As described by Russell Martin:
“That was strange,” Martin said. “I was kind of mystified. I really didn’t get that. He was punishing me.”
Typically, Martin said umpires grant his request to throw the ball back to his pitcher, which he likes to do just to keep his arm loose during games. Even after arguments, he said no umpire had ever denied him the request until last night, when Diaz told him he hadn’t earned the right.
“Now, thinking back, I should have shown him the gold Rawlings sign on my glove,” Martin said.
Though Martin bit his tongue and didn’t call Diaz any names on the field, the catcher said he took the umpire’s actions as an attempt to goad him into an ejection.
“I feel like that’s what he was trying to do, trying to get me,” Martin said. “But it wasn’t going to happen.”
Said Martin: “He’s not a bad guy. It’s just, I don’t know… There’s pride involved right there. I don’t know. It’s strange. It’s all right. We won the game. That’s all that matters to me.”
Martin said he and Diaz had no history of ill will before last night’s terse exchange. “No, not really,” he said. “But I know he can hold a grudge.”
And yet Tyrion Lannister would be banned from setting foot on the field.
]]>And the result so far is not pretty. Boy oh boy, poor Max Scherzer.
His strikeout rate is sensational: 72K on 241 plate appearances, or 30%. The next level after that is RJ and Pedro territory.
But his BABIP is downright obscenely high: .394. One level BETTER than that would send you to AAA.
And then, the outcome of his performance shows massive splits with men on base, with a wOBA of .331 with bases empty (close to league average) and .419 with men on base (basically turning an average hitter into Ryan Braun).
He’s really all over the place with the men on base split.
- His BABIP with bases empty is a high .338, but with men on base, it’s .460!
- His K rate with bases empty is 36%, but put a runner on base, and it drops down to 21%.
- His BB+HB rate with bases empty is 8%, but with a runner on base, it’s 11%
- But in this utter collapse of outcomes with men on base comes a silver lining: 5.5% of his batters faced with bases empty hit a HR (which is a league-leading type figure), but only 2% of hitters get a HR with men on base. If you can believe it, things could be looking MUCH MUCH WORSE for Scherzer. Basically, he’s “lucky” that his unluckiness doesn’t include allowing HR with men on base.
The good news for Scherzer is that we don’t expect his inflexible slide-step to continue: whether you look at his own career, or that of other pitchers, the sequencing of events is not persistent.
The other good news for Scherzer is that we don’t expect his unstoppable BABIP to continue: again, whether his career or those of other pitchers, that balls in play will find gloves.
And the final good news is that his immovable K rate will continue, as that’s the thing that is the most persistent.
I want to read your articles, very much. But, your site is blocked at the office, and you are only giving the RSS feed one line of content per article. This is like the MLB blackout policy. Thank you.
UPDATE: In the comments below, readers point out that Grantland DOES have a separate feed that has the whole article. I am sorry to Grantland for making them the bad guy, when it was my fault for not double-checking.
]]>Non-sports post.
I’m hoping that I’m not the only fool that this has happened too, and you can share your experiences.
I paid my quarterly estimate on time through EFTPS in mid-April 2012, but, I marked 2011 instead of 2012. Since I couldn’t cancel a payment that was due to go the next day, I was stuck. I called the day after the payment posted, and was told to call back in ten days. (Why? I don’t know.) Anyway, I called, explained my scenario, and after ten minutes, the helpful rep said everything got taken care of.
Except of course I got a larger refund for my 2011 taxes than expected, an over-refund of exactly my misapplied payment. So, whatever the helpful rep did was irrelevant. So, I call back, and they tell me I better make my missed payment, and then write a letter to the IRS explaining my scenario. Which I am about to do, but I’m wondering if anyone else has been in my position.
Two other points:
1. The last agent I talked to noted that had I accepted a check rather than direct deposit refund, then they COULD do something about it: I could return the check, and they could handle it. But because I accepted the refund electronically, there was no “undo” for that.
2. The IRS has a process when you mail in your paper check, rather than online through EFTPS, to correct misapplied payments. They do not have one through the EFTPS. But they sell EFTPS as the best way to not have an error. Maybe it is for the most part, but, darn it, not in this case.
Ok, tell me your stories.
He gives up four home runs in one game, to a team that was accused with out-of-context data last year of stealing signs.
Is this a case where if enough people repeat the same evidence-free summary opinion that bullsh!t becomes fact? Or, is Hammel simply applying the appropriate prior?
