SU has been doing a lot of thinking and has some questions for the intergalactic subscriber base:
- Who knew that horses do not like running in puddles and will jump to avoid them in the biggest race of the year?
- Given how the use of analytics is exploding across all sports, how does that apply in horse racing? For example, after the running of the Derby, does the trainer for Maximum Security sit down with the horse to go over data? It seems likes the jockey has a limited degree of control out there. How does this work? And how do you train the horse not to jump over puddles in the future?
- Now that Brian Cashman has learned that Severino will not be ready, at the earliest, until after the All-Star Break, does he wish he had back the $30 million a year (for the next 10 years) sunk into Giancarlo Stanton? Might that money be useful to sign some starting pitchers for a team that is ready to win now?
- In 2019, is there a more useless statistic in baseball than reporting on how many wins you have against teams with winning records? If you look at the standings, so many teams are within a few games of .500. For the Yankees, who cares about the opponents? In 2 weeks, those teams below .500 will be above it, and vice versa. SU says wins are wins – get over it.
- Is Aaron Boone a great manager? Or does he have so few healthy players to put in the line-up, anyone reading this right now could do it just as well?
- Does anyone agree with SU that the next injury for the Yankees will be to one of their trainers or strength and conditioning coaches? Surely, they are being stretched to the limit and a pulled muscle or rotator cuff injury are just around the corner.
- Are you watching the NBA playoffs? If not, you should be. The games are intense and the absence of LeBron is a real opportunity for a lot of teams. Good stuff.
OK, there you go. Food for thought. Feel free to weigh in on any of these incredibly insightful questions.
Sports Update Intergalactic 
I always wondered whether the horse knows if he won the race. And if he does does he know he was disqualified.
I watch 3 horse races a year, at most. Hardly a trained eye. Watching the race with my family, we all noticed Maximum Security move somewhat wildly to the outside. We had no idea it was against the rules. But we all noticed it right away and it was the rare comment anyone in the room made during the 2 minutes of racing. But it looked odd. And then the winning jockey was making excuses for it (blaming crowd noise) even before anyone asked. As more knowledgeable people weighed in, it became more clear that this was a very bad move. The powers that be seemed to really want to stay out of this and looked at it for as long as they could to find a way to keep the result but they couldn’t. This is one of those cases where the world parachutes in on a small and intimate community and expects to understand everything that they see. The community handled a situation the way it does all the time and the world is outraged. I say, let them do things however they want. The rest of us have demonstrated our actual interest by rarely tuning in or going to the track. We shouldn’t care one way or the other. If you have some time to spare, our President’s tweet on this and the replies are good for some laughs.
Sat through seven innings in the cold yesterday at the Stadium. Was a small crowd at the start and got smaller throughout the game. The most fun was watching the fielder’s track fly balls in the high wind. Not sure if was evident on TV but it was an adventure every time — even the routine flies required last second sprints to reach the ball. German continues to look pretty good. He’s the ace right now which, along with the rest of the lineup, is convincing me that there is no sense even talking about baseball before the season starts.
It was interesting to see PIneda on the mound again. He had some off speed pitches that made the Yankees hitters look really bad. But, as we remember well, he has a tendency to completely fall apart at times and that happened yesterday. Don’t miss him at all.
I thought the stats guys were on to something when they started shifting heavily for David Ortiz and Mark Teixeira. But now they are shifting for absolutely everybody. I think DJ LeMahieu was the only guy who got played straight up yesterday. Everybody else gets the same treatment that Ortiz and Teixeira got a decade ago. Can this be right? Can it be that every player pulls ground balls and we didn’t know it for decades. I’m wondering if the data people have gotten lazy. Or maybe they found the fielders react better when there’s consistency.
Of course the stat measuring your record against 500+ clubs is meaningless. Look at Yankees last year, they did well against the good clubs but couldn’t beat up on Baltimore and Toronto so Boston ran away with the division. A win is a win, especially when you are fielding a AAA club like the Yanks are until some of the injured players come back. Very happy with the record considering who is playing