PREVIOUSLY ON MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL: Clay Buchholtz was accused of cheating and there were rainouts.
TODAY: Buchholtz takes the mound for the first time since the accusations, while the White Sox/Royal and Rangers/Cubs are make-up games. There are 9 games overall today.
Loads of Natedictions…but here’s the baseball content.
We asked Nate Silver to gauge how predictable different things in life were: from politics to cricket, from terrorism to sexual orientation. Here’s how he scored ten different areas, on a prediction scale of 0 to 10
Baseball: 8-9
Silver made his name building a system to forecast player performance in baseball, called PECOTA. So, unsurprisingly, he thinks the game is pretty predictable.
In fact, he thinks the systems are so good now ...
The latest Rohrshach test the swiftly emerging Umps Behaving Badly narrative:
Bryce Harper was ejected in the first inning of the Nationals’ 6-2 victory over the Pirates Sunday afternoon after he drew the ire of umpiring crew chief John Hirschbeck with his reaction to a check-swing third strike. The incident left the Nationals without their best player and, owing to behavior from Hirschbeck that Manager Davey Johnson deemed overaggressive, raised the issue of contentious relations between ...
All the signs were there. Roy Halladay, a former Cy Young Award winner whose success has been predicated on his control, threw more than a handful of pitches Sunday that were miles out of the strike zone. When he did throw it over the plate, it was blasted into the outfield or over the fence by hitters who normally wouldn’t stand a chance.
So it wasn’t the 7.96 ERA over his last three seasons that made Mitch Williams retire. It was the fun factor! #tommyrot
This team I did pick to win the AL West because I thought the additions of Josh Hamilton and Jason Vargas would help them because they are both low-key players who would fit in to the Angels clubhouse — which I have since found out from a player who has since left was not a very cohesive clubhouse. And it shows on the field.
The Verducci Effect of discipline, in the classroom.
Verducci’s first gripe came with the perceived taboo by swinging 3-0. There is a .12 correlation between swinging 3-0 and R/G, but there is a .38 correlation between getting to 3-0 counts and runs. I think hitters should only be swinging 3-0 if they have a great ability to leave the defense out of the equation, a.k.a. hit the ball out of the park. Teams who hit more home runs generally score more runs, so encouraging all teams to swing more ...
It was easy to spend hours discussing the relative merits of Stan Musial, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, Ted Simmons, George Hendrick, Mark McGwire and Adam Wainwright.
However, thanks to sabermetrics, those days are past. The concept of sabermetrics, a pure mathematical analysis of baseball, first surfaced in the mid-1960s. The science of sabermetrics, and it is a science, tells us that batting average and RBIs don’t ...
I thought only industry insiders voted for The Reuben Sturman Award.
Hideki Matsui, Most Valuable Player in the 2009 World Series, and his former manager Shigeo Nagashima received Japan’s People’s Honor awards at a ceremony today in Tokyo, public broadcaster NHK reported.
Matsui set a record for Japanese players with 175 home runs in 10 Major League Baseball seasons, seven with the New York Yankees, after smashing 332 homers in 10 seasons with the Yomiuri Giants in Japan. Nagashima, who ...
It’s Sunday. Among the pitchers in action today include Cat Latos’ dad, Lester (who faces the Rangers and Darvish), Darvish (who faces the Red Sox and Lester) and Verlander goes against the Astros, which doesn’t seem particularly fair.
The ESPN Game of The Week (8:00 PM) is Dodgers (Ryu) at Giants (Cain). That should be fun.
An article about the on-the-mound rage of one of my all-time favorite Rays
“I respect the game, and I respect the guys,” he says. “But if you hit a double and you’re standing at second base doing [bleeping] cartwheels and slamming basketballs and whatever else they do these days, I figure: Screw it. You’re not going to ##### when I’m out there doing my thing.”
Occasionally, saber nerds come out of their basements long enough to make children. And sometimes, those children play Little League baseball. Little League may only vaguely resemble “real” baseball, but that doesn’t mean we can’t analyze it.
“I’m sick and tired of hearing about strikeouts,” first baseman Freddie Freeman said recently as he slouched in the chair in front of his locker. “An out’s an out.”
The Braves say they are not careless free swingers taking hacks at pitches from their shoelaces to their shoulders. They are merely a collection of power hitters who take three full cuts without fear of embarrassment.
“It does no good when you have two strikes on you, nobody on, to ...
I was so excited about finding this I had to share. The quality isn’t good, but considering it’s officially unavailable on DVD, it’s certainly better than nothing. I don’t think I’ve seen this in nearly 20 years, and it’s as wonderful as I remember.
Gary DiSarcina would like to set the record straight: He was joking.
Baseball Prospectus more than 10 years ago introduced “The DiSars,” an award given to the player who went the deepest into a season without drawing a walk. The concept has continued to this day—all in the name of the then-Anaheim Angels shortstop who Baseball Prospectus said “proudly stated that it was a goal of his to not walk all season.”
