In the sweat of Carlos Zambrano’s face shalt he eat bread — and also per the terms of his contract.

Assorted Headlines
Zambrano May Pitch in Venezuelan Winter League
Carlos Zambrano — who hasn’t pitched since an August 12th incident that saw him concede five home runs, attempt to hit Chipper Jones, and perform emotional hara-kiri — might pitch for Caribes in the Venezuelan Winter League, MLB.com’s Carrie Muskat reports. The right-hander, who posted the highest xFIP- of his career (113) in 2011, is owed $18 million in 2012. Reports suggest that he maybe also eats children*.

*These reports come from a dream I had last night.

Read the rest of this entry »

Wow.

That’s all I could muster as it became clear that David Freese’s flyball to center was leaving the yard. Just wow.

There have been numerous good playoff games and some great World Series games, but what took place Thursday night existed on an entirely different plane. It’s always tough to gauge the historic status of something so recent, but calling Game Six of the 2011 World Series one of the best baseball games in history just feels right.

The World Series is somehow, some way, going to a seventh and final game Friday night after twists and turns galore. For seven innings, the game was defined by missed opportunities and blunders both physical and managerial. After that, the game was defined by the old adage you can’t predict baseball.

In the end, Freese, who tied the game in the ninth with a two-out, two-strike, two-run triple knocked the ball out of the yard in the 11th to seal the deal. However, what transpired over the previous few innings foreshadowed a crazy finish. Freese’s home run wasn’t even shocking. Of course that happened. But various circumstances had to be present for the Cardinals to even have a shot at knotting up the game and winning it in extras. Here are some of Thursday night’s highlights that led to such a wild ending.

Read the rest of this entry »

You’re amazing.

Source: FanGraphs

It’s the World Series. Your team hasn’t played since Monday. You have a deep bullpen and the availability of a starting pitcher working on three days rest. It’s the World Series.

Top 5: Texas 4, St. Louis 3

Bases loaded, 2 outs: Colby Lewis struck out swinging

Read the rest of this entry »

Paul Swydan and Jeff Zimmerman will join me (and you!) for a chat during tonight’s game six.

A couple of months ago, I submitted to these pages a piece in which I attempted to identify five-tool players by the nerdiest possible numbers. For each of the tools — hitting for average, hitting for power, etc. — I used an advanced metric that would serve as a sort of proxy for that tool. For average, it was contact percentage; for power, it was home runs per batted ball; for speed, it was Speed Score; for fielding, it was a combination of UZR and the WAR positional adjustment. The methodology, if imperfect, at least had the effect of framing the conversation.

There was some question at the time regarding what exactly is meant by the “hit” tool — and how we define it is likely to have an effect on the how we measure it.

Fortunately for all of America, J.D. Sussman of Beyond the Box Score actually wrote a meditation on the hit tool back in March — a piece for which he was able to elicit the following definitions of the hit tool from people who know a thing ot two about a thing or two.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a good thing Major League Baseball isn’t going to, you know, overreact to the Boston Red Sox collapse. After the famous Boston Globe article that gently blew open the clubhouse, revealing that — shockingly! — some of the Red Sox pitchers ate chicken and drank beer during the ballgames, the commissioner’s office felt it had no choice but to explore a total ban on beer in the clubhouse. Joe Torre finally decided against such a ban, but Tampa Bay manager Joe Maddon was wise enough to call the ban what it was: “asinine.”

All of this knee-jerk stuff that occurs in our game absolutely drives me crazy. If you want to be proactive about some thoughts, go ahead, be proactive and I’m all for that. But to say a grown-up can’t have a beer after a game? Give me a break. That is, I’m going to use the word, ‘asinine,’ because it is. Let’s bring the Volstead Act back, OK. Let’s go right back to prohibition and start legislating everything all over again. All that stuff pretty much annoys me, as you can tell.*

* Not only do I agree, I give Maddon major props for referencing the Volstead Act, the 1919 law that led to accompanied the passage of the 18th Amendment banning the manufacture, sale, and transport of intoxicating beverages. It remained on the books until December 5, 1933, when the 21st amendment, repealing the eighteenth and ending Prohibition, was ratified. Both of these events have been commemorated by modern distillers and brewers: on December 5, 2008, Dewar’s Whisky celebrated the 75th anniversary of Repeal Day, and the 21st Amendment Brewery was founded in San Francisco in 2000 as a celebration of the law that let us drink again. I’m a fan of their Back in Black IPA. Later in the interview, Maddon identified himself as more of a wine drinker. De gustibus non disputandum est.
Read the rest of this entry »

In the dog-bites-man story of the week, the Dodgers announced that lefty Hong-Chih Kuo will have surgery on Friday. This time, the surgery is not major: arthroscopic surgery designed to remove some loose bodies. Nevertheless, the unique reliever has mentioned retirement as a possibility. That would be a shame — no pitcher has ever overcome so much before his 30th birthday.

His story is one saturated with injury. It even starts with an injury — after his very first minor league baseball game in America, the Taiwanese lefty was shut down with elbow pain. He would eventually need Tommy John surgery that year. Kuo was an 18-year-old, though, and these things happen. He even managed 19-plus innings in 2001, with 21 strikeouts against four walks in rookie ball. Maybe he’d be fine.

Read the rest of this entry »

With no game to mismanage last night, Tony LaRussa instead told reporters that he was going to go see Moneyball. He might have been joking, since he’s clearly not a fan of the concepts associated with the book. A bit later in the same interview, in fact, he said this:

“On-base percentage is one of the most dangerous concepts of the last seven, eight years, because it forces some executives and coaches and players to think that it’s all about getting on base by drawing walks. And the fact is that the guys that have the best on-base percentage are really dangerous hitters whenever they get a pitch in the strike zone.

“So if the pitcher knows that and the catcher knows that, they work the edges, and pretty soon it’s 2-and-1, 2-and-1 rather than 0-and-1 all the time.

“You watch your productive hitters in the big leagues, and they get a chance to drive in a run, they look for the first good strike, and the better the pitching, especially this time of the year, you get that first strike, that may be the last one that you get to see. So you’d better be ready to swing early. It’s not sitting up there and taking strike one, strike two so that you can work the count.’’

Let’s put aside the fact that the point of Moneyball was not “OBP=Good” and just address LaRussa’s contention directly – does the philosophy of taking pitches cause hitters to perform worse?

Read the rest of this entry »