There’s been a few Bluejays players that have left Toronto… can’t a reporter ask THEM if they were involved in sign-stealing? Is this the birther issue, applied to baseball?
]]>Sabermetrics as a word in the spelling bee:
The Scripps National Spelling Bee, which alongside poker, cheerleading, and hot dog eating constitute the E for Entertainment in ESPN, featured an actual sports word in the third preliminary round of its competition today in Washington, D.C. as “sabermetrics” made its appearance.
14-year-old Emma Ciereszynski—who honed her spelling skills by filling out paperwork requiring her full name—drew the word and successfully spelled it after learning its definition ("the statistical analysis of baseball data") and its origin (an English acronym plus a Greek-derived English part). The word’s appearance in the Bee outraged both baseball purists (who deny the legitimacy of sabermetrics as an idea) and stat junkies (who insist on spelling it SABRmetrics).
Glove-slap to multiple readers.
Other than Greg and our Polish friends, is there anyone out there that can spell her name if it was in the Bee?
]]>Mark shows us a list of players who keep the ball in the infield, and prevent the taking of extra bases.
]]>I suspect this is a common story, but it was fascinating to read nonetheless:
Naulty’s revelation hit Roberts hardest. He was the only one of the Miracle pitchers who had played with Naulty when he wasn’t using steroids: They had been in Class A ball in Kenosha, Wis., in 1992, after Roberts had decided not to pursue an NBA career. On his off days between starts, Roberts operated the radar gun behind home plate. He consistently clocked Naulty at 84 to 86 miles per hour. Fifteen years later, on a Sunday morning in 2007, Roberts watched Naulty give a television interview about how steroids helped him reach the big leagues.
“I was pretty upset,” Roberts says. “Gosh, it’s hard enough trying to make it in this profession. You want to make it on your own abilities and work ethic, and all of a sudden, when you think it’s an even playing field, you’ve got somebody cheating. I was very upset, knowing my chance to get to the big leagues was cut short. I was jealous, hurt, frustrated, angry ... all that stuff.
“I guess I should have been suspicious. How can a guy go from 85 miles an hour to 95 in three or four years? As I look back on it, it’s so clear and obvious that I can’t believe I was that naive and incredibly stupid. All the signs were there.”
...
He reported to spring training the following season at 200 pounds and with several extra ticks on his fastball. The Twins’ instructors were impressed. It was a cycle that would repeat itself every year: Naulty would use various steroids through the winter, gain muscle mass and velocity, and wow the coaches in camp. He would not use steroids during the season, causing him to lose some weight—about 10 pounds if he had gained 20—and his numbers to fall off as the year progressed. Then it was back to an off-season of doping, with a veritable buffet of steroids. “We were mixing them,” he says. “Some for size, some for speed. There was a steroid I took one off-season that was purely to speed your body up. You didn’t gain any size at all. [Your arm speed] just got faster. The point was the faster I moved the harder I’d throw.”
Probably the MLBPA’s biggest failing was not insisting on having clean players.
]]>Interesting article by Eno, who quotes our very own Alan on the issue:
]]>Let’s say it’s possibly a bad idea to grip the bat like this — obviously the Athletics think it might be. Why would players do it. Easy — leverage. Professor Alan Nathan is known for his work on the physics of baseball. He told me the reasoning, and the flaws as he saw them:
If the batter swings the bat by rotating it about some point near the body, then getting the barrel of the bat as far from the body as possible will get the highest bat speed in the barrel (which is where it counts). One way to do that is to grip the bat so that the hands overlap the knob. Of course, this whole thing assumes that the batter can rotate the bat as fast in that position as in the normal position. This kind of thing is not so uncommon in slow-pitch softball, where bat “quickness” (the ability to get around quickly) is not a big problem. I suspect it is not so common in Major League Baseball.And indeed, if you search the internets for talk of ‘knob-grabbing’ — make sure your SafeSearch is on — you get many forums talking about the benefit of the grip in slow-pitch softball, where the need for power trumps the need for contact. But it does seem at least semi-prevalent in the majors, so there are those that choose to see past the risks for the power.
Great job by David for pointing out how pitchers are giving Trout nothing but fastballs (#1 in the league) and Harper is getting everything except fastballs (#1 in the league for that).
]]>Colin gives us some data to consider.
