Primer Dugout (and link of the day) 9-30-2016

Chicago Eagle, September 30, 1916:

“I took up professional baseball after receiving a diploma in mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan because the financial returns were there,” remarked George Sisler of the St. Louis Browns, the other day.
...
“I intend to use the winter months to advantage, however, by keeping in touch with engineering. Baseball is a grant game and I want to get to the top if possible. At the present rate, I think I can retire in 12 years with a fortune.

“One ...

David Ortiz’s few remaining critics are needling killjoys who don’t deserve him | For The Win

I’m going to miss David Ortiz.

One More Incredible Rangers Statistic | FanGraphs Baseball

Of course there’s noise, or randomness, and of course circumstances can be different when a team plays a certain other one. Maybe the Rangers have gotten really lucky in terms of missing the better teams’ better starters. But we haven’t seen something quite like this in a century. In a little more than a century, for that matter.

Almost 2,300 team-seasons in the sample. For each of them, I calculated winning percentage against teams who’re at least .500, and winning percentage against ...

Can New Technology Bring Baseball’s Data Revolution to Fielding? - NYTimes.com

It’s the Holy Grail of statistical analysis!

Statcast churns out an overwhelming amount of information; describing the movements of all the players on the field during a routine ground out, according to Willman, who is an analyst at BAM, can fill the equivalent of 21,000 rows on a spreadsheet. Teams are still learning how to dig through the digital sediment for usable knowledge. For now, they rely mostly on Willman and a couple of other colleagues to serve as electronic archaeologists. The ...

Molina’s walk-off 2B keeps Cards in WC hunt | MLB.com

It was a weird end. Watching the game, I agree with the umps. Price waited too long.

Molina stepped to the plate with two out and the potential winning run on first and ripped a ball to left field. It bounced off the warning track and hit a panel of signage beyond the wall before caroming back into play. A throw from left fielder Adam Duvall was too late to get Carpenter, who slid into home to initiate the celebration.

Statcast measures the exit velocity of Yadier Molina’s double and Matt ...

OMNICHATTER 9-30-16

The “Last Friday of the Regular Season” OMNICHATTER

Jesus Montero suspended 50 games for use of a stimulant

Shoulda stuck to ice cream sandwiches.

Remember Jesus Montero? The former Yankees and Mariners prospect? Well, he was picked up by the Blue Jays back in March after the Mariners waived him and played 126 games for Triple-A Buffalo this year. That went alright, I suppose, with Montero hitting .317/.349/.438 with 11 homers. He played a bit of first base too, trying to break the mold he’s been stuck in as a 26-year-old DH.

If this season was a platform for him to make one last push to the ...

Heyman: Twins’ hiring of Falvey raising eyebrows

Derek Falvey has a lot going for him as a well-regarded young executive with the Indians, but his impending hiring to lead the Minnesota Twins’ baseball ops department as its new chief baseball officer is raising eyebrows around the league.

Falvey is indeed the choice, with the Twins believed just to be doing final background checks. Keith Law of ESPN first reported the hiring. Of course no one should blame Falvey, a very bright exec by all accounts, but it’s questionable how qualified he ...

Jay Bruce gives peek at breakout as playoffs come into focus | New York Post

The trade might work out after all.

Anthony Rizzo and Ben Zobrist were forced to swap positions (and gloves) for a single play | MLB.com

This was much ado about nothing.

Primer Dugout (and link of the day) 9-29-2016

New York Evening World, September 29, 1916:

Twenty-five straight!

If the Giants never do anything else they can rest on that record. The twenty straight of the old Providence Club lasted for thirty-two years. Under the law of averages—with the increasing difficulty of winning games as the strain of a long drawn out effort grows—the new record of the Giants should last for a century!

I don’t know, man. 100 years is a long time. People probably won’t even be playing baseball anymore in 2016.

At ...

Garrett Richards takes another step toward the 2017 Angels rotation - The Orange County Register

It will be interesting to see how this treatment will work out.

Richards’ next step will be a game on Monday in instructional league. It will be his first time facing another team – albeit mostly low level minor leaguers – since his May 1 start at Texas.

Richards is scheduled for three instructional league outings, building up to about 50 pitches, and then a follow-up exam and imaging. If he clears those hurdles by mid October, he will be cleared for a normal winter and can be penciled ...

The Other Weird Thing About the Home-Run Surge | FanGraphs Baseball

Everybody is doing it. The chicks must dig it.

I’m not saying anything here is conclusive. And it’s possible we have a population change and a baseball change. Some of the evidence for a different baseball is very convincing. But now there’s more power coming from baseball’s middle class. And there’s more power coming from baseball’s lower class. The upper class has more power, too, yet not really by a whole lot. Homers are being distributed fairly equally, perhaps more than ever ...

OMNICHATTER 9-29-16

The Last-Thursday-Of-The-Regular-Season OMNICHATTER

Untitled — We all want the real Pitch, but…

Great stuff by Rob.

The difference was massive. Male pitchers averaged roughly 37 meters per second; females 27 meters per second. That is, women threw 73 percent as hard as the men. Apologies, but this would really be stretching the definition of “a few miles per hour slower.”

Technically, of course, “a few” can mean just about anything. But a reader might be mistaken for thinking “a few” means three miles an hour slower. Or six, or maybe seven.

I got Fleisig on the phone ...

Steven Matz To Undergo Surgery To Remove Bone Spur From Elbow

While Matz, 25, announced his presence in the Majors last summer with an excellent debut, he didn’t pitch enough innings for his rookie status to expire. The 2016 campaign has technically been his rookie year, and it’ll come to a close with a 3.40 earned run average and a 129-to-31 K/BB ratio that was compiled over the life of 132 1/3 innings out of the New York rotation. Matz becomes the third Mets starer to require season-ending surgery, joining rotation-mates Matt Harvey (thoracic outlet ...

