Monday, October 25, 2021

The Monday Morning Wrangle from Far Left Texas


Dan Solomon's excuses are as good as any for me to skip this fall's elections in favor of more trivial pursuits.  And since I don't have children or grandchildren, the Houston school board races are a non-starter for me.  YMMV, of course.

Elsewhere, frying bigger fish:


We're left to our own devices as to why the other so-called liberals, Kagan and Breyer, declined to join Sotomayor in dissenting.  That's enough to project a more ominous fate for Roe once the Supremes collectively pass judgment.

There were some reactions to Governor Strangelove's latest chat with Breitbart, which happened at the 50-yard line of Darrell K. Royal Stadium.


And to think that all this time I thought it was the Aggies who were the conservative darlings of higher education in Texas.  Silly me.

Alas, on the state's corruption scale, this barely registers.


Still anxiously anticipating a long break from having to report this shit.


I'll take that as my segue to the criminal and social justice updates.


A Lefty Gamer has been relentless in Tweeting about the MAGAts running the Magnolia ISD.


That gets me to the environmental headlines.


And the soothers.  There was MuertosFest in San Antonio over the weekend ...


... and another festival just like it this weekend.


With a 5–0 statement in Game 5 Friday, Houston is returning to the World Series for the third time in five years because over the final 26 innings, it outscored Boston, 22–1. That was after the Red Sox had become the first team in postseason history to run off six straight games with 10 hits or more. A gullywasher became a drought. It ... just ... stopped.

Asked to explain the whiplash-inducing turn to the series, Boston manager Alex Cora said, “Brent Strom and Martín Maldonado. Two of the smartest people in baseball. They completely changed their strategy against us midway through Game 4.”

[...]

It was during that game that Strom, the chief navigator of pitching, decided to tack to the starboard side. The change Cora referenced was a decision by Strom to have his pitchers attack the Red Sox with fastballs.

“Yeah, very much so,” Strom said. [...] "I basically told the group, ‘If you’re going to get beat, throw your best stuff over the plate, then you can sleep at night. Rather than dancing around the strike zone.’ Young pitchers start dancing, and you can’t do that.”


Confession: I was among the Debbie Downers lamenting the collapse of the starting pitching, especially after Luis Garcia came up lame.

Garcia lasted only eight batters in Game 2, departing with a sore knee and a 91-mph fastball after getting only three outs. The knee injury forced Strom to study Garcia’s delivery to see if something was causing the pain. The old pitcher whisperer found it and put Garcia on the mound the next day for a bullpen session. He showed Garcia that he was creating stress on his knee by having his right foot (the plant foot by the rubber for the righthander) slightly angled, with the ball of his foot a bit closer to the plate than his heel. That caused his knee to be turned slightly inward as he lifted his front leg in the load phase.

Strom told Garcia to place his right foot directly parallel with the rubber. With a straight plant foot, Garcia would keep his knee (and thus his weight upon leg lift) over the foot.

Voila! Garcia hit 97 mph seven times in the first three innings after throwing one pitch that hard the entire season out of 1,118 four-seamers.

“I was surprised,” Strom said. “The funny thing about it, outside of that injury, if he had not hurt his knee, we might not have made that tweak. So, the tweak was made not to increase velocity but to take stress off his knee. We did it the very next day after he threw one inning and he seemed to like it. And quite frankly we probably should have done it sooner, but he was having a good year and you hate to mess with somebody who’s having a good year. It’s the dicey thing about messing with a good thing. The injury probably helped him.”

Then there was this, the backbreaker for the Sox.

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