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From The Athletic:
The latest FanGraphs projections have 17 teams lined up to win between 30 and 33 games this season. Right. Seventeen! For those of us who have always dreamed of, say, a six-team tiebreaker to decide the last wild-card spot, who says dreams never come true?
I mentioned this projection to an executive of a team that fought bullpen-meltdown issues for much of last season. He had to go hunt for some Advil immediately.
“If you’re kicking away games in the eighth inning every night this year,” he said, “oh my god. That’s gonna hurt.”
An AL exec had the same thought.
“Say your closer has a bad week,” he said. “They all have one. He gives up a bomb one night. He can’t find the plate the next night. There’s a bad break —somebody doesn’t make a play — the next night. Is somebody going to get demoted out of the ninth inning based on three games? That’ll definitely happen, because it won’t feel like three games. It will feel like 10 games.”
“But now the value of ‘every day’ is amplified by almost three. So I think you’re going to see some wild emotional swings in some of these front offices. It’s going to be very weird and very strange.”
(By the way, of those 17 teams projected to win 30-33 games three are in the AL Central and four are in the NL Central. If Fangraphs is right there won't be much separation at all between seven of the ten teams in those divisions. Should be a lot of games between evenly matched teams with every game's importance multiplied by a factor of 2.7. This season is going to be intense from start to finish. The last few weeks will be insane.)
The latest FanGraphs projections have 17 teams lined up to win between 30 and 33 games this season. Right. Seventeen! For those of us who have always dreamed of, say, a six-team tiebreaker to decide the last wild-card spot, who says dreams never come true?
I mentioned this projection to an executive of a team that fought bullpen-meltdown issues for much of last season. He had to go hunt for some Advil immediately.
“If you’re kicking away games in the eighth inning every night this year,” he said, “oh my god. That’s gonna hurt.”
An AL exec had the same thought.
“Say your closer has a bad week,” he said. “They all have one. He gives up a bomb one night. He can’t find the plate the next night. There’s a bad break —somebody doesn’t make a play — the next night. Is somebody going to get demoted out of the ninth inning based on three games? That’ll definitely happen, because it won’t feel like three games. It will feel like 10 games.”
“But now the value of ‘every day’ is amplified by almost three. So I think you’re going to see some wild emotional swings in some of these front offices. It’s going to be very weird and very strange.”
(By the way, of those 17 teams projected to win 30-33 games three are in the AL Central and four are in the NL Central. If Fangraphs is right there won't be much separation at all between seven of the ten teams in those divisions. Should be a lot of games between evenly matched teams with every game's importance multiplied by a factor of 2.7. This season is going to be intense from start to finish. The last few weeks will be insane.)