For every game this year we’ll be projecting the odds of each team winning on our live scoreboard. We’ve also added an extra experimental line on live Win Probability graphs that adjusts for the newly calculated game odds.
To calculate these game odds we’re doing the following:
Take a look at how the Indians have handled phenom pitcher Danny Salazar the past couple of years and you instantly notice they’re doing things a little differently in Cleveland. From the long recovery time to the big innings jump, Salazar’s comeback from Tommy John surgery has been on a unique timeline. Salazar is happy to get the training wheels off this year, and before opening night, he talked with me about the long road back and some of the peculiarities of his teams’ approach.
Ben and Sam answer listener emails about Mike Trout (as usual), clubhouse etiquette, the worst teams in baseball, catcher framing and unwritten rules, and more.
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| 5:47 |
: CLEVER INTRODUCTION!
BASEBALL!!! Polls coming later. |
| 5:47 |
: Oh, also, 9 pm ET is the start time. Be there!
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| 8:58 |
: Question. I am going to examine individual park sections for the THT like I did with the league with this article:
I already plan on looking at Oakland’s foul area, Green Monster, Houston hill. Any other requests? |
| 9:00 |
: Help Jeff out guys!
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| 9:02 |
Scooter Gennett is getting the start again today (this time vs a lefty). Safe to say he is not in a straight platoon with Weeks??? |
| 9:02 |
: I don’t think it’s SAFE to say, but it’s certainly trending that way.
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Monday featured, for the first time in 2014, a full slate of meaningful baseball, albeit with a bit of a lull in the late afternoon as the only live game for a stretch had the Rockies and the Marlins. I met a friend at a neighborhood bar a little after 5, and the bar had the game on all of its screens, and after a little conversation I found I was completely hanging on the action. Come August, I probably won’t be watching the Rockies and the Marlins, but this early in the year, everything’s interesting. And while we always know that anything can happen, there’s no cynicism around opening day. By the middle of the year, anything can happen, but we know what’s probably going to happen. In late March and early April, it’s more fun to imagine that baseball’s a big giant toss-up. That Marcell Ozuna looks good. If he hits, and if the Marlins get their pitching…
I don’t remember what most opening days are like, but this one felt like it had an unusual number of anything-can-happens. That is, events that would take one by complete and utter surprise. What are documented below are, I think, the five most outstanding miracles from a long and rejuvenating Monday. From one perspective, this is evidence that the future is a mystery and all a surprise is is a run of good or bad luck. From another, more bummer of a perspective, this is evidence that opening day doesn’t matter at all in the grand scheme of things and come on why are you already projecting Grady Sizemore to be a five-win center fielder? Why are you already freaking out about the 2014 Blue Jays? Be whatever kind of fan you like. Just remember that baseball is a silly game, and you’ll never outsmart it.
We didn’t learn a lot about Major League Baseball yesterday, because we couldn’t possibly have. Though it’s fun to get some actual data going on the 2014 season, the first “real” inputs we’ve seen in many months, you hardly need me to tell you that one game is nothing near a substantial sample size. Mike Trout crushed a homer, but that doesn’t make him any greater than we already thought he was. Francisco Liriano struck out 10 over six scoreless innings, but that doesn’t mean that all the concerns we had about him being productive for two seasons in a row for once are out the window. Other than the injury issues — Bobby Parnell, Wilson Ramos, Jose Reyes — we aren’t a lot more informed about baseball than we were yesterday.
That’s probably still true about instant replay, because the five calls we saw on Opening Day mean that we still haven’t seen 25 teams use the option, and will represent a very tiny part of the full amount of replays we’ll see this year. Over time, we might be able to learn a bit about which umpires get overturned the most and which managers and teams are the best at knowing when to call for it. On April 1, we don’t know that. But since this is something brand new, and this is the first we’re seeing of it in action, it’s worth exploring — if not to judge the calls, then at least to see how the still-new process worked in its first day. Read the rest of this entry »
With the real Opening Day behind us — sorry Astros and Yankees, you’re just late — we now have real 2014 data from almost every team on the leaderboards. Of course, besides answering trivia questions, we all know that there’s really nothing insightful to be learned from one day’s performance, and we’re not going to find useful information to be analyzed there until the samples get a lot bigger.
But there are some numbers that became useful in very short order. Strikeout rate, for instance, only has to be regressed 50% to the mean at a much lower number of batters faced than most other pitching metrics, and big changes in K% over even a few starts can prove somewhat meaningful. It’s hard to fluke your way into getting a bunch of Major League hitters to swing through your pitches, and if you’re consistently throwing pitches by people, it’s a pretty good sign for the future.
| 9:11 |
: Hey guys!
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| 9:11 |
: Shut up!
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| 9:12 |
: I chatted three and a half damn hours yesterday. You take what you get and you like it.
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| 9:12 |
: Let’s talk about the baseballs!
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| 9:12 |
Going to be a long season for Toronto? |
| 9:13 |
: Going to be a long season everywhere! 162 games is a whole lot of games and they usually don’t play more than one in a day
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The week leading up to Opening Day 2014 turned out to be quite historic, with the clear two best players in the game locked into long-term contracts guaranteeing them nearly a cool half-billion. Obviously, the prognosis for the respective long-term efficacy of the two deals varies dramatically, with Cabrera’s extension locking up his age 33-40 seasons, compared to Trout’s doing the same to his age 23-28 campaigns. This week, let’s take a step back and put these two greats into some sort of historical perspective, then use that perspective to research their aging curves in order make some educated judgments regarding the Tigers’ and Angels’ investments. Today, let’s look at Miguel Cabrera. Read the rest of this entry »
Coming off their first playoff appearance in a thousand years, the Pittsburgh Pirates find themselves in a tough spot. On paper, they’re clearly second-best in their division. A whopping 30 out of 31 of us predicted the St. Louis Cardinals will win the National League Central. We did pick the Pirates to take the second wild card, by a thin margin over the Cincinnati Reds. Our depth charts predict the Pirates to be the sixth-best team in the National League. Per WAR, they’re in a virtual heat with the Atlanta Braves. However, nobody (except me) is taking the Colorado Rockies seriously — so maybe they’re actually predicted to finish fifth.
In any event, it’s clear the Pirates are in a position where every marginal run counts. As it turns out, they have a position that could potentially be improved by many runs if only it weren’t for service time considerations. And no, it’s not first base.