So the NLCS starts tonight and the ALCS starts tomorrow night. I am assuming there is no one more than 20 miles from Chavez Ravine who wants the Dodgers to win.
The only argument for the Dodgers is that a three-peat might focus the minds of the two sides a bit in the upcoming CBA negotiations, but it’s a bad argument.
So: Brewers? Guardians? Rays?
Discuss.
Rays. If only because I don’t want any NL teams to win if the Braves can’t. And I have to go with Rob since he’s close to the Rays and the Rays are the only SE team left.
Brother, if you ain’t going for the Rays the second the Braves got bounced, I dunno what it’s going to take. Lol. The Rays are all that is good about MLB, and I’ll be in attendance tonight in our supposedly terrible but secretly beautiful dome.
It’s funny, the Rays have made the ALCS in 2008, 2020, and 2026. I was at 2008, fans weren’t allowed in 2020, and I’ll be there again in 2026. I’ll be sitting in the same section as I was in 2008 (the upper deck because I was a broke college kid back then).
Milwaukee, like Boston, is a Braves city. I will root for them
I’m definitely cheering for Brewers/Rays. Either way, I think the World Series is coming out of the NL.
Same tbh.
Either Rays or Brewers, so if you’re counting responses, 1/2 to each. I don’t mind the Dodgers – yes, they have tons of $, but so do the Yankees & Mets, and the Dodgers seem to develop their farm system (sometimes for trade chips) as well as buying free agents. As long as it’s not the Mets, Yankees, or Phillies, in that order of dislike, I’m ok. That said, Milwaukee & the Rays both seem easy to root for, and neither has ever won a WS, so I guess I’ll root for one of them.
Brewers and Freddie.
Coop: aren’t three rings for Freddie enough? I mean, I know he has ten fingers, and I love the guy, but my solicitude need not include another championship. Actually, it’s interesting that the Dodgers and Brewers have guys with 2021 rings, and the Guardians are managed by a guy with a 2021 ring. And the Rays have Jorge Mateo.
Brewers vs Rays. What will actually happen is a glorious 3rd title for the Dodgers and what an inspirational story it will be.
Brewers vs. Guardians, since my father-in-law is from Warren, OH.
Of course, he basically swore off the Guardians for 10 years after they blew the 2016 World Series to the Cubs.
RE: Riley’s treatment vs. Acuna’s
To sdp’s point, people have accepted Riley is mostly cooked. Acuna’s supposedly up for a $300M+ contract. And we can’t get a healthy, good season out of him to save his life. That’s why he’s getting critiqued. Riley also doesn’t bring the drama that Acuna brings. I’ll be honest, I’m pretty done with Acuna.
These are Acuna’s WAR totals the last 6 years (6 years is a long time, by the way):
2021 – 3.5
2022 – 2.3
2023 – 8.4
2024 – 0.0
2025 – 3.1
2025 – 1.9
Averaged out, that’s a 3.2 WAR season. And how much are really going to pay for a 30-to-38 year old player or whatever when he’s only averaged 3.2 WAR during his actual peak? Some team is going to give him $300M and they’re going to be left holding the bag.
We’re stuck with Riley, and he needs to figure out a way to get to being a 2 WAR player, and we can just accept that. He needs to get back to a .700 OPS, swipe a few bags, play good defense, and play every day. He had the last 3 covered last year, and he just needs to have a dead cat bounce at the plate. I sincerely hope there’s some truth that it indeed takes longer than originally perceived to fully recover from his hip problems.
The racial insinuations are just silly; we love Acuna’s best friend even though he’s in clear physical decline just fine. It’s just a matter of expectations.
It didn’t take long, but I think I’m kinda over the idea of blowing up the position player core. You’re stuck with Profar, so you’re going to have a platoon in LF of Yaz and Profar and I’m just not sure what can be done there. We probably don’t do anything with Harris or Acuna. We’re stuck with Riley, Albies is good value, and Olson is deity. I’d take Kim’s $20M, spend it elsewhere, and just get some sort of Nick Allen-type. Just go get a Hoover vacuum at SS. Even if Kim hit, he’s not that great of a defender. I’m unimpressed with his arm, range, and hands. In 168 PAs, Nick Allen was worth 1.3 WAR for $1.4M because he’s just so incredibly slick. You’re just not spending that money any better elsewhere. Go get a wizard and call it a day. Sadly, Dubon is probably gone based on the shortstop market. I really liked him. Use his $8M elsewhere.
Murphy will have his first true full healthy offseason in a while. I’d love to see what he does. He showed flashes. Riley will also be fully healthy. You can make the argument that this position player core really wasn’t in the best position to be successful when the season started: Profar was gone, Kim was injured, Murphy was injured, and Riley was apparently not fully healthy.
And it’s a lot of the same on the pitching side: just get guys freaking healthy and ready to contribute. And I think we did a lot this year to ensure that. We limited Fuentes and Lopez’s innings. We didn’t rush Strider back. We didn’t rush Schwellenbach back. All 4 of those guys go into the offseason in a really good spot compared to last offseason. Sale will be one year older, but it’s not like our pitching is aging out the way the position player core is aging out a little. You can probably replace Iglesias in the FA market by making Suarez the closer and then signing another late inning reliever for the same price as Iglesias. Or just bring Iglesias back for pretty much the same price.
