FRS

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.

Hope Springs Eternal

⚾ 2018 seems so long ago.

For 2019 I just listened to the Red Sox play baseball and was glad I hadn’t coughed up the hundred bucks or so for the video because they were just a mid-level team finishing mid-division and out of the playoffs. For 2020 I bought the radio package again expecting more of the same. COVID put a damper on the season, limiting the season to a mere 60 games, but the FRS did not disappoint me and lost 60% of those games, finishing last in the division.1

With our move to the west coast I though listening to the games in the afternoon would be more fun that late evening, but I was wrong, I probably listened to maybe a quarter of those 60 games. Just wasn’t the same. So this year I thought maybe I’d try watching the games. I’d have two options, watch them live at 4:00pm or watch the replay of the game at 8:00. I cancelled the audio package and signed up for the TV package.

Because it is April and still chilly in Beantown the first 3 games of the season, at home against Baltimore, were 1:00pm games meaning that they stated at 10:00am here. Morning baseball, mmm, weird, but okay in a way. But not fun as the Sox lost all three games, including an 11-3 shellacking in the finale that was over by the 3rd inning. There are like 3 players left on the the team that I remember from 2018 and now I’m sort of regretting paying that much money to watch a team that looks destined to finish dead last in the division again.

Fortunately I signed up for the free 7 day trial to start, so as of yet they haven’t hit the charge card. The Tampa Bay Rays come to town for the next three games and if they don’t win at least 2 of those, I’m going to just cancel and not be out the money.

Red Sox Win The World Series Again!

This morning we watched Game #5 of the 2018 World Series on MLBTV and the Red Sox beat the Los Angeles Dodgers 5 to 1 to win the 2018 World Series! Again!

The 2020 baseball season is supposed to start in less than 3 weeks, but not everybody is so sure, Mike Trout for one and me for another. But either way, I’m thinking that my access to MLBTV will be shut off pretty soon so I’m glad I got to watch the 2018 series again. And, unlike last time, I watched every single inning of every game.

You know, if you look back at my 2018 post about them winning, I talked about my buying a 2018 WS Champions hat. It included pictures of my previous hats from 2004, 2007 and 2013 from the MLB shop and the one from there of the 2018 that the players got on the field in 2018. I didn’t really like the MLB shop one, it was gray instead of blue, so I hunted up something that looked more along the lines of the previous three and I finally found it, I think on the Dick’s Sporting Goods store page. Less than 2 years later, that 2018 hat is long gone enough that I don’t even remember what happened to it…

That MLB Shop gray 2018 World Series Hat that I didn’t like is still available. Maybe I should buy now?

It’s Playoff Time

Last month I abandoned my plan of watching the 2018 World Series Champion Red Sox season all over again and jumped ahead three months for fear that MLB was going to actually have a 2020 season.

Because I jumped ahead and started skipping off days, I finished watching the season 3 months and a week early. Today’s game watched was number 162 in which we beat our hated rivals the MFY, 10 to 2, to finish out the season with 108 wins against 54 losses.

There’s a saying in baseball – every team knows they’re going to win 54 games and lose 54 games. It’s what they do with the other 54 games that counts. What the 2018 FRS did was to actually win all those other 54…

The first Red Sox playoff game happened 5 days after the season ended while they waited the results of the one game Wild Card Playoff between those dreaded Yankees and the Oakland A’s. I seem to remember that it does end up being the Yankees they play in the Division Series, I’m not sure if it is Cleveland or Houston in the ACLS, but I do know that they beat the LA Dodgers in the World Series, I’m just not sure how many games each series goes. This should be exciting.

I also know that we won’t be waiting 5 days to start watching the playoffs. The American League Division Series starts tomorrow.

It’s August in May

So, 3-1/2 weeks ago I started reliving the the 2018 Boston Red Sox World Championship season. I down loaded the schedule from that year in CSV (comma separated value) format and edited the year from 2018 to 2020 so I could import it into my Google calendar. I also changed the start times to 6:30 AM because, so far, almost all of the games have been watched with, or after, breakfast.

I was not sure when “real” baseball would return for 2020, or if ever, so I planned to just keep watching 2018 games on the day they occurred all the way through the World Series in October. This was assuming that MLBTV would keep offering free access to their archives. I was also basing this assumption on that they wouldn’t be playing baseball in 2020 at all, because I’m sure if they did, access to the 2018 archive would disappear.

This past Sunday I read an article in the paper that they are proposing to start an 82 game season on the 4th of July weekend. Uh, oh! The regular season ended on September 30th, so now I probably need to finish watching the season by June 30th. This morning I edited my CSV file by eliminating three month’s worth of games. Today’s game I watched was an inter-league game against the Philadelphia Phillies and originally played on August 14, 2018.

The downside to jumping ahead 3 full months and MLB does shut off my access when they start playing ball in July is that I won’t see any of the playoff games. The final World Series game was played on the 26th of October, so to see these games I would have to had jumped ahead 4 months and that would left only 2 weeks worth of regular season games. I do remember that they beat the MFY in the Divisional Series, the Astros in the ACLS and the Dodgers in the World Series, but I don’t know how many games it takes in each of those match ups. If the 2020 season doesn’t start in early July or they don’t shut off access to the archive I’ll watch those games.

Living in the Recent Past

With the 2020 Major League Baseball season on hold, possibly forever, MLBTV has opened up the 2018 & 2019 archives for viewing. Because I am subscribed to MLB Audio and my $20 yearly subscription was automatically renewed on the 1st of March I can watch any of the approximately 4,800 games, regular and post-season, from the last 2 years. From what I can find, this treat is available to all users. You may have to create an MLB account, which if I know these guys they will require a credit card and this will mean that if they do start the season, they will probably hit your card and sign you up for $100 package.

Having exhausted all the Brit TV we could stand, MLBTV becomes a perfect TV time waster in these times of #stayonyourcouchtoflattenthecurveandsavelives. So, I figured it would be cool to watch a Red Sox game a day, on the date the game was played. Well, guess which which season I’m going to pick? A) Last year, 2019, where the Sox finished just 6 games over .500 in third place in the division, 19 games behind the Yankees or B) 2018 when they won the division by 5 games and ended up winning the World Series. No-brainer huh?

Yesterday’s game was the finale of a 3 game shellacking of the Angels in the their home stadium where the FRS outscored them 27 to 3 to move their won/loss record to 16-2. For all of the entire 2019 season, I remember about this April series and the fact that they won the Worlds Series, everything else will be “new” to me.