Well, Joe Girardi is out in Philadelphia. It wasn’t entirely surprising, but at the same time, it’s hard to believe Girardi’s actually been the problem there.
Managers are well-designed to be fall guys. They don’t make a huge difference, the difference they do make is more an environmental one than a huge strategic shift, they’re good to fire when you want to shake things up.
Or when you want to buy yourselves some time.
As we wrote the other day, the Phillies should be fine, at least next year if not this one. They might not be, of course—it might just not work, they might need to reset—but overall, this is the kind of thing that sometimes happens when a team thinks it’s structurally pretty ok, but does either want to provide a jolt, want to provide a distraction/publicly acknowledge something’s gone wrong, or both.
Lindor and the Door
It’s all about the wording, Steve.
Francisco Lindor was out last night, having slammed his finger in a hotel door. It’s unclear if he’s going to go on the IL, but you’d rather that not happen. The Mets are already a little banged up, but that’s more on the pitching side than the hitting side. Still, things are going well there for now, and the nice thing about the lead they’ve amassed is that it gives them space to be cautious with things like swollen fingers.
The Cubs Are Doing Good Things
The Cubs took the first game of five against the Cardinals, and while Willson Contreras’s ankle might be a little pained, he evidently avoided serious injury with the hit by pitch. Still waiting to see him back out there, but sounds like he’ll be alright.
We’re also waiting to see who’ll start the non-Matt Swarmer game tomorrow, but at least the media environment seems to be turning towards Caleb Kilian, the prospect on the rise who came over last summer in the Kris Bryant deal. Could be a big weekend when we look back on it, though to temper expectations a bit: Developing prospects is a bit of a numbers game. Especially the way the Cubs’ system is currently set up. Lot of possibilities, few guarantees.
College Baseball: Regional Weekend
The college baseball NCAA Tournament starts today, and each stage is such a blitz that it’s hard to have much to say without digging into the thing in great detail. One thing to remember is that baseball is a fairly random sport, game to game, and while there’s a “well, duh,” to that, the wide gaps in talent at the college level sometimes mask it. College baseball is stratified enough that we know pretty clearly who the best teams are. This leads us to have confidence in those teams. Then, the randomness of baseball as a sport bites back.
One funny thing about this phenomenon is that in basketball, we kind of do the opposite thing, conditioned by the NCAA Tournament’s single-elimination format (in that sport—in baseball, you can lose as many as four times and still win the College World Series, if you time those losses right) to expect chaos.
Anyway, plenty of chaos ahead.
How Do the Warriors Regroup?
We said yesterday that the Celtics are better than the sum of their parts. That’s an easy thing to say. Gracefully, they illustrated it for us.
As Steph Curry taught the basketball world, threes are worth more than twos, and when it looked like Golden State had put Game 1 away, the Celtics used the Warriors’ own trick to rally back and steal the thing. Jayson Tatum wasn’t in a groove? That ended up ok. Al Horford and Derrick White were very much in grooves of their own.
Guys who can shoot are valuable on any team. We’re not trying to say the Celtics are brilliant because their shooters happened to be the ones who were hot. Rather, the thing Ime Udoka and Brad Stevens are deservedly getting praise for after Horford and White singed the nylon in San Francisco is compiling an assortment of guys who, as a toolbox, offer a lot of tools. When Plan A doesn’t work, there is a Plan B, and a Plan C, and a Plan D, and so on, and for the Celtics, those are strong plans. It’s the ‘diverse portfolio’ concept. By not being too reliant on any one thing, broader strength is achieved.
Also, it’s possible, as plenty of others have said, that the NBA is sliding towards being a three-point contest, which was maybe always where things would be headed once the three-point line was added, kind of like how the shift was inevitable in Major League Baseball. Not saying either of those are good or bad—how to respond to them is a question for another time—but that’s a parallel that might help explain the thought should you be among those who, like I did for a while, assumed the lines that “the three point line is ruining basketball” were just old man talk.
Gelo Might Be Catching Up on the Avalanche
Last night was decisive, and it came against a good team.
All postseason, the Avalanche have eluded Gelo. We’ve lost every bet we’ve placed against them, and consistently, the market has been so far away from our model that we’ve thought we were doing the math wrong on futures odds.
Part of this is that Colorado ended the season kind of cold. Gelo’s pretty quick to react to recent results, but the other thing that means is that it weighs recently heavily, and since it doesn’t look at anything but how many goals each team scored (besides in the offseason, when a few other inputs are added), it doesn’t care about what a team has to play for and things of that sort. Gelo thought highly of the Avalanche entering the playoffs, but it had also seen them end on what I believe was a 4-5-1 stretch.
Another part of this is that Colorado played the Predators in the first round. The Predators were not a great team, and winning against them didn’t mean as much to Gelo as, say, the Blues winning against the Wild.
The last part of this is that Colorado had a hard time against the Blues. The series went six games, and the Avalanche weren’t entirely pounding St. Louis. They didn’t entirely pound Nashville either. Last night was only the second of their ten postseason victories to come by four or more goals, and while that’s a big margin of victory, those are the kinds of results that make a difference in a system that relies to a sizable extent on margin of victory.
In short, last night mattered a lot to Gelo, and it was more unexpected to Gelo than it was to the market, so while there’s some market noise with Colorado because of Darcy Kuemper’s injury (what a game by Pavel Francouz, by the way), Gelo might be closing the gap. Will it ever be fully closed? Probably not without a lot of injuries. If it’s closed, will Gelo start picking the Avalanche? No. Gelo would have to be actively high on the Avalanche (or low on their opponent) to pick them. Who’s right? There’s no great way to know. Probably the market, but Gelo’s got a winning record so far.
Over the weekend, it’s not necessarily more likely that something decisive happens in the Western Conference than the Eastern. The Oilers do need to get in the win column in Game 3, whereas the Lightning still have Game 2 and Game 3 to get their skates under themselves, but the Avalanche have already made a bit of a decisive move. Beating your opponent 4-0 with your backup goalie in the net to take a 2-0 series lead? That’s about as decisive as you can get, even going on the road for Game 3. We won’t come out of the weekend with the Oilers in control of the series. We might come out of tonight with the Lightning holding a comparative advantage, and by Monday morning, they may be a heavy favorite to make the Stanley Cup Finals.
What to Make of Gateway
Gateway, as it’s colloquially known, is hosting its first NASCAR Cup Series race this weekend, and between that and the new car, it’s among the most uncertain races in recent memory. Our current thought is that this will lead in practice and qualifying results being heavily weighted by betting markets, and while that’s proper, our current thought in addition to that is that it’ll probably go too far. We aren’t going to try to bet on bad cars, but we’re basically hoping Kyle Larson doesn’t qualify all that well so we can grab him and trust that him being the best driver matters.
Meanwhile, IndyCar’s in Detroit and F1 is idle for the weekend.
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Having some site issues, so we don’t know when these’ll post, and we’re just going to eschew the weekend viewing schedule. You all know the drill by now. We’re watching baseball and basketball and hockey and maybe some motorsports and we’re keeping college baseball and softball on at least one screen until whenever those are done for the weekend. (Monday? Later, for softball?)
