One of the most formidable tools in a pro baseball pitcher’s arsenal is the consistency of pitching motion when throwing different kinds of pitches. If your delivery looks the same to an opposing batter when throwing a 95-mph fastball, a 80-mph curve, and a 85-mph change-up, well, you’ve really got something there. Texas pitcher Yu Darvish is ripping up the AL this year with a 4-1 record, 1.65 ERA, and 49 strikeouts, which prompted Drew Sheppard to layer five of Darvish’s pitches on top ...
History was written into the baseball books today, as a result of the situation developing in the Giant-Phillies game yesterday. A man singled with three on bases, winning the game, but didn’t single, and the game was not won. The crowd swarmed out on the field, thinking the game was over, but…settled down to witness the finish of the game.
... [Pete] Alexander wound up to shoot the ball over to the pinch hitter. Umpire [Bill] Klem had his back turned ...
Casey Janssen ponders his fate as he looks at the baseball world for the time being. And sees only darkness.
Mention the numbers to Casey Janssen, and he’s quick to point out how early it is, and how the baseball schedule will eventually even everything out.
There’s a lot of that kind of talk going on right now with the Toronto Blue Jays, only while many of his teammates are expecting a natural progression to the mean, he instead raises the matter in reference to a regression.
This almost makes up for Darling’s “The Great Escape”/“The Sand Pebbles” Steve McQueen mess up from the other day.
Today’s game on SNY (the home of the Mets on TV in New York) between New York and the Dodgers featured riffs on “Dodgeball,” Darling’s fellow Hawaiian-born major leaguers, and lastly, a rant about the guys who cover the NFL Draft, which featured an old wrestling catchphrase from Ron. Cohen and Darling were talking about SNY pre-empting a potential game broadcast featuring Met ...
Screw Lilly…we need the Jeff Ledbetter Fair Play Act of 2013!
College baseball is on pace to set a record for fewest home runs and a 40-year low for scoring and batting average. Now some coaches are calling for a livelier ball to bring the numbers back up.
The switch to toned-down metal bats in 2011 has led to an offensive decline greater than many expected.
“The game isn’t the same,” Clemson coach Jack Leggett said this week. “It’s not as exciting.”
MoneyDUKE: I made baseball as much fun as re-doing your taxes.
Much has been made about Beane’s infatuation with on-base percentage — that was a major focus of the book and movie — and Duquette is also a big fan of seeking out hitters with high OBPs. But this current Orioles club isn’t exactly an on-base machine — with a .324 mark heading into the road trip.
“We are still working on that,” he said with a laugh.
Duquette points out that OBP was something he focused on when he was ...
“Bud Selig was adamant Thursday that he plans to retire when his current term expires on Dec. 31, 2014.” I thought Bud Selig’s choice of words was outfuckingstanding!
Selig touched on an array of other topics during Thursday’s meeting, which lasted more than an hour. Here are some of the highlights:
Selig said he watched the pregame ceremony at Fenway Park last Saturday, when the Red Sox played their first game in Boston since the marathon bombings, and cried. He was especially ...
Rick Camp, who provided swingman duties for the Braves from 1976-1985 died today. He was 59.
On July 4, 1985 Camp, an awful hitter, even by pitcher standards, hit a game-tying home run in the 18th inning of a rain-delayed game against the Mets.
Very good article, with different people’s perspectives on what it’s like to play in such a homer-suppressing environment. I had been unaware of the “marine layer”.
Petco Park has one of the coldest average game-time temperatures in the Major Leagues as well as one of the highest game-time humidity levels in the game. And that marine layer that rolls in off the Pacific Ocean, which sits outside the doorstep of the ballpark, makes it tough to elevate a ball at night.
Baseball New Zealand is hoping a Government-backed investment will lead millions of dollars of greater investment around the bases and sliding into the “mythical land of baseball talent”.
Government agency Sport New Zealand, formerly Sparc, has committed to a $40,000 investment in baseball over the next two years.
The investment is targeted specifically at getting more Kiwi kids active and playing sport and is the first time Baseball New Zealand has ...
Outfielder Mason Williams, who’s generally regarded as the top prospect in the Yankees’ farm system, was arrested in Florida early Thursday morning on charges of DUI. Mark Feinsand of the New York Daily News tweets further details:
Mason Williams arrested in Tampa early Thursday for DUI. Breath tests were under legal limit of .08, but he failed field sobriety tests.
And you thought the Twins were living under a rock.
Twins general manager Terry Ryan, who signs off on every major baseball decision the organization faces, leans back in his chair recently in the Target Field press dining room and tells a packed table of media that it was “just happenstance” that led to those ground-ball machines landing here.
“If you look at that statistical stuff, historically those guys throw ground balls,” Ryan says. “It’s part of the equation. You could talk to Jack a ...
BS: Do you have to be a stat freak to be a member of SABR?
ST: No, because I’m not one myself. I know a lot of them. I was a stat freak growing up and going into the box scores and all that. My interest is history, ballparks, minor leagues. A big part of our membership is people into statistical analysis.
BS: What is your favorite statistic?
ST: I can tell you some of my least favorite. Batting average is one of my least favorite. If there’s going ...
