Adam Dunn arrived in the Major Leagues in 2001. Since then, he has led the major leagues in both walks (1,172) and strikeouts (2,046) and is third in home runs (408), and his career stands as something of the perfect example of the Three True Outcomes. Of the 7,256 times he’s walked up to the plate, 3,702 of those PAs (51%) have ended without defensive involvement. Dunn has perfected the slow pitch softball style of baseball and turned that skillset into a pretty effective big league career.

And now, at age 33, Dunn is participating in an experiment to become an entirely new kind of hitter. Two weeks in, and it’s hard to call the experiment anything other than a total failure.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

1. SCOUT Leaderboards: The Week’s Top Performances
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Game Odds, Translated into Winning Percentages

SCOUT Leaderboards: The Week’s Top Performances
Much as with skinning a cat, but far less gruesome, there are a number of ways, theoretically, to determine the “best” performances in baseball over a timeframe as short as a week. One could, for example, merely sort by WAR. If WAR seems inappropriate, one can use WPA, instead — to see which player, that is, most improved his team’s chances of winning (offensively, at least) over the course of the week. Alternatively, one might prefer simply to look into his or her own heart for the answer — or any of the other more vital organs.

What the author has done, in this particular instance, is to give readers another tool — namely, the SCOUT leaderboards below for the past week’s best hitters and pitchers.

“What actually is SCOUT?” a reasonable person might ask — to which question the author has provided a (hopefully) reasonable answer here. In brief, however, it’s this: an attempt to use our knowledge of certain metrics, and at what sample sizes they become reliable, to measure run production/prevention in instances where small samples are all that’s available.

In so doing, we learn lessons like:

• For as excellent as Atlanta’s Evan Gattis has been in an uncertain role, St. Louis’s Matt Adams has been that excellent in an even less certain role.

• Oakland third baseman Josh Donaldson is making more contact than would have otherwise seemed likely.

• Apart from a rather unfortunate blown save in Chicago, Giants closer Sergio Romo was dominant last week.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Reds received a scare when Johnny Cueto was placed on the disabled list with a strained lat muscle. As he returned to Cincinnati for further testing yesterday, the minor leagues’ hottest pitcher took the mound in Louisville awaiting to hear whether he would replace Cincinnati’s ace. In three Triple-A starts, Tony Cingrani destroyed the International League: he struck out 26 batters in 14.1 innings. But is he ready? Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam discuss how the Marlins’ lack of lineup protection has affected Giancarlo Stanton so far.

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Saturday night in Seattle, the Mariners were playing the Rangers, and the score was 1-1 going into the top of the eighth inning. Carter Capps relieved Joe Saunders, and the broadcast warned that Capps shouldn’t walk leadoff batter Craig Gentry, because Gentry is one of the quicker runners in the league. Also because you shouldn’t walk anybody if you can help it. Capps subsequently walked Gentry, and Gentry scored, and that run would prove to be the winning run in a 3-1 final. Gentry walked on seven pitches and a full count.

It was a walk not without its controversy, although it looks like a bigger deal now than it seemed at the time. With the count 2-and-2, Capps threw Gentry a fastball in the low-away quadrant that easily could’ve been called strike three. Gameday shows that the pitch was within the strike zone, and during the game other strikes were called in the area. The pitch was ruled ball three, and the next pitch was a far less controversial ball four. Hence the walk, hence the run, hence the loss. It didn’t sit very well with Carter Capps, not that the one pitch was the reason the Mariners lost the ballgame.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Lexington Legends had been the Low-A affiliate for the Houston Astros for quite some time. Walking around Whitaker Bank Park, you would see images of Hunter Pence and that one time Roger Clemens pitched there. Those images aren’t there anymore after the Astros bolted and the Royals came in. This is a little sad because this would have been the year to see the Low-A Astros team as opposed to the years of yuck before that, but the Royals are a nice consolation prize. Here are some prospects of note from my four days in Lexington last week.
Read the rest of this entry »

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

1. Featured Game: Cincinnati at Pittsburgh, 13:35 ET
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Game Odds, Translated into Winning Percentages

Featured Game: Cincinnati at Pittsburgh, 13:35 ET
Regarding This Game, Who’s Starting It for Pittsburgh
In terms of who’s starting this game for Pittsburgh, right-hander Phil Irwin is starting it for Pittsburgh and making his major-league debut while so doing.

