 2nd)...

All those silly trades for players to keep Beltre happy and get him to resign hasn't panned out and has put the team in this situation. I would just as soon have those 10 or so prospects back, we'd have a lot younger team with a better upside going forward...

We have a CFer who can't play CF cause he has a noodle arm, another CFer who is HR or K at the plate (not enough production to justify that approach), a 1B who weighs more than his production at the plate and a 2B who should be more of an average hitter doing the HR or K routine too...

A lot of things are going to happen this off season how many of them make sense will remain to be seen...
 
Uncle Siggy said:
If you can't hit your spots or do hit your spots but are predictable as to when you hit them or predictable in what pitch you throw in certain situations how's the new stadium going to solve those problems???

If you're thinking the new stadium will play smaller then they really are screwed when teams like the A's and Royals come to town and the Rangers have guys that only hit HRs or K. They only have 2 guys that can really run the bases. If they had traded for Hamilton you would have 3 guys that would be creating havoc on the bases all thru the game and would probably raise the team BA at least 10-15 points cause the rest of the team would be seeing better pitches to hit. And your whole OF issue (DD in LF, Billy in CF and Mazara in RF) would be solved and in good shape for the next 7-10 years... (Some days I would just love to kick JD where the sun doesn't shine)...
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JD mentioned the new stadium with climate control would attract better pitching talent.
 
Pegasus said:
JD mentioned the new stadium with climate control would attract better pitching talent.
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I think JD is "wishing" it will happen. The new stadium may not have the same jet stream characteristics but I've played enough night games down there to know on cooler nights with the roof open and that lower humidity Texas air the ball is still going to carry...
 
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