The Definitive Brandon Belt T-Shirt / Belt Knows Best by BreakingT - McCovey Chronicles

I like this shirt. A better shirt would be "It's not a strike until Brandon Belt says it's a strike."

from McCovey Chronicles:

https://www.mccoveychronicles.com/2018/5/22/17382466/the-definitive-brandon-belt-t-shirt-breakingt-belt-knows-best?ref=digest

The Definitive Brandon Belt T-Shirt

BreakingT has captured Brandon Belt's Player of the Week-winning week in this striking cotton blend.

Bryan MurphyMay 22, 2018, 4:23pm PDT

Brandon Belt was just named the National League's Player of the Week in part because he hit 5 home runs over seven days. He also got into some trouble arguing the strike zone with Doug Eddings. But Belt knows the strike zone, probably better than anyone! And to commemorate his performance for the week and for calling out Doug Eddings and for his historic 21-pitch at bat earlier this season, 

Order your Belt Knows Best shirt by clicking on this link.

Sent from my iPhone

Finding one stat to represent each Giants hitter - McCovey Chronicles

I'm not sure Giants fans needed a fancy computer to confirm this stat, but....He probably leads the majors in toppers back to the mound. Those two stats are probably highly correlated.

from McCovey Chronicles.com
Finding one stat to represent each Giants hitter - McCovey Chronicles:

Hunter Pence: 0 barrels
According to Statcast, in his 61 plate appearances in the majors so far this year, Hunter Pence has not barrelled up a single ball. Barrelling up a ball is a key part of hitting it hard, which Pence has had trouble with this year. This is the thing that you can see from home on TV. He’s just not hitting the ball like he used to.

'via Blog this'

Also, it's good to see the numbers confirm that Brandon Crawford is back to hitting the ball hard, Andrew McCutchen is really, really hitting the ball hard and often and Evan Longoria maybe should mix in a walk every now and again. And Belt, while he might not be Freddie Freeman, is still pretty darn good.

Also, not news that Kelby Tomlinson has no ISO. He's still pretty productive with his AB's. Buster Posey, only 2 HR's...really? Yeah, I guess I can believe that. He goes through this and then he'll go on a 2-3 week tear and gets back on pace for around 15 HR's. Not too worry....yet.

6-9, dudes! - McCovey Chronicles

Let's do the math.
6-9 = .400 ball.

• .400 ball = 65-97 final record
• 65-97 record = zero improvement over last year. 
• Zero Improvement over last year = UNACCEPTABLE!!

from McCovey Chronicles:
Chroncast #76: 6-9, dudes! - McCovey Chronicles:

Yes, the Belt Wars get some play in this week’s episode, which is admittedly not the most topical discussion to have, but still feels pretty relevant to the first 3 weeks of the regular season. But rather than watch pitches go by, we take a swing at other topics including: did the Giants make a mistake sticking with Beede over Suarez? Is Mac Williamson simply too good to be on the Giants? Is the definitive Josh Osich the one we’re seeing now? We also tackle your Twitter questions.

'via Blog this'

• OK, Longoria and McCutcheon aren't going anywhere. 
• OK, Pence goes down to AAA, Williamson goes to AAAA or LF, whatever. 
• Whoever authorized keeping Beede over Suarez needs their head examined. 
• Whoever still sees something in Osich also needs their head examined. 

Belt is the least of the Giants many problems right now, although he has Joey Votto-itis minus the production. Swing the bat once in a while, you're not Ted Williams and the Moneyball - OBA love fest is over, replaced by exit velo and launch angle.

You get neither with the bat on your shoulders.

Oh, and fire Hensley Meulens, please.

Minor League Baseball Players are About To Get Screwed - McCovey Chronicles

Of course they are....they are in out of their league when it comes to playing the game called politics. There is nobody fighting for them including the MLBPA. If you want to rail at somebody in all this, rail at them.

Minor League salaries are abysmally low in order to allow guys like Bryce Harper a shot at ringing the register for $400 million dollars. The NFL players union caters to the stars, the NBA players union caters to the stars. Nobody advocates for the lesser lights.

Break off a piece of that action and sprinkle it across the minor leagues and then tell me more about fairness and equality. Why do I feel like some these guys who advocate this position drive around with Bernie Sanders bumper stickers? Clueless....

