I believe the Yankees have a great home advantage, with the tendency of their park to give up homers and them batting last and everything.  I think we’ll see a few more walk-off homers before the season is done, and perhaps ESPN will only spend 15 minutes, versus the entire show, on the “phenomenon.”

There are people who still watch ESPN?  I made the mistake of looking at it last night to hear “coming up next: which reality show will be better Keyshawn’s or T.O.?”  I then burned Chris Berman in effigy (again!) and found a sports channel to watch

That A’s/Twins game was historic in another sense: I checked Baseball Reference.com, and since 1954 (as far back as their database goes for this stuff) there has never been a game in which the starter gave up 11 earned runs or more and the team managed to eek out a win. 

The max is 10 ER, which has been done 6 times, 5 of them since 1997, and as recently as last year, when Pettitte gave up 10 against the Royals, but the Yanks won 12-11. 

Jaime Navarro allowed 11 runs (10 ER) in 4.2 innings and his team won, 14-12, in 1997.

David—rail against bad umpiring all you want, but your accusations of actual corruption are beyond the pale.  If you have evidence for such a thing, great, advance it. Absent such evidence, however, your comments in that regard are potentially libelous and will not be tolerated here.

Before you call a team immature, perhaps you should research the whole story.  Karstens getting beaned has more to do than just retaliation for him hitting Ryan Braun back in April.  It has more to do with most of the Pirates bench not knowing how to keep their emotions in check and their mouths shut during their losing streak to the Brewers.

Yep.  Because taken in context it’s quite apparent that the threat was, indeed, idle, and not serious.  Just as a snarky comment about how “man, who paid off the ump” comment after the Twins game wouldn’t reasonably be construed as libelous.

David’s comments, however, were far more serious, far more specific, and were made with no apparent satirical, sarcastic, or humorous intent.  To the contrary, taken together with many of his other comments, there is every reason to believe that he was serious in his accusation of corruption.

Ultimately this is my judgment to make, and I’ve chosen to err on the side of caution with respect to what appear to be serious, albeit unfounded, accusations of corruption.  I’ll gladly take further discussion on this matter—from you too, David—but that’s where I am right now.

Be fair, Craig.  Livan and Frenchy outperforming their capabilities had nothing to do with a fluke, and everything to do with the fact that they were playing the Nats.

The White Sox are only 1 game behind the Tigers now, not 1.5 games.  :(

Jack Marshall approves of this rant by David.

(just playin’ around, Jack!)

Obviously, it would be pretty selfish and narcissistic of me to get into a detailed discussion about my the nature of my comments, but I will say that I absolutely recognize and appreciate your tolerance with my posts.  There are a lot of mods at a lot of boards who love to commandeer the threads and punish posters and delete comments for no better reason than because they’re power-tripping losers, but THT has not behaved like that at all.  So I’m not trying to feign victimhood or anything like that, I actually feel pretty darn fortunate to be able to rant and get into heated discussions at this site.

Having said that, my comments about MLB umpiring (a topic which I’ve also written about at ‘Prospectus’, to no avail whatsoever) were (a) nothing even close to libelous, as I was writing a hypothetical scenario and it was clearly written as an opinion, and (b) the word “probably” mitigates it from any libelous claims, and yet you cited that as a reason that it was libelous.  It’s just totally wrong.

It’s no fun to be suspicious of officiating, anymore than it’s fun to think that legal cases can be corrupted by unconstitutional laws, an attorney’s friendship with a judge, political pressure, or anything else.  For me, like most people, there’s a very strong desire to have confidence in the honesty and integrity of the systems we’re involved with.  (Otherwise, hell, it’s just chaos, right?) 

But it’s because honesty and integrity is so crucial that we have to diligently police the policemen (literally and metaphorically) and that, when we sense that the system is deviating from its rules, the problem must be diagnosed and then cured. 

MLB umpiring this season, in my opinion, has been inexcusably incompetent.  And the magnitude of that incompetence, coupled with many of the calls that I’ve seen, leads me to suspect that it’s actually beyond mere incompetence, it’s been contaminated and corrupted by some external force. 

My suspicion in umpires is compounded by this fact: In addition to them harming the legitimacy of the competition, we’ve also seen umpires become very comfortable provoking players into arguments, as well as inciting physical confrontations.  (Note that umpires have to have a lot of confidence that MLB has got their back to, say, pick a fight with a 250 lb. 27 year-old man, who’s a physical specimen and who’s also in a heated frame of mind from being involved in a competition.  Would you start sh—with, say, Carlos Zambrano?  Hell no.  The only circumstances where umps would do that would be where they knew that they knew they were protected by MLB.)

Anyway, I haven’t the time nor the resources to really do a sophisticated study about this phenomenon I’ve observed, and I definitely don’t have the power to take any actions to correct the problem.  So maybe I’m especially aggravated because of my powerlessness over the problem.  But, as a fan, the “integrity of the game” is, in fact, the foundation upon which the entertainment is built.  And I think that that foundation is crumbling, but fans and the media think that if they just ignore it, it’ll go away.  No, it won’t go away.  It’s going to get worse.  If it hasn’t already, MLB will soon become the NBA.  And then it’ll be the WWE, except, unlike wrestling fans, baseball fans will be pretending that their competitions are legitimate.

——-

One other note.  You wrote:

“If I’m being too conservative in that estimate, fine, I’ll risk that rather than not being cautious enough.”

If you’re going to err to one side or another, I personally think that you should err to the side of freedom of speech.  I think it’s just the right thing to do and it also leads to more vibrant discourses.  But that’s just my opinion.

And, again, I appreciate that you and THT have granted me (and other posters, no doubt) far more license to speak at this site than many other sites.