Theo Epstein Agrees To 5-Year Extension With Cubs

They’ve always said it was inevitable, but the later in the season it got, a little doubt started to creep in.

Chairman Tom Ricketts and president Theo Epstein hammered out a new deal that will keep Epstein in charge of the Cubs’ baseball operations for five more years. Epstein’s contract had been set to expire at season’s end.

The deal surpasses the $8 million annually that Dodgers baseball czar Andrew Friedman garnered in fall 2014 to become their president of baseball operations, ...

White Sox will retain Robin Ventura if he wants to return: report - Chicago Tribune

Has he really earned a new contract?

Tebow homers on first instructional league pitch

Of course he did.

Tebow, batting second, was making his debut in Port St. Lucie, Fla., against the Cardinals’ instructional league team. His homer came off left-hander John Kilichowski, the Cardinals’ 2016 11th-round pick out of Vanderbilt, who gave up just one homer in 47 at-bats vs. left-handed batters in the Minors this year.

Time For MLB To End Rules That Jeopardize Safety Of Scouts - BaseballAmerica.com

“MLB’s rules that limit our ability to travel a Venezuelan guy to the Dominican Republic, that limit our ability to get them in a complex at different ages, all these rules are solely contributing to the risks that all of us are taking traveling from complex to complex, facility to facility in the streets,” said one international director. “Someone is going to get killed. It’s just a matter of time, and it’s on MLB when it happens, because they’re the ones who created these rules. ...

Fan loses ring while proposing during game at Yankee Stadium

Generally, I’m not a fan of the marriage proposal at a sporting event.

It’s become such a common event that most people just roll their eyes when there is a proposal on the big screen at a stadium. Teams, such as the New York Yankees, even encourage fans to propose at games.

However ... there are times when it’s pure magic.

Cracked: Baseball Is Carefully Crafted To Skirt The Limits Of Human Ability

[scroll down to #1]

On any regulation baseball diamond, the distance from home plate to the pitcher’s mound is weirdly specific: 60’ 6”. That distance isn’t a two-thirds ode to the devil; it’s an important design feature. That’s the empirically determined balancing point which puts the pitcher and hitter on an equal playing field. Moving the pitcher’s mound back even five feet would change the game wildly, giving batters a huge (20 percent) increase in the time they had to prepare their swing, ...

Here Are The 2016 MLB Prime Time Television Ratings For Each Team

The data from Nielsen NLSN +0.06% that covers the 29 U.S. clubs in the league from April 3-Sept 25 shows that nine clubs had the No. 1 ranking across all TV networks in prime time (Royals, Tigers, Orioles, Pirates, Indians, Red Sox, Mariners, and Giants). More than half the league (16 out of 29) saw them rank in the top 3 across all television networks. Out of the 29 clubs charted, 24, or 83% of the league saw the No. 1 rated programming in primetime on just cable over the course of the season. ...Read More...

RoyalsRetro (AG#1F) Posted: September 28, 2016 at 09:56 AM | 13 comment(s)
  Beats: baseball is dead, television ratings

Primer Dugout (and link of the day) 9-28-2016

New York Sun, September 28, 1916:

The great winning streak of the Giants looked deader than Dickens’s door nail on the Polo lawn yesterday when the ninth inning came rolling around. With two out in the ninth and the Cards leading at 2 to 0, the boys in the stands were edging toward the exits. Then came the explosion.

A warm slap to right by Charley Herzog was converted into a triple by Owen Wilson’s keystone komedy fielding, and Lew McCarty and George Burns rushed home with the tieing runs. The ...

Pete Rose petitions Hall of Fame for inclusion on ballots in lengthy letter

This is tiresome.

Disgraced hit king Pete Rose has asked National Baseball Hall of Fame officials to reconsider the bylaw that blocks his candidacy for enshrinement, petitioning Hall president Jeff Idelson in a seven-page letter that argues for his inclusion on future ballots.

The letter, obtained by Yahoo Sports, contends the terms of Rose’s lifetime ban for gambling – drawn by then-commissioner Bart Giamatti – intentionally excluded language that would have barred Rose from Cooperstown ...

Tigers rely on young pitchers in next 4 games | MLB.com

It’s Fulmer today, Daniel Norris tomorrow.

He would have Verlander pitching the regular-season finale on Sunday, particularly if a postseason bid is at stake. But as for Friday and Saturday in Atlanta, it’s two from the threesome of Matt Boyd, Jordan Zimmermann and Buck Farmer.

Baseball Prospectus | Pitching Backward: What We Know About Spin Rate

Your head might be spinning by the end of this article.

Cardinals GM John Mozeliak refects on 2016 | MLB.com

On how the organization intends to improve its defense before next season:

“Any time you identify something you want to address, whether it’s defense, power, the pitching, a lot of times it’s at what cost? And what I mean by that is, to get better defense, we may have to take a step back offensively. In terms of internal analysis that we do upstairs, that’s certainly an exercise we’re going to do. Then we’re going to decide what makes us look like a better club. But none of us is satisfied ...

Is Oakland’s Mount Davis Killing Fly Balls? | FanGraphs Baseball

Interesting stuff.

Comedy writer/baseball announcer Ken Levine reminisces about Vin Scully

Levine:
Here’s something that will make you groan. I asked if he kept all of his scorebooks down through the years and he said no. At the end of each season he just chucked them. To me that’s like throwing away the Ten Commandments.

...There was some guy on the internet selling full game broadcasts from the ‘50s-‘60s. He had some Dodger games so I bought them. I’m driving to the stadium one night listening to Vin call a game at Wrigley Field from 1966. I get so caught up in the drama ...