Ben and Sam preview the Diamondbacks’ season with Doug Thorburn, and Pete talks to AZCentral Sports Diamondbacks beat writer Nick Piecoro (at 19:39).
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Tom McCarthy: Well, Wheels, that’s what you’re talking about. They’re not going to take many pitches.
Chris Wheeler: No. I was kidding with Juan Samuel about that behind the cage today… I was kidding around with Sammy. He says, “You want to see the lineup?” and he showed us the lineup card. I said, “Not many walks in that lineup, are there?” He said: “I told you a long time ago, we do not come off that island walking. We come off swinging.” And that was something that Sammy had said years and years ago, and it’s so true.
–From the second inning of Tuesday’s Dominican-Phillies exhibition game
During today’s game between the Dominican national team and the Phillies in Clearwater, Florida, the broadcasters for Comcast SportsNet Philadelphia (Tom McCarthy and Chris Wheeler, it appears) made a number of references to the aggressive approach of the Dominican team’s batters as a unit — the comment above being merely an example of a half-dozen or so made by McCarthy and Wheeler over the first two or three innings.
Certainly, this will not mark the first time that the reader has encountered the suggestion that Dominican players — or, perhaps, Latin players as a whole — exhibit less in the way of plate discipline than their American counterparts. To what degree there is or isn’t any truth to this generalization historically is one matter — and is decidedly outside the purview of this present post. The plate discipline of the lineup deployed by manager Tony Pena on Tuesday, however, is something that can be measured with some ease.
Who do you think is the slowest player in major league baseball? No fair guessing Bartolo Colon. Allow me to re-phrase. Who do you think is the slowest position player in major league baseball? You probably have a few names floating around in your mind. Many of them are probably catchers. I can tell you I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a worse runner than Jesus Montero. Montero wasn’t just slow, but his technique was so bad he had to spend the offseason learning how to run. Montero is a 23-year-old high-level professional athlete. That whole chapter was embarrassing. Maybe it’s still embarrassing; I haven’t seen the new, improved Montero in 2013.
Montero, then, is a candidate for MLB’s slowest player. So are other catchers, like Jose Molina. But allow me to direct your attention to Paul Konerko, who isn’t a catcher, but who is old and defensively unremarkable. Konerko has very quietly had an outstanding career, and Konerko has very quietly been perhaps the slowest player in the league. If he wasn’t the slowest player before, he certainly hasn’t gotten quicker with age.
In the wake of the Biogenesis reports linking several more Major League players to a PED supplier, Bud Selig has begun to talk about enacting stiffer penalties for failed drug tests. From last week:
“The time has come to make meaningful adjustments to our penalties,” said Selig, according to CBSSports.com’s Jon Heyman.”We need to do everything possible to deter the use of performance enhancing drugs … [the recent Biogenesis investigation has] driven my intensity to increase the toughness of our PED penalties … Apparently the penalties haven’t deterred some players.”
And then, earlier this week, Selig made this statement:
“If people want to continue to do what they shouldn’t do, then the one thing that you have to do is you have to have stricter penalties,” Selig said. “It’s as simple as that.”
If only it really were as simple as that.
Table of Contents
Today’s edition of the Daily Notes has no table of contents, it appears.
Four Teams Qualify for Second Round of WBC
Pools A and B of this year’s edition of the World Baseball Classic began this past weekend in Japan and Taiwan, respectively. As noted in a semi-adequate preview of the Classic, many of the first games took place at a time when Americans are either (a) asleep or (b) engaged in some manner of illegal activity or, strangely, (c) both.
In any case, what follows is a record of what has taken place thus far.
Standings
In the first round, comprised of 16 countries, each team plays the other three teams in its pool once. The two teams with the highest winning percentages advance to Round Two. A series of tie-breaking rules exists which the author has no interest in reading even at all.
As of today, four nations (of a possible four from Pools A and B) have qualified for second-round play, where they will compete amongst themselves, in a double-elimination format, for two spots in the final: Chinese Taipei, Cuba, Japan, and the Netherlands.
Wrigley Field is falling apart. The Ricketts family, which bought the Cubs for $845 million in 2009, has a plan to spend $300 million of their money to renovate the 98-year-old ballpark. There will be structural upgrades, improved clubhouses, new underground batting cages, upgraded luxury suites and club facilities, more and better concessions and restrooms, and a new patio area in left field to serve the new upper deck. The Cubs also want to add new LED signage and billboards in the outfield. The classic Wrigley look will remain the same: the brick, the marquee outside the ballpark, the ivy and the old scoreboard. Cubs blog Bleacher Nation has conceptual drawings, which you can view here.
The Rickettses are prepared to spend an additional $200 million to develop a hotel across the street from Wrigley, an office building and an open-air plaza to be used for neighborhood and family activities. The open-air plaza will be developed in a triangular-shaped plot just west of Wrigley on Waveland and Clark avenues.
Neither the Cubs nor the Ricketts family are asking for a dime of public money. Instead, they expect the renovation plan to add significantly to public coffers. Julian Green, the Cubs’ vice president of communications, has said 800 new construction jobs will be created to complete the project and 1,300 new permanent jobs will be created with the new hotel, the office building and the open-air plaza. Green also estimates that, once completed, the new Wrigley complex will generate an additional $12 million in sales and property taxes for Chicago — plus an additional $3 million in sales tax for Cook County and an additional $4 million in sales tax for the Illinois. Overall, Green said the renovation will result in an additional $1.2 billion in economic activity and taxes during a 30-year period.
Sounds perfect, doesn’t it? A privately-funded stadium project that will benefit the city, county and state in the short and long term?
Not so fast.
The SABR Analytics Conference has stolen some of its luster, but the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference remains an important event for the sabermetrics community. The seventh annual took place this past weekend, in Boston, and featured a plethora of thought-leaders. The Baseball Analytics panel included Ben Jedlovic, Jonah Keri, Voros McCracken, Joe Posnanski and Farhan Zaidi. Other speakers included Mark Cuban, Michael Lewis, Sig Mejdal, Dan Rosenheck and Nate Silver.
Several of them took the time to answer questions between presentations. This installment includes conversations with Cuban, Jedlovic and McCracken. Later in the week we’ll hear from Mejdal, Rosenheck and Zaidi.
Ben and Sam preview the Dodgers’ season with Jay Jaffe, and Pete talks to MLB.com Dodgers beat writer Ken Gurnick (at 15:21).
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