Baseball Info Solutions has timed pitcher deliveries and catcher pops for the last few seasons. When you combine the pitcher’s time to the plate and the catcher’s pop time, you can see the strength of that relationship:
My sense is that the guys in charge needed a non-embarrassing season to keep their jobs, to keep organizational faith in the process, and show that there were positive steps in the right direction, even if those steps didn’t result in a winning season just yet. They needed Jesus Montero, Dustin Ackley, and Justin Smoak to hit. They needed Taijuan Walker, Danny Hultzen, and James Paxton to pitch well enough in the minors to justify the hype. They ...
Relatives of Harry Coveleskie [sic]...received a message that he had been badly injured at Chattanooga, Tenn. While warming up preliminary to a game a bat slipped from the hands of another player and struck him on the head, rendering him unconscious.
HEADS UP!
Coveleski was fine. He was back in the big leagues in 1914 and won 20 games each year from 1914-1916.
Back in the 70’s a drunko friend of mine sent a perfume-soused love letter to Ava Gardner…and asked her why her face went crooked.
In many ways, Gardner doesn’t fit in with the New Yankees. I had to seek out video of him speaking to hear his voice. He has a gentle, South Carolinian drawl. There really isn’t much else to say about him as a person, because I don’t know much else and because no one has cared to ask him any such questions, or at least to write about the answers. If ...
But no team has committed to the committee as a full-season endeavor, even in theory, since those ‘03 Red Sox. Even the Tigers this time around seemingly viewed the strategy as a stop-gap measure following Rondon’s struggles.
“It’s just a balancing act,” Epstein said. “If you have a manager who buys into it and relievers who buy into it, the way Jim Leyland does at times, finds the right matchup. If you have a great left-handed set-up guy and ...
The Omnichatter. Sometimes, we have serious discussions about the games in process. Other times, we make bad jokes. Still other times, we go off-topic and talk about cult TV series. But no matter what, never forget the number one rule of Omnichatter: Nobody cares about your fantasy team.
In 2011, Strasburg threw first-pitch strikes 71.6 percent of the time, the highest in baseball. He carried over his “challenge” mentality from college and put fear of shame into hitters. Last year, he threw 62.3 percent, 34th among starters. Wednesday, he was down to 56.2 for the season, an awful 84th among 107 starters.
...
Until he gets his 0-0 phobia fixed, until he reverses the balance of terror between him and hitters, getting back to the level of confidence he showed when he arrived ...
I haven’t seen a Victor mail it in this bad since Victor Mature in “Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood”.
With two outs in the bottom of the third in Detroit, Tigers infielder Jhonny Peralta sent a line drive single to right field, scoring Prince Fielder from third. Victor Martinez—who had previously doubled—attempted to score from second on the play.
The problem here was three-fold:
1. Martinez was already slow.
2. He’s a season removed from having his ACL (knee) repaired.
3. Royals ...
The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum and the United States Mint announced today the names of the judges who will help choose the image for the obverse (heads side) of the 2014 National Baseball Hall of Fame Commemorative Coin. The judges are all Hall of Famers and represent more than half of the nine positions on the diamond: Joe Morgan (second baseman, elected 1990); Brooks Robinson (third baseman, elected 1983); Ozzie Smith (shortstop, elected 2002); Don ...
The 2011 Oakland A’s offense was, in a word, inept. As a team, the Athletics hit .244/.311/.369. They finished 20th in runs scored and 24th in home runs. Just one player on the entire roster hit higher than .265 that season: Jemile Weeks, the team’s primary second baseman, who managed just two homers all year. On the final day of the 2011 season, with the A’s out of contention, the Mariners let Oakland hitters stand on the outfield grass for all their at-bats; not a single player reached the ...
Carl Crawford admits he began to have doubts – about ever hitting .300 again, ever smiling again, maybe even playing baseball much longer.
“I don’t think I smiled in two years,” the Dodgers outfielder tells USA TODAY Sports of his time on a troubled team in Boston.
“I was just frowning, I started growing grey hairs on my face from the stress and everything for two years straight,” he says, stroking the stubble on his chin and grinning—as much about how ...
New York Mets Third Baseman David Wright has been selected as Major League Baseball’s official spokesperson for T-Mobile® All-Star FanFest, the world’s largest interactive baseball fan event, to be held at the Jacob K. Javits Center from Friday, July 12 through Tuesday, July 16. Wright joins a distinguished list of MLB stars who have served in this role including Torii Hunter, Derek Jeter, Albert Pujols and Justin Upton. In addition, Mets ...
Maybe Frenchy can hook up Burnett with some Delta miles.
Go back to last October and the number reaches 20, making general manager Alex Anthopoulos the undisputed heavyweight champion of the baseball world in bottom-feeding.
“Alex claims everybody,” Baltimore Orioles general manager Dan Duquette said with a hearty laugh…..
While clever from a management perspective, it can be trying for players caught in the cycle, like right-hander Alex Burnett.
I, too, am pulled in by black-and-white sports applications of deep-dive analytics. What’s not to like about the idea that any small-market business could have as much insight and reach as the massive enterprise competition? (Although, truthfully, as a fan of the lowly Buffalo Bills, another recent analytic convert, I’d consider a pact with the netherworld at this point to get my team into a meaningful late-season game.)
Quick: name the shortstop who led the major leagues in home runs last year. I’ll give you a hint: he also led in OPS+, posted an above-average defensive season per Ultimate Zone Rating, and held down the position for the team with the National League’s best record. And he’s only 27, suggesting his best days are just ahead of him.
Hopefully, you know I’m referring to Ian Desmond, shortstop for the Washington Nationals. But while serious baseball fans have heard of ...