***
Let me give you two points:
1. Do we count the IBB for the hitter to the same extent that we do a regular walk? Do we include all those IBB that the great trio of Braves pitchers were forced to throw, even as lesser pitchers don’t throw as many IBB? Or, is the pitcher at the mercy of his manager?
2. The ENTIRE BASIS of every performance metric is to compare a player to his peers. And the easiest question to ask yourself is the following:
What would a league average player have done UNDER THESE CIRCUMSTANCES?
So, what would a league average player have done if he’s playing for the Jays manager and lefty-power (though bunter) Carlos Pena is at bat? He’s going to run two hundred feet to his left, because that’s what the manager told him to do. Under those circumstances, what would a league average fielder have done? Well, he’s going to go wherever his manager tells him to go. And what did Lawrie do? And how many outs would the Jays have recorded with a league average fielder, and how many outs did the Jays record with Lawrie on the field?
Of course, we’re going to get into a gray area, because the manager influences so many decisions. To guard the line or not. To move a few steps to the left or right. How much of positioning is to the fielder and how much to the manager? Should we presume that an average fielder to stand at EXACTLY the same spot as our 3B did on each play, or, is there a two or three step margin that the manager is allowing each of his fielders?
Ideally, we would split everything up. We’d have an overall metric that would consider massive shifts or not, that would split the data between positioning and range, that would see how close the adjacent fielders are, if there’s a DP opp on, if they are playing in with a runner on 3B, etc.
At the very least, since the shift data has been identified, then split that data, and show us the results as a split line. And let the reader make his own personal decision as to whether he wants to include the shift data as part of the fielder’s overall value, or if he’s going to assign it to the manager, the way the manager calls for the IBB.
]]>Ben does all the hard work, shows us the video of each hit, and concludes:
Of the 17 singles off Venters, 10 were grounders that found a hole. The other seven were classified as line drives, but only two or three were hit hard. No pitcher goes through a season without allowing a cheap hit or three, but Venters has given up more than his fair share. To be fair and balanced, I also watched all of the balls that were turned into outs behind Venters, just to see if he’d lucked out on any of those. There wasn’t a Web Gem in the bunch, though there was another ball that bounced off of Venters.
What Ben did is basically a basic version of PZR (the flip-side of UZR, but from the pitcher’s perspective). So, great job to Ben to showing how much good/bad breaks plays into allowing/stopping hits.
]]>This is a pretty simple one to do. Take a team’s W/L record after 46 games, double it, and add 35 W and 35 L.
I never actually tested this, but based on my past work on related issues, this one should work pretty well. If you want to do the same in other sports, try (test!) this:
NHL: After 23 games, double their record, and add 18 W, 18 L. (Count OTL as L.)
NBA: After 34 games, double their record, and add 7 W, 7 L.
NFL: After 2 games, double their record, and add 6 W, 6 L.
Someone want to test this out?
]]>Good article on Konerko, and his wOBA by spray angle (represented by three buckets of hit/out location).
Using only simple averages, his pull wOBA in his last three years was 70 points higher than his preceding eight years. His up-the-middle wOBA was 71 points higher for the same time periods. His opposite-field wOBA is up 110 points.
Since frequencies were not in the chart, we can’t tell if he’s actually spraying the ball more. Not that we’d necessarily want him to, since he’s still at his best pulling.
]]>Craig looks at the probability of a no-hitter in a fun article.
Now, one thing that caught my eye was this:
The logic behind their method is simple—you look at the two stats that matter for no-hitters—outs and hits allowed—and calculate the “out percentage” (outs / (outs + hits).) You then raise this out percentage to the 26th power. (There is an average of one out on the bases, which makes 26 more accurate than 27.)
Except.... there would be that one out, if there were a certain number of runners on base via hits and walks. But, with a no-hitter, you have only guys with walks on the bases. Surely, in those games, the number of baserunner outs is going to be less. Let’s say there are 26.5 outs per no-hitter.
Craig’s calculation of p^26 = 0.000718 implies p=.757, which we put to the power of 26.5 to give us .000625.
Interestingly, Craig gives us the empirical (actual) data as:
Between the birth of the Mets in 1962 and May 27th, 2012, there were 209,764 starts made by major-league pitchers, with 131 ending up as no-hitters. This gives us a p(no-hitter) of .000625.
I don’t know whether 26.5 is the correct figure. We can at least look at those 131 no-hitters and see how many walks and batters there were.
]]>