“The answer is no,” however, according to Dan Brooks, a postdoctoral fellow in neuroscience at Brown University and the founder of brooksbaseball.net. “We’ve heard broadcasters say (Buchholz’ pitches) are dipping and diving and moving in weird ways — well, we can look at what the pitches are doing, we can look at the data. And the data say that they’re not doing anything special.”
Brooks’ website has data on nearly everything a pitcher can do on a mound: pitch selection, ...
Legendary Yankees slugger Mickey Mantle likely used a corked bat in games later in his career, according to a game-used merchandise auctioneer that will sell one of Mantle’s apparently adjusted Louisville Sluggers. From Grey Flannel Auctions:
As noticed and documented by John Taube of PSA/DNA, “during our examination of the bat, we noticed a circular area .75 inches wide in the center of the top barrel. The finish in the area has also been touched up to mask the circular area. ...
It’s one thing for Michael the Kay and Sen. Al Leiter to screw this up last night…but the BBWAA high muckety-muck? “Rookie shortstop Adam Rosales smoked a first-pitch fastball to left-center for his first career home run.”
Sabathia was taken deep on the first pitch of the game. Rookie shortstop Adam Rosales smoked a first-pitch fastball to left-center for his first career home run. Sabathis settled down nicely but needed major help from second baseman Robinson Cano to get out of a fifth-inning ...
Fagan inspection: Find defects in Josh Hamilton’s game.
What follows isn’t an attempt to predict the rest of Hamilton’s season; it’s an attempt to use several advanced statistics to provide a deeper look at how poorly he has played so far in 2013. Keep in mind that the calendar has just barely crept into May, so we’re dealing with small sample sizes.
The stat: .248 wOBA
What wOBA doesn’t stand for: Would *Oyster Burns Approve? How it relates to Hamilton: Hamilton isn’t drawing ...
There was a time when a younger CC Sabathia was a frequent visitor to the Indians manager’s office where he was told he couldn’t win the fight with umpires and to stop showing his displeasure with them while on the mound.
Those days have been gone for a while, but last night at Yankee Stadium a fill-in umpire mistook the Yankees’ ace yelling at himself for Sabathia screaming at him and let Sabathia know about it.
“I can’t be yelled at, I am a grown man,’’ Sabathia said after ...
It’s Kentucky Derby day! And it’s the 142nd anniversary of Fort Wayne’s 2-0 victory over Cleveland in the first MLB game EVER (when going by the B-Ref definition of Major Leagues). Wonder if the Kekionga faithful had any idea what it would one day become….
Anyway, full slate of games. Nobody cares about your fantasy team. Baseball is weird. LaTroy Hawkins is a Timelord and/or has the Philosopher’s Stone in his possession.
The larger point of course is that Jesus Montero probably isn’t a catcher at all, and thus it doesn’t matter if his bat may compare well with Wilson Ramos’ or even Miguel Montero’s. Catchers generate so much value because of their scarcity; this makes Montero’s 123 wRC+ elite. But give the same hitting stats to a 1B, and he’s barely above average (Paul Goldschmidt’s 123 and position got him 2.8 WAR last year). Add in the base-running penalty because, well, you know, ...
Millar made his weekly appearance on WEEI’s Mut & Merloni on Friday, and one of the topics discussed was the recent allegations against Clay Buchholz. Toronto broadcasters Dirk Hayhurst and Jack Morris accused Buchholz of doctoring the baseball during his start against the Blue Jays on Wednesday, which prompted Dennis Eckersley to defend the Red Sox pitcher before and after Thursday’s game. Millar wasn’t shy about stating whose corner he’s in.
Mitch Williams appeared on 94.1 WIP this morning and ripped into Phillies pitching coach Rich Dubee, saying the Phillies need a new man for the job.
He said Roy Halladay‘s problems were a simple mechanical fix that Dubee simply could not find. He mentioned an encounter he had with Dubee in Spring Training, when Dubee yelled at him for trying to talk to his pitchers, although he claimed that did not make his criticism this morning personal. ...
The plunder of 600 stolen bases was laid out around Juan Pierre’s locker late Thursday night.
The lineup card from the Miami Marlins’ 7-2 loss to the Phillies was displayed with the uprooted base where Pierre attained the milestone.
The head-scratcher was the pyramid of Hawaiian Punch cans surrounded by Honey Buns. That was the result of the Marlins posing the question to Pierre’s wife Liz: What do you get a man who has stolen 600 bases?
Actual headline: “The Truth About Clay Buchholz.” Said truth? That not only was he doctoring the ball last night, he’s been doctoring it all season long…and that the start of this behavior mysteriously coincides with his sudden effectiveness as a starter.
Thanks to accusations from Toronto broadcasters and former pitchers Dirk Hayhurst and Jack Morris, Boston pitcher Clay Buchholz has reignited an ageless debate about what constitutes “cheating” in baseball. [...]
When I was a kid, Barry Bonds’ dad Bobby was still playing. He spent the first seven years of his career with the Giants, but after that he was traded roughly every two minutes. The answer usually had something to do with how his team couldn’t abide all his strikeouts. He averaged 154 per 162 games played and set the single-season record of 189, since obliterated by Mark Reynolds, Adam Dunn, and five others. He also had tremendous power and speed and ...
