I ran across this excellent piece by the late, great Greg Spira … he was writing about the idea of pitching to the score, and he wrote two sentences that have stuck with me:
“The pitchers who get a reputation of ‘pitching to the score’ have one thing in common - they have all generally gotten good run support through most of their careers. It seems apparent to me that pitchers get this reputation because they get better run support than most other pitchers and thus have a W-L record ...
The statistics that tend to get the most attention (OBP, SLG and OPS) don’t become reliable until after well after the trade deadline!
But, that’s way off in May and we need to start making moves now. What we need is to find a way to take the stats that have stabilized (Swing% and Contact%) and predict other things which are likely to come to pass in the future. So, while Swing% and Contact% don’t seem to tell us much all on their own, we can use them to determine if other changes (that ...
(COOPERSTOWN, NY) – For every Hall of Fame player, there’s a scout who started him on the road to Cooperstown. Now, those scouts will have their place at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. The Museum will unveil the new interactive exhibit Diamond Mines on May 4 with a cast of baseball luminaries on hand for the celebration. Diamond Mines, made possible with the support of the Scout of the Year Foundation, will begin a scheduled two-year run in the Museum’s second floor ...
90 CC’s sure as shiit ain’t pure thrust like 100 CC’s.
Something is different about Yankees pitcher CC Sabathia. To open the year, Sabathia’s fastball velocity has been down significantly. After averaging 93.04 mph with the pitch last year, Sabathia’s velocity has dropped to just 90.59 mph this April. The 32-year-old has already done a tremendous job making due with a diminished fastball, and will look to continue the trend against the Blue Jays Saturday. Through five starts, he has a 3.34 ...
No letter on catcher/non-eye catcher, Andy Etchebarren. And that’s a damn shame.
Another part of it is that Johnson learned that former Dodgers and Cardinals GM Branch Rickey - a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame and famously known for being the guy to sign Jackie Robinson - liked Johnson when he was a prospect in the Orioles organization.
As you can see in this letter found in the Library in Congress (and put online by Twitter user bettilupi), Rickey recommended to the Cardinals’ ...
The White Sox slugger is hitting a cool .108 on the season and has hit a combined .184 over 2011-12, but contends that some of that is due to the pressure placed upon him when his batting average is reported in the media and flashed on scoreboards.
“I’m telling you,” said Adam Dunn, whose batting average has dropped in recent seasons, “if people didn’t post people’s batting averages on the scoreboard or in the media, people would be batting .400. I’m serious. I believe that. ...
This is taking Vaseline’s® new Spray & Go® a bit too far!
Consequences for cheating? If you do well enough, you make the Hall of Fame. MLB won’t do anything about it. The Steroid Era may get the headlines, and it may fuel the debate today, but the seeds were planted when baseball let Gaylord Perry get away with throwing the spitball.
What is more damning is that Perry’s 1974 autobiography provided enough evidence for him to at least be suspended. Imagine if then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn ...
Saturday: Full slate of ballgames. Also, a new episode of Doctor Who. But mainly a full slate of ballgames. Also, the last four rounds of the NFL draft. But screw that, it’s a full slate of ballgames. And, hey, guess what, it’s also the 191st birthday of Ulysses S. Grant…. but mainly a full slate of ballgames.
But it is NOT a place to talk about your fantasy team. It’s rule #1 of Omnichatter, written in the ancient days of earlier this week and passed down through history.
In a span of less than three innings, the Yankees lost their starting catcher for for more than a month and their fifth starter for an unknown amount of time.
Francisco Cervelli fractured his right hand in the first at-bat of the game, when a pitch from Ivan Nova struck him. He will require surgery and miss at least six weeks.
In the third, Nova departed due to pain in his right elbow. He will undergo an MRI later tonight.
Miami Marlins owner Jeffrey Loria personally mandated the lineup card change that flip-flopped starting pitchers Jose Fernandez and Ricky Nolasco in a doubleheader Tuesday and left Marlins players furious with his continued meddling, three sources with knowledge of the situation told Yahoo! Sports.
Loria insisted Fernandez, the team’s prized 20-year-old rookie, pitch in the first half of the doubleheader at frigid Target Field instead of the scheduled Nolasco because the day game was expected ...
A film archivist at the University of Georgia discovered some rare baseball footage from 1919 that shows African-American plantation workers playing against workers from another plantation, complete with uniforms and everything.
If you drill down a bit you can find a link to the footage without the overlays. Said to be the earliest film of African-Americans playing ball.
Just hope this robot doesn’t turn into a bar room murderer like The Mighty Casey!
Researchers at the University of Electro-Communications in Tokyo and the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology have built a small humanoid robot that plays baseball — or something like it. The bot can hold a fan-like bat and take swings at flying plastic balls, and though it may miss at first, it can learn with each new pitch and adjust its swing accordingly. Eventually, it will make contact.
“Connie Marrero had a windup that looked like a cross between a windmill gone berserk and a mallard duck trying to fly backwards,” former big league star Felipe Alou once said
Fave YankFan chant: “I’d like see Eduardo Nunez get 500 AB’s and see what he can do!!!” ~Nunez now has exactly 500 career AB’s.~
Eduardo Nunez is just not good. Among shortstops, with at least 60 plate appearances, he is currently tied for last place in WAR (-0.4) with the likes of Asdrubal Cabrera and Brendan Ryan. The latter is the only shortstop to have a worse wRC+ (6) than Nunez (37). Basically, the Yankees have needed him to step up for the injured Derek Jeter and he has done absolutely ...
After 50 years of pronouncing it \bru-NET\ big shot Baseball-Reference comes along and tells me it’s \brue-NAY\. F you Frank Messer!
Brunet was now 38, but he had no plans after baseball. He wanted to keep pitching. A friend of his, former major league shortstop Chico Carrasquel, convinced him to give it a whirl in the Mexican League. At the time, the league served as a bastion for over-the-hill major leaguers who still felt they had something to offer.
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 ...
