Zack Greinke prepares for tonight’s pregame interview. (He’s a nerd, is the joke.)
This edition of One Night Only contains:
1. Expanded previews for two games: San Diego at Milwaukee and Detroit at Toronto.
2. Shorter, but no less charming, previews for three more games: Minnesota at Boston, Oakland at Texas, and Chicago AL at Los Angeles AL.
3. Pitcher and Team NERD scores for every one of tonight’s games.
Pirates over Astros, 2 games to 1
Moving the Needle: Sunday, Ryan Doumit brings the Pirates all the way back with a three-run shot, +.596 WPA. Now this is the kind of WPA swing I’m talkin’ ’bout. The Pirates had a 2-0 lead in this one, but the second the bullpen entered the game things got dicey. As in, the bullpen blew the lead and left the Pirates down 4-2 heading into the bottom of the eighth. But after a single and a walk Doumit absolutely crushed one, putting his team on top 5-4. Joel Hanrahan closed it out, giving the Pirates the game and the weekend advantage.
Notable Pitching
Charlie Morton: 7.2 IP, 7 H, 1 R, 1 ER, 1 BB, 5 K, 0 HR, 12 GB.
James McDonald: 6 IP, 3 H, 0 R, 2 BB, 8 K. He really needed this one. That’s three straight serviceable starts for him. Now, if only he could pitch into the seventh.
Astros 3, Pirates 2
Pirates 6, Astros 1
Pirates 5, Astros 4
Also in this issue: Angels over Indians | Reds over Cubs | Rays over Orioles | Nationals over Marlins | Red Sox over Twins | Mets over Dodgers | White Sox over Mariners | Yankees over Rangers | Cardinals over Brewers | Tigers over Blue Jays | Padres over Diamondbacks | A’s over Royals | Braves over Phillies | Giants over Rockies
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Jeff Francoeur is off to a great start and appears ready to reach his full potential.
It’s now May 9th, and Francoeur is hitting .302/.345/.581. He leads the league in total bases with 10 doubles, a triple and eight home runs. He adds value in the field and on the basepaths. His .279 ISO ranks fifth in the American League, and he ranks fifth from an overall production standpoint with 1.7 wins above replacement. His sharp uptick in productivity is surprising, especially since there is at least one real sign that the improvements might stick.
One of the most interesting aspects of his overall line is how he isn’t walking any more frequently than in years past. The improvement is entirely attributable to a power surge. His batting average on balls in play is by no means otherworldly at .310. His line drive rate is a fairly unimpressive 16%, and nearly 50% of his balls in play are on the ground. Add in that his strikeout rate is a touch higher than it was last year, and it becomes easy to wonder how he is displaying so much power.
I noticed last night that the Mariners were the only team left in baseball that had yet to play an extra-inning game this season. Division-mate Oakland has already played eight. Sometimes I am content to let a little nugget like that pass off into the twitter-verse and let it die, but in this case I got intrigued enough to head to Retrosheet and see if I could dig up some context. I restricted the search to seasons starting in 1962 when the expansion to 162 games took place and started the season earlier in the year.
The best that I could do was to go by calendar dates. I would prefer to go by game counts, but that was not available to my database at this time. Luckily, calendar dates are a reasonable proxy for how many games a team has played. And the winner for the longest it has taken to play extra innings goes to the 2005 Boston Red Sox who didn’t go beyond nine until their 99th game of the season on July 25. Read the rest of this entry »
Episode Seventy-Three
In which the panel is fantastic — in only one sense of the word.
Headlines
Eric Hosmer’s Glory — Glorified!
Pick Six Fantasy Game — Shilled For!
Competent Third Basemen — Sought After!
Featuring
Jason Catania, Longest Islander
Eno Sarris, Bay Area-ist
Finally, you can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.
Audio on the flip-flop. (Approximately 60 min play time.)
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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The Mariners offense is comfortably in baseball’s bottom third. And while they are getting positive offensive contributions from Ichiro Suzuki, Adam Kennedy and Milton Bradley, who knows where they would be without Justin Smoak, who, after a 7-for-12 performance against the Rangers this week, is beginning to look more and more like the potentially great player many thought he was when he was traded last season. Read the rest of this entry »
After their 1-6 loss to the White Sox on April 10, the feeling in many quarters was probably that the Rays’ hopes for contention were on the rocks, as they dropped to 1-8. It was early, but if over the winter some were already skeptical of the Rays’ chances gives the offseason departures of Carl Crawford, Carlos Pena, Matt Garza, Rafael Soriano, and Grant Balfour, then after the Manny Ramirez Era in Tampa Bay ending, um, not well, fellow free agent acquisition Johnny Damon not hitting, and, worst of all, Evan Longoria out with injury, the Rays goose understandably may have seemed cooked.
Fast forward to today: the Rays are 17-14, one game behind the Yankees, and pre-season favorites Boston are still under .500 after their own rocky start. Are the Rays simply having a hot streak, or are they positioned to contend for the rest of the season?
A Portrait of the Artist as a Middle-Aged Baseball Man
This edition of One Night Only contains:
1. Hot, bullet-pointed previews for seven games — probably including your favorite team!
2. Pitcher and Team NERD scores for every one of this weekend’s games.
3. Tons of frigging whimsy.
As I’m sure many of you are aware, doing early season baseball analysis can be a difficult thing. It’s tempting for saberists to scream “Small sample size!” whenever someone makes a definitive statement about a player, and early season results should always be viewed with a heavy dose of skepticism. After all, it’s a heck of a long schedule: the season started over a month ago, but we’re still less than 20% of the way finished. With most players, we have years and year of data on them – whether in the majors or minors – so why should we trust their results over a mere 100 plate appearances? More data almost always leads to better predictions, so at this point in the season, trusting 2011 results over a player’s past history is a dangerous thing.
At the same time, completely ignoring 2011 results is a horrible idea too. Some players do make dramatic improvements in their game from year to year, and there are always players that age at a different rate than expected — young players that develop fast (or slow) and old players that age quickly (or slowly). Some of a player’s early season results might be the result of a slump or streak, but sometimes there’s also an underlying skill level change that’s tied in with that slump or streak.
So how do we untangle what’s random variation and what’s a skill level change? Scouting information is huge when evaluating players in small samples, but sadly, not many of us are scouts. But stats can still help; you just have to know where to look.
Earlier this afternoon Dave raised an interesting point regarding newly promoted Royal Eric Hosmer. Plenty of prospects have produced high BABIPs in the minors, which has led to results that simply aren’t sustainable in the majors. Among the BABIP casualties he lists is Alex Gordon, former top prospect turned bust, who is now ripping through the league with a .385 wOBA. Yet much of his success this season rides on his .380 BABIP.
This is clearly — wait for it — unsustainable. Gee, how did I ever come to that conclusion? Of course, if it were merely a matter of inflated BABIP driving Gordon’s success, he wouldn’t warrant a further look. You could glance at the number on his player page, see that it’s out of line with his career totals, and write him off as lucky and a severe regression candidate. But it’s not that simple. BABIP is not composed 100% of luck.
