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By Brian Joura
After back-to-back 0-4 games, Jeff McNeil had a two-hit game on 8/5, which included a home run. It was the first time since 6/11 that McNeil homered. Thru his first 443 PA, McNeil had just 3 HR and his ISO stood at a woeful .073 for the season. For anyone who watched the games, the reason was painfully clear. Pitchers were pounding McNeil inside and he continually beat those pitches into the ground, grounding out to the first or second baseman.
We’re wired to look for easy answers to make sense of a complex world. The conventional wisdom became that McNeil was struggling due to MLB eliminating extreme shifts. That was taken to a ridiculous length on Thursday night’s Fox broadcast, when the play-by-play announcer claimed that he knew that McNeil was going to have a poor year because they banned shifts. It was the single dumbest thing said in an annoying telecast, one where nearly everything the Mets did was secondary to whatever the Phillies did on the same play, regardless if it made sense to frame the play that way or not.
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