Regarding Phil Irwin, A Notable Thing
A notable thing in terms of Phil Irwin is how, after posting merely above-average numbers (104.1 IP, 19.5% K, 4.0% BB, 3.40 FIP) in 16 starts last season at Double-A Altoona, how he posted elite numbers (21.0 IP, 31.5% K, 7.9% BB, 2.30 FIP) following a mid-August promotion to Triple-A Indianapolis — which elite numbers don’t even include a glorious start (7.0 IP, 24 TBF, 11 K, 1 BB, 0 HR, 2 H) in the International League playoffs.

Regarding Phil Irwin, Another Notable Thing
Another notable thing regarding Phil Irwin is his curveball — to which curveball one might theoretically refer as a “12-to-6” sort, but only on a clock face that was crafted by the all the gods together from all the world’s different spiritual traditions and then presented to Phil Irwin whilst he was losing his virginity.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

1. Mostly Idle Thoughts Regarding Garrett Richards
2. Today’s Notable Games (Including MLB.TV Free Game)
3. Today’s Game Odds, Translated into Winning Percentages

Mostly Idle Thoughts Regarding Garrett Richards
Regarding Angels right-hander Garrett Richards — who makes his first start of the season tonight in place of the recently injured Jered Weaver — it has generally been the case that he’s possessed a plus fastball but little else to complement it. As a result, his strikeout numbers (20.9% K in the minors, 14.7% in the majors) have been somewhat lower than one might expect from a pitcher who sits at 94-95 mph.

Richards, however, has begun the season in promising fashion so far as strikeouts are concerned, recording 5 of them against the first 19 batters he’s faced (26.3%) while also halving his major-league walk rate, as well.

Here are some idle, but eventually relevant, points regarding Richards’s success so far, and how it will or won’t carry over to his starting role (all of which points one might augment by reading Jack Moore’s own recent piece on Richards, as well).

• Richards has thrown exclusively in relief so far — whereas his numbers from previous seasons include a plurality of innings from starts, in which capacity pitchers are almost always less effective.

Read the rest of this entry »

And now we’re to the second part of the second edition of The Worst Of The Best. In this part, as in the second part of the first edition of this series, I encountered a problem where I logged into MLB.tv too often in too narrow a window of time. What happens then is you get your account suspended! Very temporarily. So it is something of an inconvenience, hence the delay in getting this post up on the page. So be prepared if you’re ever going to load a bunch of different MLB.tv archive games all willy-nilly. Don’t load them from Gameday or from the scoreboard page; load them through the actual MLB.tv window itself. Having had this problem twice, it’s clear that the penalty after the first infraction wasn’t enough of a deterrent to teach me a lesson, but I won’t worry about my cognitive function until or unless it happens a third time.

Incidentally, when I did something like this last year, sometimes people would write in about really ugly swings, wondering why those didn’t show up on the list. Like, swings where the batter fell down, or something. Those are bad swings, but these are the swings at the wildest pitches, which is different and which is based on PITCHf/x instead of observation and judgment. Someone, probably, should keep track of all the swings where batters fall down. But because that information isn’t easily recovered on a computer, I’m not going to worry about it, myself. Here are wild swings at pitches way out of the zone. That’s all this is, and nothing more. Off to the top five, or the bottom five, depending on your perspective.

Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of position players have had torrid starts to the season. Justin Upton and Michael Morse have each hit six homers. Chris Davis is slugging 1.100. Adam Jones already has 18 hits. Coco Crisp has an eight-game hitting streak. But none of the hot starts this month are even in the range of Barry Bonds’ April of 2004.

In April, 2004, Bonds put up just some ridiculous numbers. You already knew that, of course. But let’s take a look back, shall we? That April, he drew 39 walks. That puts him in some rare company, as only eight other players in history have done that — Max Bishop, Jack Clark, Roy Cullenbine, Lou Gehrig, Ralph Kiner, Mickey Mantle, Babe Ruth and Ted Williams. In fact, April ’04 was the third time Bonds had done it, and he would do it another two times in ’04, putting him at five times overall — two more than Ted Williams.

To put it in further context, since 1947, there have been 2,159 players who have qualified for the batting title who have walked fewer than 39 times for the entire season. Just last season, there were 37 such players. Even if you took Bonds’ intentional walks out of the debate, Bonds walked 21 times of his own accord during the month, and there have been 413 players who have qualified for the batting title since 1947 who have walked 20 or less times in a season. Last season, there were two such players — Delmon Young and Alexei Ramirez.

Read the rest of this entry »