10/11/2025
Great ball game last night.
Overall the play in the playoffs has lacked consistent fundamentals. Cutoffs missed, rundowns stink, base running sucks, situational hitting just ok. Pitching has been very good.
Here are some issues.
1. You cannot execute things you don't practice or do regularly
2. Guys don't practice much team concepts if at all after spring training and it shows up
3. We are dealing much more with an International mix of players with far different methods of the way they see things especially in pressure situations.
4. We have a group of HAAAAVAAD grads who think they rule the World who don't know s**t from shinola making crucial decisions.
5. We have gotten away from the core group of HS draft picks being the premier players with huge upsides and settled for an older more low ceiling/high floor player that are not going to make spectacular plays do to lack of pure athletic talent.
6. Managers are being told how to play the game instead of using instincts.
7. We are scouting using metrics and video not the eyeball test. Missing too many in the draft especially on make up.
8. Players making 100 million do not want to have team practice and will tell the manager to F off. The players are running the show and it's not great especially dealing with the huge influx of International players
9. American kids are coming out of college too old. Plus they rush them up they don't have to live the tough life of minor leaguers everything is pretty soft. We don't display a lot of toughness.
10. Baseball has become a country club sport. 12 year olds don't want to be coached. They have Coach Johnny who got drafted and played 1 year believing he's a guru or JC Johnny who played 2 years at East Bumble JC trying to teach skill sets.
11. Parents today and for many years do not want to build mental toughness. Anything hard they quit or point fingers. Epidemic of quitters and weak mental games.
12. College is not a great player development operation strictly because of time. Any arena where you are time trapped is not good. A kid with 3 years in the minors has 100's of more at bats and innings pitched than the same aged college kid.
In a nutshell it's not going to get better only worse. Less HS drafts, more international, more 24 year old low ceiling college kids.
It is what it is.