Fear The Chorizo

I view wild card teams in the current system as not quite playoff teams - IMO the wildcard round is a play-in game to reach the NLDS. Thats the price you pay for not winning a division. If people don't like that format then baseball should just go back to 1 wildcard team and 4 teams per league in the postseason division series. No way should there be a completely separate wildcard series of any length, because even now as it is set up the NLDS starts a couple days too late in my opinion.

I would argue just the opposite. The team that won 106 games in the regular season and has the 2nd best record in ALL of baseball is playing one game against a team that won 90 games to determine their fate. On top of that, if they win, then they go on to play the team with the best record instead of reranking based on regular season records. Seems to me like the regular season really is not being prioritized at all. They didn't win 16 more games than the Cards because of an "unbalanced" schedule where they play teams in their division more. In fact, I would argue that they would have won more games if they were in the East or Central. The West is clearly the strongest division in the NL. I'm not shedding any tears for LA and I also think having WC teams is great. In fact I have issues with the current financial structure in MLB and big market TV contracts, but that's a different discussion. I'm trying to look at it objectively and I think a team with the 2nd best record in baseball deserves more than a 1 game playoff. Saying that it "evens out" over the years seems like an admission that it is sometimes not fair to certain teams. So, why not attempt to fix it or make it better rather than assuming it will all even out. Again, 3 games is not perfect either, but it's so much better than 1 game. At least then you have to show some pitching depth. Yes, that would probably require shortening the regular season, but I think its worth it. We're looking at this differently - what I mean by prioritizing the regular season is emphasizing winning your division to give you a better chance at making a postseason run in baseball, because to me performing well enough over 162 games to win your division should give you an advantage over teams that don't in the playoffs, regardless if there is a wild card team or two with better regular season records. I think you're trying to emphasize comparing regular season records leaguewide among playoff teams and pointing out the overall wins discrepancy seemingly shorting the Dodgers this year - but failing to account for the fact that no team's schedules across baseball are the same, particularly when comparing teams across different divisions. Saying the NL west was easily the best division in the NL fails to account for the fact they had 2 doormat teams in it and a very disappointing Padres team that underperformed. It was the Padres who were supposed to win 110ish games and give the Dodgers a run for the division at the start of the year, not a Giants squad who I can't recall anyone saying would win 100+. And this has happened frequently in the 2 team wildcard era. In 2015, the Cubs and Pirates were the wildcard teams and they won 97 and 98 regular season games. In fact, since this format started in 2021 most years the top wildcard team won at least mid-90s games for each league and several seasons where both wild card teams in a league had better overall records than 1 or more division winners. That's just how uneven schedules go, and the cycle rotates across different divisions as groups of teams peak and wane over time.

If they want to stick with a 162 game regular season, then I think their current playoff format is about the best they can do - there's just not enough time on the calendar to add more games to a WC round, and I like the fact that each league has 5 teams making the postseason as I think it limits how many teams are in perpetual rebuilding/tank mode. I also really like the fact the wild card teams get put in a disadvantage for the 5 game divisional set against what is presumably the top seed in each league right after a 1 game WC round - at least in terms of a quick travel schedule and not having their pitching staff fully lined up and rested. It really does put a premium on winning your division and prioritizing the regular season. If winning a division wasn't a big deal to optimize postseason success, both the Giants and Dodgers wouldn't have pushed all the way to the end of the year, same as the Brewers and Cubs in 2018.

I don't have a problem with this. It's all subjective anyway depending on your criteria. Crosby is actually only 9 for 14 on game winning or potentially game winning kicks in his career which is 64.3%. However if you just look at the last 6 years he is 6 for 7. So it just really depends on how you look at his career as a whole. I do tend to think he's a different kicker now than he was early in his career up to 2012 which does skew the percentages against him. When you have to break down most of Crosby's struggles/inconsistency in the "early" part of his career being 6 seasons, and then his career has now had 9 more seasons after that at some point you've got to realize that he's probably a pretty darn good kicker or otherwise he'd never have lasted 15+ seasons with one team in the NFL. I remember early in his career when Crosby had the most inconsistency, it wasn't like he was missing a bunch of FGs under 40 yards even then - his disastrous 2012 kicking season was largely impacted by him being 2-9 from 50+, and four of his season's 5 missed FG attempts under 50 came in that one game at the Lions. Crosby has the longevity that he has with the Packers because after he "lost it", he found a way to recover and actually become a more reliable kicker before getting cut - when most other kickers start "losing it", the can't rebound quickly enough before their original team cuts them. Ask the Bears and Vikings if they'd rather have GB's situation over the last 15 seasons or their own - I'd imagine the overall percentage of kicks made/missed between them and the Packers is quite similar over that time, but that doesn't mean there's a huge difference in having confidence in your kicker being able to make a big kick when it matters most at the end of a game and having that moment resting on one kicker over those years instead of 5-8 different ones depending on which season you're talking about from 2007-present. Some of that stigma rests more with the organizations than with the individual kickers they bring in - the endless churning at that spot almost is self-perpetuating because I think it messes with the guys they bring in mentally. Hell, the Vikings drafted Carlson in 2018 in the 5th round and cut him after TWO games following a 3 FG missed game at Green Bay - and was picked up by the Raiders and has been a very reliable kicker ever since.

