Tom Hamilton has the Best Home Run call in all of People Business.

LGT: There’s been a kind of evolution in statistical analysis and understanding of baseball. How much weight do you give to this broader statistical analysis?

TH: We get all the statistical information we need in advance of games. But I really think for my purposes, you have to be careful. You can number people to death. People will go numb if you use too many numbers. I know I do. If I hear a broadcast and they’re stuck on ...

Evan Longoria (4.3 PA/G) is currently your most consistent hitter, sitting at 28% better than league average. That’s great news for the Rays considering he has a 154 wRC+ so far in 2013. Not only is producing at an extremely high level offensively, but his performance has been quite consistent, game-to-game.

Contrast that to the Marlins’ Placido Polanco. Polanco (4.2 PA/G) has the sixth-best VOL so far this year, but he’s hitting 41% worse than league average. That means the Marlins are ...

The Cone of Silence can’t drop on Dan Plesac quick enough.

I still like pitcher wins, warts and blemishes and gaping scars and all. Are pitcher wins perfect? Of course not. Should they be the first recourse in evaluating a pitcher’s performance? Of course not. Should they be discarded into the trash bin of ill-advised statistics, like the game-winning RBI? Of course not.

So I think it’s pretty cool that Max Scherzer is now 10-0, the first pitcher to win his first 10 decisions to begin a ...

To counteract the Manmohan Singh Primer… the search for objective knowledge about hitting mechanics.

I compiled a list of the top 50 hitters from the 2012 season according to Fangraphs’ Batting component of WAR.  I then looked at side views of each of these hitters from highlights of the 2012 season in which each player hit a homerun.  In the case of switch hitters, I used the side of the plate where they were most successful.  In all but Melky Cabrera’s 2012 stats, that described their ...

Manager Buck Showalter downplays the notion that he suddenly found religion on the shift.

“People were doing it years ago,” he says. “It’s not something new. Ask [1960s slugger] Willie McCovey. But a lot of it then was really tough, because you were basing it on just what your gut told you.”

...Orioles closer Jim Johnson, a ground-ball pitcher when he’s throwing well, says the shift has become too popular. “It’s fine on certain guys, but I think sometimes it gets a little carried ...

Harold Reynolds: “The A’s aren’t walking a lot.”

Last season, when the A’s won the AL West, they mostly walked and hit homers — their .238 batting average ranked next-to-last in the AL, and they struck out more than any team in the league.

This season, their identity is different due to the acquisitions of two quality hitters, catcher John Jaso and shortstop Jed Lowrie, and emergence of a third, third baseman Josh Donaldson.

The A’s grind down opposing starters — they’re first in ...

Terrific (yet clutch) interview with Singleton.

MW: I found that my personal appreciation of the game has increased exponentially as I’ve explored sabermetrics. I know there is a group of fans out there (and maybe they’re even the majority of fans) who cringe at the new age stats – can’t have the nerds ruining baseball with all their numbers! For me though, the metrics are not diminishing the game, rather they’re merely elaborating on what our eyes see. The “mystique,” if ...

That’s how far Albert Pujols has fallen in the year-and-change since moving from St. Louis to Orange County. Last year, he was a victim of a very poor start to the season which colored everyone’s perception the rest of the way, but come June he hit his stride, with a .941 OPS the rest of the way. This June has also been his best month of the year so far, but whereas last June he hit .326/.409/.568 (.977), this June has only seen him hit .262/.327/.548 (.874) so far. A slugging-heavy .874 OPS is ...

Joey Bats: Show-up time.

As Jose Bautista came to the plate as the second hitter of the game, Steve Stone noted that Bautista was the rare slugger in the No. 2 hole. He couldn’t really explain it, but that didn’t stop him and Hawk Harrelson from attempting to discredit it.

  Stone: One of the reasons why Bautista’s hitting second—and we wondered about that—was that Alex Anthopoulos, their general manager, feels that the best hitter in your lineup should hit second. And this is a guy that ...

Kunio Shimoda…I hear the Trost - Levine regime is hiring.

After months of denial and an inexplicably huge surge in home runs, Japan’s baseball chiefs have admitted they secretly switched the design of the ball to make the game more exciting.

Players and fans had repeatedly quizzed Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) bosses after seeing a 40 percent rise in the number of balls that were slugged out of the park so far this season.

In April NPB said the specifications of their ball—each of which ...

Part one of a three-part examination of the Red Sox advance scouting system.The Red Sox are smart. What makes them smart isn’t a sabermetric slant. It’s a willingness to find and use any information they can find which can give their players an edge. 

Here’s part two: Information overload has transformed the nature of advance scouting.

In The Beginning Was The End…

It is June 10 and Ryan Howard has seven home runs in 231 trips to the plate. Seven home runs used to constitute a good week for the slugger. Among full seasons, his previous low for home runs on June 10 was ten in 2010. His .185 isolated power this year is 90 points below his career average and his .306 weighted on-base average nearly matches his output last year when he was hobbled by his Achilles.

The biggest and most obvious change is that Howard struggles ...

Gauge Ramifrying Inning Tosses?

By the time the dust settled, Kennedy had thrown an alarming total of 50 pitches in the inning — the second-highest single-inning total in the majors this year, and the highest by a Diamondback since Doug Davis threw 44 in an inning on June 10, 2009 — long before Gibson was manager. Asked about his starter after the game, Gibson told MLB.com:

  “We need around 100 [pitches] from him, no matter what…

  “I didn’t have a choice… It happened ...

