There is no fucking way Martin Maldonado isn’t calling pitches for Cristian Javier in the biggest game of the season tomorrow night.
The only lineup question is if Dusty goes with Chas or Dubon in center field against Scherzer.
There is no fucking way Martin Maldonado isn’t calling pitches for Cristian Javier in the biggest game of the season tomorrow night.
The only lineup question is if Dusty goes with Chas or Dubon in center field against Scherzer.
Exactly. Martin will start tomorrow. And he should. It’s not up to him to win this. That’s on Yordan. Abreu, Altuve etc.
You know damn well Dubon’s in center again tomorrow.
I respectfully disagree. I doubt it’s just Dusty making this call. Verlander wants to win and he wants the best catcher possible behind what he’s trying to accomplish.
Diaz had a great season. But I don’t think anyone (including the players) thinks this is his time yet.
I will happily accept descending opinions.
Verlander has earned the right to have a personal catcher based on his career accomplishments. Nobody else in the Astros’ rotation has. But, the Astros’ pitching staff trusts Maldy explicitly, and Baker isn’t stupid. He isn’t going to rock the boat unless its absolutely necessary.
Dubon has been hitting well in the postseason. I kinda understand why he is playing. I hope Brantley is in there tomorrow, and I hope Tucker takes extra BP.
In a season elimination game I would pick Javier to start. And it seems like that’s where we are.
So let’s get our second or third best hitters in the lineup and see what happens.
Win Game 7 tomorrow, crush the arlington mouth-breathers’ hopes, piss off to all sorts mlb, that fuckwit manfred, and the rest of the haters…
Paraphrasing Neo in “the Matrix”, we need runs. Lots of runs.
I think if Dusty approached Justin during the season (and yes, he was only here the last few months but he started probably around 10 games) and said “Look, we need Diaz to catch you at least one game in case you have to throw to him in the playoffs if Maldy gets hurt or is out for any reason” I seriously doubt JV puts up a fight.
That’s all academic at this point. Need to focus on Javier and the team tonight. Positive vibes only. We’ve needed to win game 7’s before and have come through in the past so hopefully they can lean on that experience and do NOT PRESS.
Good fucking grief.
That’s 3 games with around 82% strike accuracy and now a 74?
Fucking hell these guys suck donkey balls.
Every game these guys get worse, and every game it’s worse in favor of the Rangers.
This is an NBA-level rat-fucking.
I think one game the scorecard was slightly in our favor but the rest have been awful. It also seems to be worse for us as the bad calls seem to occur early on in the game, so it not only impacts that at bat but each subsequent at bat as now that hitter has to expand his zone to swing at pitches at least 6 inches off the plate.
We get frustrated at our guys swinging at slop at critical times but I wonder how many can be traced back to shitty calls in a previous at bat.
Bottom line we need robo umps asap.
Exactly. The classic was Bregman’s first at bat. I mean last night, not the one on Friday where he got totally fucked too. With two on and no outs, the first-pitch heading into the Astros’ dugout is called a strike. Bregman - behind in the count now for the entire at bat - eventually flies out to CF. Astros get only 1 run out of a potentially huge inning.
In isolation, that’s just how it is. Bregman should’ve been a professional hitter and played through one bad call. But it’s not one bad call; especially for Bregman. He has seemingly been singled out for rat-fucking all series. Which is no coincidence because with Altuve and Brantley in front of him, he often comes to the plate with the potential to do some damage.
Further, the Astros have come away empty-handed from several bases-loaded situations with less than 2 outs; some of them with no outs. How can that be? Well there has been some poor hitting for sure. But there have been ridiculous strike calls sprinkled here and there in all of those situations that relieve the pressure on the pitcher and put the hitter on the defensive while expanding their swing zone making them much easier outs.
I was skeptical of this thumb-on-the-scale theory, even after the García/Abreu nonsense from Friday. But not any more. The reason I disappeared from the GZ mid game last night was because I turned the game off to preserve my sanity.
At one point, HPU called a ball that was about a foot off the plate a strike, and all the Ranger-sniffers in the comms booth could say was “wow”. Even they had no explanation as to what we were seeing. It doesn’t get more obvious than that.
Great post, agree on all counts. When six umps gather, incompetence is usually individual, but collectively a willful strategy.
Bregman needs more Bregman in him, and less Ensberg.
He’s been taking pitches off the plate that are called strikes. They have no need to pitch in to him if that’s the case.
He’s also taking a lot of fat pitches down the middle.
At the biggest point in the game last night bregman worked a 3-0, took strike one middle/middle, then gets the same pitch again and popped it foul to the catcher. He knew he was going to get a FB because they didn’t want no outs, 2 on for Yordan, and did dick with it.
The umpires have been absolutely awful, and it’s suspiciously one-sided enough that it feels biased against the Astros, but the players still have to perform when given the chance.