They got unlucky because they won 106 games and didn't get a division title. If they wanted a division title instead of the Giants maybe they should have won the season series against them....Giants won that 10-9 in head to head matchups, and wound up winning the division by that 1 game in the standings. I discount total # of wins for teams in different divisions because of how the schedule is weighted to inter-divisional matchups and discrepancies with interleague opponents. NL Central and NL East teams didn't have the benefit of padding their W-L records against the Dbacks (worst team in the NL) by playing them almost 20 times. Sure, the NL Central and East may not have had top heavy teams capable of winning 100 games - although I'd argue the Brewers could have gotten there had they not been cruise control the last two weeks of the season if they really needed 5 more W's.

To be fair, nobody runs on the Buccaneers even when teams give it 20-30 carries of effort - and that goes back quite awhile

One thing is for certain...Gute knows how to ID offensive line talent in the draft.

March down and score a TD here to put get this game out of hand

This is the type of program-wide decline on the offensive side of the ball that gets coaches fired by good programs...it's both the lack of talent (i.e., poor recruiting and more importantly development) and poor coaching (system, playcalling, in-game decisions, etc) that are the problem. Blame for both of those falls in the lap of the head coach. I really think the Badgers will be fortunate to make any bowl this year, which is amazing given how terrible the Big Ten West appears to be. I'm pretty sure Leonard is probably picking out window treatments for the head coach's office in Madison mentally right now.

The Bears played in Wrigley quite awhile until the 1970s when they moved into soldier field....and there was already discussion about renovations starting in the late 1970s that involved threats to move to the burbs or temporarily playing at Notre Dame. When they were exploring soldier field renovations in the 1990s, I think they had kicked the tires on a large development site in Gary, IN and there were other plans laid out to the Park District to build a new stadium somewhere else along the lakefront/Northerly Island that would have given them more room to build a larger capacity stadium - that all got shot down and they opted to stick a spaceship inside the existing footprint of the soldier field structure, which drastically limited the stadium capacity and overall creature comforts inside it. That renovation was panned by basically everyone even before it was completed. Most of the time it was the Bears bringing up options to Chicago/Park District about relocating to a different part of the lakefront, and Chicago's response has consistently been "we have soldier field for you already in place"

I always enjoyed going to Arlington Park when I lived in the north burbs of Chicago....The Arlington Million was a fun horseracing day without having to drive far at all, and the track was a great part of my bachelor party - if the Bears go through with this, it'll be a shame that property gets turned into something that presents an unwatchable product for me, lol. There would need to be alot of infrastructure upgrades to properly develop that area - might be the reason to force the full 4 lane extension of highway 53 there...right now it just kind of abruptly dead ends a bit to the north. My guess is the team and the City of Chicago find a way to screw up what would be a great longterm opportunity, because that's what they do.

Frankly none of the pitching matchups for this weekend's series will have any impact on how the Brewers line their rotation up for the NLDS, which starts 5 full calendar days after game 162 of the regular season. Unless Woodruff or Burnes pitches into the 8th during Sunday's game (0% chance), there's nothing to even look at with pitching matchups aside from seeing them walk off the mound healthy this weekend.

I think this series will come down to who is better across innings 6-8, and how each team pitches through that part of the game that's typically a bridge to the 9th. Hoping the Brewers' starters can consistently work through 6 and into the 7th most games to minimize the number of outs the bullpen would need to get before handing the ball to Hader. Not having Williams to serve as that 8th inning hold role is tough against this Braves team that keeps coming at you offensively. I think the Brewers' bats get going enough to win this series in 4 - and I think there will be some uncharacteristic slugfests in these games (8-6 type of final scores).

If we just block people with less than 100 posts from commenting you solve 99% of the problem. Sounds like a great way to grow the board

In addition to the horse track area itself, that facility has a pretty large practice grounds and stables, too. Not to mention a bunch of crummy apartment complexes begging to be bought up and torn down...all in all they could easily pick up 400 plus acres in that area. Edit: article said the purchase would be 325 acres - thats plenty of space . Fwiw, the Lambeau field block is about 50 acres....if they were dead serious its actually a really good spot

Williams has already underwent one Tommy John Surgery (2017), missed the 2020 postseason with shoulder issues, had elbow discomfort again earlier this year, and now broke his hand punching a wall. When he's healthy, he's an extremely good reliever - but his biggest problem has been staying healthy, and that has more to do than his dumb actions with the broken hand. Who knows - if they wind up winning it all without him contributing, their pitching depth could easily lead to Williams being dealt this offseason or next year at the start of his arbitration process after he's hopefully proven to be the same pitcher following a fully healed broken hand. It's not like Grisham was automatically on the trading block after the 2019 season, and look how that turned out.

