| 2:04 |
: Saw these guys along with Andrew Bird, Weezer, Mumford… and they were clearly the best in show
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| 12:01 |
: #VoteHos
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| 12:01 |
: #LoveHos
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| 12:02 |
: More like Dellin Becanthitthestrikezone am I right?
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| 12:02 |
: It was the reason he didn’t start, right?
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| 12:02 |
: Fister, Gossett, Lively, Butler – I dare you to rank them.
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“Watch a batting practice of mine and it’s real boring,” said Freddie Freeman with a smile. The Atlanta first baseman is back, and he’s playing third base right now. You’d think the change of position might be the strangest thing about him. After studying angles with the team’s infield coach Ron Washington, though, he feels like playing third won’t actually be so difficult. What’s weirder is his approach during batting practice. As both his numbers and geometry suggest, however, his unusual BP strategy makes sense for him.
Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by sabermetric forefather Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game.
How are they calculated? Haphazardly, is how. An explanation of the components and formulae which produce these NERD scores is available here. All objections to the numbers here are probably justified, on account of how this entire endeavor is absurd.
Most Highly Rated Game
Boston at Tampa Bay | 19:10 ET
Sale (120.2 IP, 62 xFIP-) vs. Faria (32.1 IP, 78 xFIP-)
Imagine how good Chris Sale has been in your head. Now imagine a pitcher who’s been roughly 18% worse than that. Who do you see? Jacob Faria, is one possible answer according to the numbers. Faria’s been one of the majors’ best pitchers since his debut almost precisely a month ago. This game represents an opportunity to observe both him and Sale and the wondrous indoors of Tampa Bay’s Tropicana Field.
Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Boston or Tampa Bay Radio.
Episode 754
Owing to a confluence of circumstances, including his own impending fatherhood, the author is compelled to ask Dave Cameron: “If a parent’s sole, awful intent were to raise a future major leaguer, how would he or she go about that endeavor?” Using both objective data and also wild speculation, the guest attempts to answer that hopeless question.
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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 18 min play time.)
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Over the winter, the Dodgers re-signed Rich Hill. They did so because they knew that, when he was able to pitch, Hill looked like one of the best starting pitchers in the game. And then 2017 went and got underway. Through the earlier part of 2017, Hill looked like one of the more frustrating starting pitchers in the game. The stuff, for the most part, remained there, but Hill didn’t have his same control, and his remarkable curveball was no longer working. I wrote about Hill in the middle of June, at which point his curveball had the lowest run value among all curveballs, out of everyone. It made me wonder where, exactly, Rich Hill was. Could someone who reappeared so suddenly disappear with similar speed?
Since I wrote about Hill and his struggles, he’s gone back to looking like one of the best starting pitchers in the game. In three starts, he’s allowed four runs over 19 innings, with six walks and 26 strikeouts. The easy explanation is that Hill has simply regressed to the mean. That is, his newer mean, the one he began establishing a couple years ago. That explanation would ignore the changes that Hill has folded in. Regression to the mean isn’t an automatic process. Rich Hill has simultaneously simplified and grown more complex.
Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Jeff’s altitude sickness, Matt Albers and Ryan Raburn, an odd-field update, the Rich Hill resurgence, the MLB Battlegrounds event in Hyde Park, Logan Morrison’s comments about Gary Sánchez, Jonathan Lucroy’s comments about framing, and more on the Reds’ pitching staff. Then they take a detour to talk to listener Max Goder-Reiser about Beep Baseball and the Boston Renegades before answering listener emails about team wins, team WAR, and chemistry, the worst records for playoff teams, David Ortiz’s tire-changing, reaching-on-error records, pitching after long breaks on the bench, the best non-qualified seasons, Aaron Judge’s BABIP, multi-level single-season home-run records, a hypothetical closer, grand-slam oddities, and more.
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We might as well start this off with a Buster Olney tweet:
Teams asking about Justin Verlander; perception is DET looking for big,big,big return w/out salary offset. Owed $70m for rest of ’17,’18.’19
— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) July 4, 2017
Just from reading that tweet alone, one could infer a few things. One, that the year hasn’t gone very well for the Tigers. That much is true, and the Tigers are only in the playoff race in the way that everyone in the American League is still in the playoff race. The Tigers are closer to the AL basement than they are to a playoff spot. Two, that Justin Verlander is available, and he’s been good enough to be interesting. That much is also true. And three, that a Verlander trade is going to be very challenging to execute. That much is certainly true. Verlander’s is the most fascinating name on the trade market, but as things stand, I don’t know how two sides could come together.
