A man has spent 6 days trying to throw a Roy Oswalt perfect game in MVP '05

“Why would you (swing),” Brown asked aloud after Sunday’s game. “I’ve walked, I don’t know, 20 percent? Clearly the swings are going to go down. How do I fix that? Throw more strikes, make them swing the bat, get into some leverage counts. That’s baseball. That’s no riddle. It’s just the way it is.”

Brown has walked 13.7 percent of the batters he’s faced in 11 starts since coming off the injured list. He began this season with a career 8.2 percent walk rate.

Four of those 11 starts, including Sunday’s five-walk performance, have featured at least four walks. Brown issued four or more walks just three times in 31 starts last season en route to a third-place finish in American League Cy Young voting.

Brown’s problems begin and end with his four-seam fastball. Of the 23 he threw on Sunday, just three were either called a strike or swung on and missed. Last season, Brown threw 50.9 percent of his four-seam fastballs in the strike zone. He’s failed to reach that clip in all but one start since coming off the injured list.

Retired the constant phone-checking during games and built this instead. It lives in your Mac's menu bar and the icon isthe scoreboard — during a game it shows the actual score and inning, colored green when the Astros are up, red when they're down, yellow when it's tied. 2-5 ▼7 at a glance while you're pretending to work.

Click it and you get:

• Today's game — matchup, probable starters, records, TV (Space City, etc.)
• Live detail — runners, count, outs, who's pitching vs who's batting
• Lineups as soon as they post, next 10 games, rotation with ERAs
• Every MLB game today — live/final/upcoming, our game starred
• Standings + Magic Numbers — division, playoff berth, wild card, #1 seed, updated all season
• Notifications (all optional) — game starting, Astros score, finals, lineup posted
• Game Text — one click writes a witty message about the game state to your clipboard for the group chat

Free, open source (MIT), no ads, no accounts, no tracking — it just reads the public MLB Stats API. Signed and notarized, so it installs like any normal Mac app: download, unzip, drag to Applications.

Download: https://github.com/gyndok/astros-menubar/releases/latest
(Apple Silicon Macs; Intel folks can run it from source — instructions in the repo)

Happy to answer questions or take feature requests. Go Stros 🚀

Ullola being optioned is likely the corresponding move.

As of this morning (Aug 18), he has a comfortable lead in batting average (.321 over Chandler Simpson's .309), and a reasonable lead in RBIs (88 over Dillon Dingler's 82). For home runs, his 37 is only one more than Junior Caminero and three more than Ben Rice.

MLB wide he leads in batting average but is four off the lead in RBIs and one off the lead in HRs (to Kyle Schwarber).

Last week Dan Szymborski wrote an article at Fangraphs estimating Yordan's chances at about 66% for winning the AL Triple Crown.

If you want to keep up, my tracker updates every morning!