From tracking box scores, it seems like Keston has been hitting pretty well the last week +.....callup most likely to get him some ABs while guys who will be on the playoff roster get some rest, and probably also a mental pick-me-up to finish the regular season with the MLB club. Still rooting for this guy!

I think we're on our way towards college sports being fully professional sooner rather than later. Which would be a travesty, and is frankly not realistic or sustainable anywhere close to what we consider to be college sports presently. Aside from college football and men's college basketball, there are few sports that generate enough revenue for schools to support those individual programs on their own even without having those players on the university payroll. The only way this works financially in the long run is if colleges remove the scholarship aspect from the sports programs, and they essentially continue running specific athletic programs as entertainment for their universities - essentially the athletes playing at the colleges aren't students anymore. That works for the bigtime revenue sports, but it simply doesn't work for 90%+ of the rest of college sports. If you thought student athletes were treated unfairly prior to having the option to pay kids as athletes in a collegiate sports program before, just wait until $$ becomes the sole driver without worrying about these kids actually having to be students to see how bad things get.

Yeah, I'd imagine at minimum any thought of a longterm extension for Williams is off the table, and if they don't actively try and trade him this incident will be brought up every year come arbitration time. Just really, really stupid and at a really bad time for both the Brewers and Williams

The Vikings have enough talent at key positions to make themselves competitive, but their roster has no depth and that leaves them with a likely inconsistent year where they wind up winning a few games they aren't expected to when everything goes right and also lose very winnable games when they shoot themselves in the foot. I think if everything goes right for the Vikings on the injury front their ceiling is a 10 win season helped by playing the Lions and Bears 4 times.

Oh, so only the people that like the go for it on 4th down move can act like the following 49er drive would have automatically led to points had they started at the 25 instead of the 5, and just assume they get as much or more yardage? I thought it doesn't work that way... Sorry, nobody's mind is getting changed, we will agree to disagree here. 3 points in that spot in the game against a really good defense to me is worth far more than a consolation prize of 20 yds in field position if you don't convert. IMO, scoring decisions early in the second quarter should never be about weighing how many scores/possessions different decisions put you up by, it should be all about what decision gives you the best odds of increasing your point total. Converting and getting a TD on that drive is the obvious best case scenario, but I didn't like the risk taken at that point in the game given how it was unfolding compared to just picking up 3 more points and really giving san fran no sort of advantage afterwards. Had the GB defense forced a 3 and out right away leading to a short field on GB's next TD drive, I could see an argument justifying pinning them back as an advantage - but that didn't happen. I actually would have been more ok with going for it on 4th and short from the 30 in that spot compared to opting not to take a gimme field goal.

Like they needed to win 3 games before their opponent won 2 or 1 in order to advance. I'd argue those Brewer teams didn't have the starting pitching depth this one does, so games 3 and 4 were going to feel a bit more dicey to win in 2011 or 2018 than this year. But, any team that would lose the first two games of a short series probably isn't feeling too great - regardless of it being home or away.

Don't sleep on Carolina either....although they've got some key injuries piling up now, too. Their defense is legit

I thought the defense played very well last night given the perception of the mismatch it had upfront coming into the game - Some of that goes to San Fran being limited a bit in the run game with all their RB injuries, but the front 7 held their own in the trenches. Also, it was nice watching DBs actually close enough to receivers to even attempt making plays on the ball and having PI to debate, and to me that's largely due to Stokes being on the field. He'll take his lumps, but he's on another planet athletically than King is and can cover guys man to man. Seeing San Fran throw towards Alexander in coverage last night much more than we have come to expect has alot to do with the corner on the other side of the field actually covering someone, and that is significant for how this defense works. I also think Garappolo will be either holding a clipboard in San Fran or traded pretty soon...hell, I didn't even realize he was still starting games and just assumed Lance had overtaken him.

Buehler against the Padres on Tuesday with Scherzer on Wednesday....pretty much sets up for either of them to be the choice to start the wild card or a game 163 for the division against the Giants unless their final game has division implications, at which point we'll likely see Buehler Sunday. Kind of hoping the Giants clinch the division on Friday or Saturday later this week so the Dodgers can get all their ducks in a row for the WC game against the Cards....that way I can actively root for both teams to lose during the WC game (LAD and STL) and walk away knowing whoever won still has a hill to climb before reaching the NLCS. What I'm interested in seeing this week is if the Cards are intelligent and give a few of their key bullpen arms a series off and rest some of their regulars down the stretch, or if they keep grinding as hard as possible to extend their current winning streak. 16 straight down the stretch has been impressive to watch even as a fan who actively roots against them against anyone - but at this point part of me wants the Brewers to just mail in their games in STL this week if it means STL keeps the pedal down when it honestly means absolutely nothing for them.