MLBPA where are you? MIA?

from mccoveychronicles.com
https://www.mccoveychronicles.com/2018/3/21/17146268/the-prospect-round-up-3-21-18-minor-league-baseball-players-are-about-to-get-screwed?ref=digest

The Prospect Round-Up 3/21/18 - Minor League Baseball Players are About To Get Screwed

Kevin J. Cunningham

Design by Kevin J. Cunningham

TRIGGER WARNING: I'm about to talk Politics.
I know I'm going to get some comments or replies on this saying to "Stick to Sports". Oh well. This is about sports.

I hate it when the sport I love does something that makes me want to stop supporting it, writing about it, and move on to something else. But it's doing it right now.

The organization of Baseball (comprised of both the Major and Minor Leagues) is attempting an end run around legislation subcommittees and lawsuits, by including a rider on a massive government spending bill that exempts minor league players from federal labor law protections.

Omnibus subplot: Effort afoot to write labor-law exemption for minor league baseball into spending bill, quashing players' wage claims.https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/spending-bill-could-quash-minor-league-baseball-players-wage-claims/2018/03/18/d31cd76e-2b0a-11e8-8ad6-fbc50284fce8_story.html …— Mike DeBonis (@mikedebonis) 10:48 PM - Mar 18, 2018 The ultimate in inside baseball. MLB billionaires working to secretly get an exemption from minimum wage laws so they can continue to pay minor leaguers nothing during spring training and $4 per hour during the season. https://twitter.com/mikedebonis/status/975564643157463040 …— Garrett Broshuis (@broshuis) 11:30 PM - Mar 18, 2018

By doing this, they will skip various subcommittees that are there to discuss labor matters in full. It will just happen. And the travesty of how minor league players are paid and kept in poverty will remain.

Garrett Broshius, former Giants prospect and the lawyer helping to lead the lawsuits against Minor League Baseball for their payment of players, has been vocal about this latest version of the bill. He shared this letter written by a prospect who left baseball, and explaining why.

Here's a legit MLB prospect walking away from the game because of financial woes. He made under $8,000 last year at the upper levels of the minors. But yes, let's give MLB an exemption from minimum wage laws.

http://www.stlsportspage.com/CARDSBASEBALL/tabid/91/entryid/12071/economics-of-playing-in-minors-prompts-cardinals-prospect-to-retire.aspx#sthash.clydCl4S.4AQExARk.dpbs …— Garrett Broshuis (@broshuis) 11:26 AM - Mar 19, 2018

It takes a while for him to get to the financial side of it, but it's worth reading. The fact that teams pay players as "Seasonal Employees" when they are expected to maintain rigid offseason workout programs and report their progress in, but not be paid to do so nor have those facilities to do it in, is insulting. Minor League players are also not paid for Spring Training.

Baseball insists that minor leaguers should view their employment as a "Stepping stone" rather than a career, and compares them to fast food employees in that regard, according to an interview published by Baseball America.

They continue to push the argument that raising the salaries of minor leaguers will essentially destroy minor league baseball, throwing those clubs into debt and closing them, ending the jobs of thousands of other workers at those stadiums who are protected by minimum wage law. This is complete BS, since minor league players are paid by their major league team, not the minor league ownership. I have yet to see anyone try to get the organizations of baseball to explain this argument further.

O'Conner says "We're not saying that it shouldn't go up," in the Post article…and yet, they spend millions on these lobbyists rather than making minor league salaries go up.

I feel strongly about this. I feel disgusted by the people who run this sport that I love and that I write about (for free). This is my opinion. But if it is yours as well, now is the time and try and get those in Congress to do something. This isn't a party issue; both Democratic Leaders and Republican Leaders seem to support this bill.

If you want to, you can use this website to help find your constituents. I would also suggest contacting the four Congress leaders: Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, House Speaker Paul Ryan, and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi.

Tell them you believe Minor League Baseball Players are more than interns. Ask them how they can allow workers to be asked to work year-round and not get paid. Ask them why it's minor league organizations that are being threatened when the pay of the responsibility of Major League clubs. Ask them why they think this deserves to skip the methods other labor rules have to take. Ask them why baseball gets to be the exception.
Ask them why, just because it's a game played by kids, does it not protect its players like adults.

Okay, that's my political rant. I won't do that often, but I feel very strongly about this issue. If players don't get paid in the minors, they can not be in top shape. They can not stay healthy or well-fed. They can not support families that they are kept away from for months at a time. And, ultimately, it causes players to leave the game, or young athletes to choose other sports.

This will hurt baseball. Not tomorrow. But in the long run. And it will hurt real people tomorrow.
This is a baseball issue. I'm not a fan of the Player's Union, but this is cheap baseball owners trying to save a buck rather than invest in the players who will (in their near-future) compose the teams they make their bucks on. It's frustrating.