Looks like this Trout’s fielding stats may be a bit fishy ...

We talked to a scout—one who has seen Trout play more than 20 times in person over the past two seasons. He was as surprised by the numbers as we were and felt they were not a good measure of his overall skills. He offered this assessment:

“The great thing about Trout is that he has exceptional baseball instincts and exceptional speed to close on balls. He has tremendous body control and great natural ability. He’s very ...

As Jonah points out…“Chris Davis feature with enough stats and .gifs to choke a horse.‏”  Peakness Stakes, if you will…

For the first 1,495 at-bats of his career, Chris Davis looked like a thousand big, lumbering, mediocre sluggers before him. He didn’t run well and didn’t field well. He had a terrible batting approach, one that could best be described as swing for the moon, then offer every fan on the third-base side a nice, cool breeze. Sure, he would close his eyes and launch balls fairly ...

How is St. Louis fending off the Reds and Pirates? Grinding, says hitting coach John F. Mabry.

Mabry uses terms like “process” and “grinding” almost interchangeably. Mind-set is as important to success as technique.

Mabry knows that style carries lots of weight in a market that loves to reminisce about Whitey-ball, which was played on a rug with lots of fast guys, two elements this club no longer boasts. (Nobody in the NL has attempted fewer steals than the Cardinals’ 17.) The new ...

And a dread of some strange Impemba doom…

For weeks, the Fox Sports Detroit TV announcers kept crowing that the Tigers had the fewest errors in the league, and that proved they must be a great defensive team, as if fielding percentage were a meaningful measure of defensive prowess. It hasn’t been, at least not for the past 30 years, since Bill James arrived on the scene.

It’s really quite simple: in order to be charged with an error, you have to reach a batted ball. And if you have poor ...

From 2005-present, the AL is .553 (2106 games) [against the NL]...

This is an issue that I was just completely wrong about.    For years, asked about the relative strength of the leagues, I would say that I didn’t see how there could be a significant disparity between them.  The teams in the two leagues draft players from the same talent pool.  They send players to the same minor leagues to develop them, and they play against each other in those leagues.  They trade players between ...

Or…Google Boy wannabes more popular than Jesus now.

Remember wanting to play for the Yankees when you grew up? The next generation is more interested in running them—or at least drafting and signing the players, maybe even overhauling the farm system.

“If you go back 25, 30 years, the opportunities didn’t exist,’’ Sandy Alderson said. “First of all, front offices were smaller, staffs were smaller, and they came from more traditional sources. Now they come from traditional sources but others ...

Hypotinuse or not?

I’m not sure how far Cubs manager Dale Sveum got in mathematics with the Pythagorean Theorem. As most of you know, you can calculate a team’s “Pythagorean” or “expected” won-loss record based on its run differential. I’ll spare you the details here.

Despite their actual won-loss record of 22-30, the Cubs go into this afternoon’s game against the Arizona Diamondbacks with a run differential of plus-6, having outscored their opponents 214-208. Their ...

Dusty Baker, not so much. (quickly heads over to chemicalland21.com for product updates)

It is some kind of oddity or irony or sabermetric injustice that they are providing this OBP assault in the first one-third of a lineup drawn up nightly by the man oft-associated with being anti-OBP. But Dusty Baker, who once famously made the observation that “clogging up the bases isn’t that great to me,” will tell you he’s not so much anti-OBP as he is anti-OBP obsession. OBP, he said, means nothing if ...

The presentations this year have more of a historical focus than they have in the past; there aren’t quite as many analytical offerings. Although there is this one:

RP27: Baseball in the Age of Big Data: Why the Revolution Will Be Televised
Sean Lahman

and this:

RP12: A Probabilistic Approach to Measuring the Excitement of Baseball Games
Michael Freiman

and this:

RP29: Statistical Predictors of MLB Players’ Proneness to Long Hitting Streaks
Alan Reifman and Trent McCotter

Mark Armour is ...

Arthur Koehler will testify that Daugherty indeed has a knot in his head.

I KIDNAPPED THE LINDBERGH BABY. Actually,  I wrote that a 3-hole hitter should drive in runs. Seems an obvious statement. Harmless, you know? Not to the metrics gurus.  I’m not getting into this, except to say it’s starting to get amusing. For suggesting RBIs are, you know, good, I am e-bombed by the SABR types… Apparently, I’m ignorant and lazy. I know nothing about baseball. Certainly not compared to them.

...

Uhh…avoid The (Bob) Melvin at all cost?

Could Dustin Ackley actually have performed worse because of advanced baseball metrics?  Was he on fangraphs late at night looking at his ground ball percentage and his BABIP and wondering if his successes were flukes or his shortcomings were surmountable?  It’s possible, as Ackley is young and plays in a progressive city and just might hear terms like WAR and wOBA tossed around at home and around the batting cage.

More likely, though, Ackley goes ...

While we’re waiting, let’s do this today. Yesterday, GM Jed Hoyer talked a lot about the Cubs’ lack of walks and the importance of on-base percentage in the OPS equation. We couldn’t get to all of it in the paper, so let’s get to some of it here on the blog.

The Cubs still are last in the National League in walks drawn by their batters, with 116. The Brewers are above them, with 122. In their last four games, however, the Cubs have drawn 15 walks. They’re 12th in the NL in OBP ...