Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Daily Notes.

1. Featured Game: Colorado at Texas, 20:05 ET
2. A Very Notable Other Game (With a Note on the MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Featured Game: Colorado at Texas, 20:05 ET
Regarding This Game, What the Big Deal Is
The big deal regarding this game is that 34-year-old right-hander Roy Oswalt is starting it for Texas.

Some Relevant Information Regarding Roy Oswalt
In terms of Roy Oswalt, these are facts about him:

• His most recent regular-season start was on September 27 of last year (box).
• His velocity was in the 88-92 mph range last season before back problems forced Oswalt to the DL. Upon his return, Oswalt’s velocity increased slightly, sitting more around 91-95.
• A free agent after 2011, he signed with Texas at the end of May.
• Two or three minutes’ worth of internet searches suggest that Oswalt’s fastball is probably sitting in the low-90s at the moment — or, at least that’s what it was doing in his second-to-last warmup start.
• He posted this line in a total of four minor-league starts between Double- and Triple-A: 15.1 IP, 13 K, 4 BB, 1 HR.

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Francisco Liriano is back. After a month-long banishment to the bullpen, Liriano has returned to the rotation looking like a completely different pitcher. In his six starts prior to his demotion, Liriano was broken. The lefty allowed 37 hits in just 26.2 innings, and racked up a 9.45 ERA. While his stint in the bullpen only lasted five outings, it seemed to be exactly what he needed. Since rejoining the Minnesota Twins’ rotation, Liriano has allowed just 16 hits in 30.1 innings, and has posted a 2.67 ERA. Even though there are some reasons to doubt Liriano’s recent performance, there are also some signs that his success could be due to an altered approach.

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On October 20, 2004, Derek Lowe had what might be the greatest pitching performance in Boston Red Sox history. It’s certainly the most underappreciated. Facing the New York Yankees in a classic Game 7, Lowe allowed one run and one hit in six innings. And he did it on just two days of rest.

The Red Sox won the game 10-3 and completed a stunning comeback from a three-games-to-none deficit against their hated rivals. They went on to defeat the St. Louis Cardinals in the World Series and earned the franchise’s first title in 86 years.

Lowe talked about his historic outing when his current team, the Cleveland Indians, visited Fenway Park earlier this season.

——

David Laurila: Your performance in Game 7 of the 2004 ALCS is arguably the greatest in Red Sox history. Do you agree with that?

Lowe: “I don’t know. There have been a lot of games in the franchise’s history. Maybe the magnitude makes it that big. It was a perfect storm. I had competitive stuff that day and we scored a lot of runs. I had just pitched against them 48 hours earlier, so I had a fresh thought of what I wanted to do.

Our game plan was to throw a lot of breaking balls. We threw a lot of them and I was fortunate enough to have good command of my off-speed stuff that day. We figured they’d be ultra-aggressive, because it was kind of how the series had gone. They had been up 3-0 and we had clawed our way back to Game 7 in Yankee Stadium. We felt they’d be over-aggressive and maybe force the issue. Our game plan was something we were going to live and die by.”

DL: How good was your stuff that day?

Lowe: “Oh, God. I’ve had better. Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 202
David Laurila, curator of FanGraphs’ Q&A Series, talks with Marlins outfielder Justin Ruggiano about the latter’s baseball-related travels, including stops in Taiwan, Mexico, Venezuela, and… Ogden, Utah.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 16 min. play time.)

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Jose Bautista is back. After a horrendous April which saw him post just a .185/.298/.333 line, the Jays’ star has surged. He’s following up a .257/.342/.552 May with a a .258/.413/.774 June, including an absurd 10 home runs in 18 games.

Bautista’s resurgence has come with a return to what elevated him to the game’s premier power hitter back in 2010: get the ball in the air often and with authority.

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Dave Cameron made a radical proposal today aimed at teams thinking of moving away from the standard five-man rotation. He suggested that they essentially blur the lines of starters and relievers and simply assign an even number of innings (or batters faced) to each pitcher in the pen. “Each pitcher will be asked to face 10 batters per game, which translates to about 38 pitches apiece.”

Cameron advocates that teams target two-way players like Micah Owings, who are decent at handling a bat and also can throw average innings, and swingmen like Alfredo Aceves — mopup guys capable of taking a fair number of innings fairly frequently. That’s actually much more akin to the way that bullpens used to function in the days before hyperspecialization, except that in those days the majority of the important innings went to a “closer” like Roy Face or Bruce Sutter or Rollie Fingers, who pitched a lot more innings but had a lot fewer appearances than modern closers and setup men.

Cameron’s strategy makes pitchers more fungible. But teams would still want reliability. The best pitchers in such a system would be the ones who throw a lot of innings every year without fail. There aren’t many of those around: there are only two active pitchers in the top 40 on the all-time appearances list. One of them, Mariano Rivera, is out for the year and maybe for good. But LaTroy Hawkins is still going strong.
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Yesterday was the first day of summer. Temperatures were above-average throughout most of the country. In cities hosting MLB games, temperatures were 5-15 degrees above normal, save for those games played in the paradise known as the California coast.  There were 41 42 home runs hit in MLB games yesterday. These facts are likely related.

First things first. Yesterday’s home run tally did not break the record for most home runs hit by all MLB teams on a single day. That record is 62 home runs, hit on July 2, 2002. We’ll come back to that in a bit.

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Yesterday, we talked about the four man rotation experiment that the Rockies are trying out, and while I expressed some skepticism that it is going to work in their specific situation, I do applaud the effort to try something new. What we know about the relative of performance of starters and relievers suggests that teams could theoretically get better run prevention by getting more innings to their relievers — or at least pitchers working in a role that looks something like a reliever.

So, is there a way to create a pitching staff where this effect is taken advantage of more thoroughly? In looking at the requirements that a pitching staff faces over the course of a season, I think there just might be.

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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Daily Notes.

1. Featured Game: Tampa Bay at Washington, 19:05 ET
2. College World Series: Elimination Games Abound
3. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
4. Today’s Complete Schedule

Featured Game: Tampa Bay at Washington, 19:05 ET
A Note on Who’s Pitching, First
This game features hard-throwing left-hander Matt Moore (75.2 IP, 103 xFIP-, 0.6 WAR) against other hard-throwing left-hander Gio Gonzalez (78.2 IP, 75 xFIP-, 3.0 WAR).

Regarding These Left-Handers, How Hard-Throwing They Are
In terms of fastball velocity, Moore (94.2 mph) and Gonzalez (93.4 mph) have the second- and third-highest average ones among all qualified left-handers, according to PITCHf/x.

Regarding Left-Handers, Generally
With regard to left-handers, generally, both etymology and probably also science somehow teach us that they’re (i.e. left-handers), by definition, sinister.

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