FRS

They’re One In A Million

After Tuesday’s loss to the Tampa Bay Rays the Red Sox’s probability to make the playoffs fell to 0.9%. It looked grim, but on Wednesday they beat the Rays and their probability “skyrocketed” to 1.7%! The joy was short lived as they managed to lose the next two games and their change to play in the baseball post season fell to 0.1% or one in thousand.

There are 8 games left in the 2024 season for them and they have to win all of them. That would be the easy part, the four teams in front of them would all have to lose at last 6 (that’s right six) of their last 8 games. One in a thousand sounds optimistic, more like one in a million.

Sure Didn’t Need That Break

The Red Sox had the best record in baseball from June 15th until July 14th with a 17-7 record. Then the 4 day All-Star break happened. “Second” half started Friday night and the Sox were in LA to play the Dodgers. They promptly lost all three games in spite of being ahead by several runs in two of them. Admittedly the Dodgers are a better ball club than the FRS, but they should have been able to win one of those three games.

Now they are off to play 3 games against the Colorado Rockies who are 36-64 and 23 games behind their division leaders, those same Dodgers. I hope the altitude doesn’t make them high1 and the Red Sox win at least 2 out of the three games.

That Didn’t Work Out So Well

I’ve been watching the FRS play baseball for a week now on MLB.TV, so yesterday when I tried to watch all I was offered was the audio. WTF. Turns out the game was on Apple TV+, who has worked out a deal with baseball to broadcast 2 Friday games every week.

Let me go and see if I can get a free trial just so I could watch the game. I already was a subscriber about a year ago, so I thought maybe if I use Donna’s name and a different email I could get one. Wrong, they are smarter than me I was denied. Might have worked had I used a different charge card…

Well, the lure of the game made me plunk down the one penny less than a 10 spot for a month of Apple TV+. My reward was after watching 5 wins in a row on MLB.TV, the Red Sox lost the Friday game 9-2 to the San Diego Padres.

The $9.99 is not a total loss though as now I can watch the third season of Slow Horses.

Just When I Thought I Was Out

They pulled me back in.

Earlier this month my BIL asked me how my Red Sox were doing and I really had no idea. I haven’t paid any attention for the last 3 or 4 years, curiosity peaked, I checked. In the AL East the Yankees were leading the division with the Baltimore Orioles a game back. The Red Sox along with the Rays and Blue Jays were battling for third place a whooping 15 games behind the MFY with all three hovering right around the .500 mark.

I looked ahead and last Saturday the Red Sox were going to be playing the Yankees with the game being Fox’s Saturday Game of the Week. When I tuned in, the game was between the Seattle Mariners and the Texas Rangers. I guess because I’m west of the Mississippi I wouldn’t care about those two northeastern teams. So when an email showed up in my inbox on Sunday about my last chance to get MLB.TV at half price for the rest of the season, I signed up.

I would like to think that the fact that the FRS have won 4 straight was because that I started watching their games, but I know better. I’m sure they will soon settle back into that middling win one, lose one scheme of the first half of the season.

It Works

Two weeks ago I found out that the FRS were the free game of the day on MLBTV, so I thought I’d tune in. They were in last place in the division at 5 wins and 6 loses, but hey it’s still early in the season. I just looked today and currently the Red Sox are 13 & 13 and still in last place in the division, two games behind the Yankees and eight behind the division leading Tampa Bay Rays. Oh. well, wait’ll next year.

Plus I also wanted to see a game and check on how the whole pitch clock thing was working out. I’m not sure how the players like the clock, but according to a Bleacher Report article, MLB says it has knocked an average of 26 minutes from game times. Wow. The game I watched with the Angels still went almost 3 hours, but hey, it could have been nearly 3-1/2 hours.

I scanned back several games and found that several of their games have been just a few minutes over two and a half hours. This means that if I was still back on the east coast those 7:10 PM starts would be ending at a sensible half past ten. This pitch clock thing might have even prevented those games against their arch rivals the Yankees running to nearly midnight. And if I remember, I’ll see how long the games against New York when they play them on back to back weekends in early June.

Putting the F in FRS

After last year’s miserable showing of 24-36 and last place in the division during the COVID shortened season, the outlook for 2021 was just hoping for a mid-pack finish in the division. But something wonderous happened, the Red Sox were playing great baseball. At the All-Star break they had the third best record (55-36) in all of baseball and were leading the division by a game and a half over Tampa Bay. The Yankees and Blue Jays were 8 games back. They had 5 players make the All-Star team.

Something changed in the second half of the season, the All-Stars stopped playing like they were and the stellar pitching cooled way off. Since the break the FRS has reverted to playing like it was anticipated they would – mediocre. They are playing exactly .500 ball with 36 wins and 36 loses. Unfortunately every one else in the division started playing great. A month after the All-Star break Tampa was in first by 3 games. By the end of August the Rays were ahead of the Red Sox 9 games and the Yankees had past them too.

We are heading into the last three games of the 2021 baseball season. And the Sox are hanging on for dear life to the second Wild Card spot. The last three games are against the Washington Nationals who are the fifth worse team in baseball having won only 65 games and losing 94. But winning all three of these games is not assured as they just finished a 3 game set against the Baltimore Orioles who are 52-107 and the Sox lost 2 of those. The way they are playing they don’t deserve to be in the playoffs.

The F in FRS stands in for an expletive, but in this case, because I expect them to choke, I think it really stands for something our previous President reserved for the New York Times (among others) – Failing.

Blacked Out

Back in Aiken the only team MLB.TV blacked me out from watching the Red Sox play was the Atlanta Braves which are 140 miles away. This was never a problem because our cable system carried TBS which broadcast the games. I could watch the Red Sox play their division rivals in Tampa and Baltimore, the next closest teams which are 200 miles away.

The Red Sox are currently playing a 3-game series against the Seattle Mariners and I am 370 miles (as the crow flies) from T-Mobile Park, but in spite of that distance, I am blacked out from viewing the game.

Out here I am blacked out from the San Francisco Giants and Oakland Athletics games as well, both places being around 310 miles away. I can see either of the Los Angeles teams, Dodgers or Angels because they are about twice as far away as the Bay Area teams.

None of this is a real problem anyway because I subscribe to a VPN which lets me pretend to be where I’m not. Right now I’m virtually in Denver.

The only issue with this is I have to watch the game on the desktop PC or the cell phone. I can watch it on a TV, but I’d have to get the game up on the PC and then use an HDMI cable to the TV, which is usually not worth the effort.