For many people, a good fireworks show is a welcome part of their extended 4th of July weekend. I mean, who doesn’t like one, except for some really good dogs out there? That said, if you attended a fireworks show every night of the entire summer, it’d probably get old pretty quick, right? Right.
Well, what I’d like to do here is consider a different sort of fireworks — one more relevant to our national pastime — and the possibility of them wearing out their welcome.
For the sake of the analogy, home runs will take the place of fireworks. Homers are occurring more than ever and, I submit, it’s going to get old pretty soon. Oh, we’ve been down this road before, in the so-called steroid era, which peaked right around the turn of the 21st century. Homers got pretty old then, too.
Well, we’re hitting way more homers now than we were hitting then. In the year 2000, major-league hitters combined for 1.17 homers per team per game, an all-time high. Or, I should say, an all-time high until now. Now we’re rolling along at 1.26 homers for the season, shattering the previous high.
As for the implications of the home-run spike, I’ll discuss that in a moment. First, a couple key notes for context. In 2000, teams struck out an average of 6.45 times per game. That average has been on a rocket ship upward over the last decade, up to 8.24 thus far this season. As for walks, they had been trending downward for a while, from 3.42 per team per game in 2009, down to 2.88 in 2014. Well, that has turned upward in a big way, up to 3.27 thus far in 2017. What we have here is the Russell Branyan-ization of baseball: the Era of the Three True Outcomes is upon us.
According to this weekend’s ESPN Sunday Night Telecast, Bryce Harper has, in recent years, often performed his pregame routine and taken batting practice indoors, in the bowels of major-league ballparks, much to the disappointment of ballhawks across America. But Harper revealed himself over the weekend in St. Louis, taking BP on the field, and any time a star like Harper deviates from a routine, it raises curiosity. During the broadcast, ESPN’s Jessica Mendoza related how she’d asked Harper about the change. He said he wanted to hit some batting practice home runs, wanted to see the ball travel.
Perhaps he wanted to see how an adjustment, something akin to an R&D prototype, would work outside a lab setting, outside of an indoor batting cage.
When I think about Harper’s swing, I think about the violence of it. The leg kick, the force compelling his back foot — his left foot — to rise from the ground. Former Nationals beat writer Adam Kilgore wrote an excellent multimedia piece about Harper’s swing for The Washington Post several years ago.
From that piece:
[Nationals video coordinator Rick] Schu scanned through video and found film of Harper hitting. He arranged clips of Harper and Ruth side-by-side on the monitor and stopped at the moment each hitter’s bat connected with a pitch. In each still picture, he saw a stiff front leg, an uncoiling torso and a back foot lifting off the ground. “Wow,” he thought. “That’s identical.” …
“The full thing is God-given,” Harper said. “I don’t know how I got my swing or what I did. I know I worked every single day. I know I did as much as I could with my dad. But I never really looked at anything mechanical. There was nothing really like, ‘Oh, put your hands here.’ It was, ‘Where are you comfortable? You’re comfortable here, hit from there.’ ”
What’s interesting, at least to this author, is that Harper is willing to tinker with a gift that allowed him to reach the majors at 19. What’s perhaps troubling for the opposition is that he continues to look for ways to improve despite already possessing an NL MVP on his resume and returning close to that form thus far in 2017. He’s still just 24 — he won’t turn 25 until October — and is four months younger than Aaron Judge. His youth suggests he’s still learning himself and the game. And on the ESPN telecast, Harper debuted an apparent decision to trade power for control — or at least explore it. It’s not a swing I recall him taking — at least not regularly — a swing seemingly executed at 80% effort.
Against the hard-throwing Carlos Martinez, Harper shelved his signature leg kick. To commence his swing, he slightly raised his right foot but not completely from the ground, and took a much less explosive movement. He seemed to consciously trade power for control.
Consider Harper’s first swing of the evening:
| 12:02 |
: Happy Wednesday, everyone.
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| 12:02 |
: Have my first post-op meeting wth my orthopedist today, so will have to wrap things up a little before 1 pm, but I’ll go longer next week to make up for it.
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| 12:02 |
: Think the Brewers will make at least a minor trade to try to compete this year? They have a ton of outfield depth in the minors they could deal.
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| 12:03 |
: Yeah, they keep hanging around, and barring a huge collapse, definitely won’t be selling now. I could see them going after a Jason Vargas type, the kind of guy who would upgrade their rotation more than some other teams, and who might be able to crack their playoff rotation but wouldn’t in some other cities.
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| 12:04 |
: I’m sure they’d prefer a controllable guy, but I would imagine they’ll get outbid for the likes of Gray and Quintana.
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| 12:04 |
: Should the Cubs try and sell Arrieta and Davis at the deadline? No team has ever won the WS being below .500 on July 5th.
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