Of course, the fans will not like this answer, but I don’t care It’s AA’s job to care.
One of the Hammer Territory guys made the observation that Acuña is no longer a productive player unless he’s 100% healthy. Any time he has been playing through some kind of nagging lower body injury, he’s basically a replacement level player. If I had to guess, he probably plays fearful of injury now, and who could blame him. But from a roster construction angle, the problem is that he he’s had one healthy season (excluding COVID season) this decade. And, when healthy, he won the MVP convincingly. But that was three years ago and he’s got an ACL repair in between that time. I don’t think I’m ready to trade him, but I think the idea he’s going to get a big contract extension to stay in Atlanta is kind of a fantasy. He will almost certainly reach free agency and from there I don’t know what to make of his value. I imagine a lot will be answered over the next two seasons.
Extending Acuna would be nuts. We should pick up his 2027 option and look to trade him if he has a good season. If we have a rule we don’t trade players who signed team-friendly deals, fine. Pick up 2028 if he’s worth it, then let him play it out and walk when he’s pushing 31
A big disappointment I have with Acuna is that he doesn’t seem to have matured a lot as a player. His baserunning can be absolutely stupid, he still takes some strange angles in the outfield at times, and at the risk of sounding like Joe Simpson, he sometimes shows a lack of hustle. I will say that his reaction to his play in the playoffs was encouraging to me. Him taking full responsibility seems to be a good sign. When is the last off-season he was given a chance to work on his game and not just rehabbing from injury?
I would not be surprised to see him have a really good year next year. If he does I don’t see why we should not consider resigning him – I think I will be happy if we either trade him and get excellent value or re-sign him. If he has a season like this year (WAR below 2), I think trading him is a no-brainer. I think we would still get some value in teams thinking they could turn him around.
On the WS, I’m with most everyone else. I want to see the Brewers and Rays. I don’t have a huge preference for who wins between those two.
On Riley, I think we are stuck with him. My guess is he will have some sort of revival next year. If he doesn’t turn it around, I don’t think we can take another year like last year for the entire season. Maybe we could swap with another bad contract, but that’s about it. It is still hard to believe that RAJ had a 1.9 WAR and Riley’s WAR was at 1.1. I would have thought there would have been a lot more separation than that. I realize a lot of that is Riley had 150 more at bats, but Riley’s season seemed to be historically bad. Acuna’s just seemed average.
Lessons from tonight: (a) it is possible to get runs off Yamamoto; (b) apparently Roberts biggest problem is Riley x 10000 — Ohtani is completely lost at the plate, but you can’t sit him down.
He’s clearly hurt. It’s amazing that both the Dodgers and Yankees entered September with essentially no fear of missing the playoffs and essentially just one job: keep your best player healthy. And both of them completely failed to do it, letting both Ohtani and Judge take way too many clearly painful hacks in way too many meaningless games before belatedly saying oopsie and sending them back to the IL. The Yankees got steamrolled in the Division Series and the back-to-back champs are in danger of getting sent packing in the LCS, all so Judge could hit .174 in seven games and Ohtani could hit .200 in eight games in September.
Judge also came dangerously close to insubordination regarding the Yankees’ plans to let him heal, so I get that it can be hard to manage these personalities. But that’s really the team’s biggest job. You’ve got nine figures invested in the guy and the whole reason is so he’ll be healthy for the playoffs.
Whoops!
I didn’t make him Captain. The Yankees have the temerity to have a Captain… no other team does to my knowledge. When you have a Captain, he can’t be insubordinate, can he?
That said, for a player of his stature to complain that he didn’t make the team for the playoffs… yeesh!
A Captain can absolutely be insubordinate! If the term means anything, it implies that there’s a chain of command – he occupies a privileged position, but just as he has people who look to his example and follow his lead, he also serves and takes orders from more senior leadership.
A captain worth his salt shouldn’t go popping off to the media and petulantly whining about his manager not letting him play even though he thinks he can grit through the pain, but that’s what he did, and that’s the example he’s setting, and it isn’t admirable.
Riley still has great bat speed and exit velocity. His swing is too pronounced an uppercut to succeed. Against Duren, he connected against a 100 mph fastball but when you watch the side view of that swing you appreciate just how unlikely that connection was. He needs to flatten his swing and get shorter to the ball. I have no doubt he can be a .280 hitter with a lot of doubles if he stops trying to hit 40 homers. And he might not even hit fewer homers.
Love Ronnie, but you should probably trade him now or soon as long as we get a good return as the Braves won’t sign him in two years. Profar will never play for the Braves again, I think.
Riley, I sat next to a guy at the dodgers game who claimed that his kind of injury just takes a long time to get the strength back in his upper body. Don’t know if that’s the case. Maybe it’s just a better shrink.
if you know you are not going to resign a player like RAJ, then you trade them nd load up on prospects to flip.o
2 year contract extension for Mattingly in Philly.
I would be absolutely livid if I were a Phillies fan, but as it is, I am absolutely delighted!
Imagine having this kind of Jedi on your team:
https://x.com/justbb_media/status/2110119708322398354?s=46
Hiring Mattingly gives me the impression that the Phillies plan to do some kind of light rebuild which might diminish their competitiveness in the near term.
Ububba, just saw Sugar here in DC – your buddy David Barbe’s in fine form!
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