Giants drop close one to Braves, 9-0 | McCovey Chronicles

 

I am growing a bit weary of the mantra that the Giants -- individually or in aggregate -- are the "unluckiest" team on the face of the earth.

Let's review the facts:

• They ended the last half of the 2016 with the worst record in baseball.
• They have started the first half of this season with the worst record in baseball, except for the pesky Phillies who at least had the decency to finish strong last season.
• Combined, this gives us the worst record in baseball for almost a full season worth of games.

Luck shows up in the short-term or in a short series. That's why the playoffs are such a crap shoot and the "best team" on paper doesn't always win.

Skill demonstrates itself over the long-term. Small sample sizes go bye bye and conclusions can be drawn. 

My conclusion: This team sucks. They are not unlucky, the are lesser skilled than their opponents.

Some in the blog-osphere are coming around to this conclusion. Like Grant over at McCovey Chronicles. 

from McCovey Chronicles:
https://www.mccoveychronicles.com/2017/6/19/15835200/giants-recap-why-are-you-even-reading-this

The thing about bad teams is that they can keep it close. It's not like every 100-loss team is down 9-0 before the fifth inning of every game. That's not how baseball works. Most wins and losses are built incrementally. A misplay here. A missed location here. A double play with the bases loaded there. They build and build and build, and you wonder, hey, maybe this is just bad luck! 

No. You have watched bad baseball before. You have watched good baseball before. This is the former. I will admit to being someone hoping for bad luck in the second half of last season, but it's been almost a full calendar year. This team is abysmal.

There is another option in play and I hesitate to bring it up because it calls into question the professionalism of the individuals involved. As Micheal Mauboussin describes in his book The Success Equation: Untangling Skill and Luck in Business, Sports and Investing if you can lose on purpose, skill dominates the activity, if you can't lose on purpose then luck likely dominates that activity.

From Michael Mauboussin:

There’s a simple and elegant test of whether there is skill in an activity: ask whether you can lose on purpose. If you can’t lose on purpose, or if it’s really hard, luck likely dominates that activity. If it’s easy to lose on purpose, skill is more important.

Could the Giants be losing on purpose? Not like throwing games on purpose, but is the team chemistry so out of whack from the glory years when this was virtually Team Chemistry to the current version that appears to be a something constructed by the young ladies from Mean Girls? 

I'm just asking. It seems a little more likely than some of the other alternatives. A lot of guys are playing like they have just literally forgotten how to play baseball (Matt Moore, Derek Law, Hunter Pence). They certainly have forgotten how to play at the level they once performed at, so what gives?

In fairness, we do tend to say a winning team has "good chemistry" and the total is greater than the sum of the parts when they out-perform our expectations (some SABR types default to "luck" here).

Is it possible that since the Giants are grossly under-performing even our most modest expectations over the last full season of games that somewhere bad team chemistry is at work?

If that's the case, the Giants front-office needs to tinker with the roster. The bullpen is an absolute shambles right now. Melancon, Law, Osich all have terrible ERA/WHIP whatever your pet stat is. Osich makes me long for Will Smith and he's a big LHP who can't get LH hitters out.

The only guys I have some confidence in are Strickland, Guerrin and Kontos.

The starting pitchers are a mess. Cueto is crumbling under the weight of carrying the staff in Bumgarners absence, Samardzia, even though .he's cleaned it up lately, seems to lose his way just long enough to lose his way. Matt Moore has totally lost his way and Matt Cain is still doing it with smoke and mirrors. It's as if hitters who've been around for a few years are saying "That's Matt Cain? Really dude?" and swinging at the old Matt Cain stuff. Once they adjust, it's game over for Matty, Except that we owe him a lot of money and management seems to want to get at least some ROR on the money. Greedy capitalists!! It;s what Bernie's been telling us all along!!

Anyway, the pitchers should be suing the hitters for non-support. Or is this another example of bad luck run amok? Eight guys all swinging the bats like it was a wet newspaper or a girls purse simultaneously? What are the odds of that happening? No productive outs, no clutch 2 out RBI. Hell, most nights, hardly any RBI at all. What gives?

Maybe it's time for an intervention of some kind. We've tried a good, old-fashioned bench clearing brawl and that didn't turn out too well. Maybe Dr. Phil is available.

Or Peyton Manning:
https://www.hulu.com/watch/1603
http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/united-way/n12129?snl=1