| 9:02 | : I’m the least late I’ve been in months! |
| 9:02 | : Reminder #1: I am not a fantasy baseball expert |
| 9:02 | : Reminder #2: I am not a baseball expert |
| 9:02 | : Remember #3: There are hundreds, if not thousands of questions submitted in the queue over the course of a chat, so I have no prayer of keeping up. |
| 9:02 | : Now we begin with the baseball chat! |
| 9:03 | omg help. say something nice. do something helppppp! |
One of the best things about really getting into the regular season is that we’re starting to get some meaningful data. One of the best things about getting meaningful data is that it’s accompanied by a lot of meaningless data. True insight can be gleaned from the former, but fun? You can have fun with both. Let’s talk about pitchers stealing bases.
A year ago, pitchers combined for seven stolen-base attempts. The year before that, they also combined for seven, and the year before that, they combined for three. Then six, then ten, then 12, then seven, then nine…it isn’t often that pitchers get on base, but it also isn’t often that, once on base, pitchers attempt to steal. Pick your favorite reason, or combine them. They want to avoid injury. They want to conserve their energy. They aren’t properly trained for aggressive base-running. They don’t want to distract their hitters. They don’t want to give up a rare opportunity to not watch from the dugout. They want to actually exchange words with the first-base coach. Nobody thinks about pitchers stealing because pitchers don’t steal. On April 25, Cliff Lee tried to steal. On April 26, Andrew Cashner tried to steal.
As you read this, the Boston Red Sox have the best record in all of major-league baseball, unless you’re reading this at least a few days after it was published. The Red Sox’s success is less of a surprise than the Blue Jays’ lack of success, but nobody expected Boston to start this well, and the organization is well on its way toward restoring the city’s confidence in the team. The Red Sox have gotten to this point by getting valuable contributions from their position players and from their pitchers. That will not be the only obvious sentence in this post.
We should pause to acknowledge what the Boston pitching staff has done to date. If the season were to end today, we’d all be left wondering, “wait, what?” But eventually we’d get over it and look at the statistics, and the statistics would show that the Red Sox have the highest team pitching strikeout rate in baseball history. As a team, the Sox have struck out 26.7% of opposing batters, and second place would be the…2013 Tigers, at 25.8%. Third place would be the…2013 Reds, at 23.3%. Fourth place would be the…2013 Royals, at 23.2%. So times have changed and strikeouts are up, but for the sake of perspective, the Red Sox as a team have a higher strikeout rate than both Nolan Ryan and Sandy Koufax. This is, of course, a team effort, but the greatest individual contribution so far has been made by Ryan Dempster.
I still don’t really know what I’m supposed to do in these introductions, and I suspect it would be unprofessional to use this section to throw out links like this. I guess for the time being I might as well just repeat myself, since I’m at a loss and nobody reads these for the introductions anyway. Hey you guys! This is the second part of the fourth edition of The Worst Of The Best, and here’s last Friday’s wild-swings article. You’re going to see the five swings from the past week at the pitches furthest from the center of the strike zone, as determined by PITCHf/x and me. Only included are full swings — not checked swings — and I’m also going to make a point of excluding swings on hit-and-runs, since those aren’t really up to the hitter. Maybe they’ll earn honorable mentions. I haven’t actually encountered one of those yet.
For the purpose of this series, I don’t care about funny-looking swings where the hitter loses his balance and falls down. So don’t look for those in the body, although you’re free to post them in the comments because they’re still hilarious and embarrassing. And as I noted earlier, don’t expect to see these posts next Friday, since I’ll be out of town and, more importantly, not at a computer. I’m going to go ahead and guess I couldn’t compose a post like this from a smartphone. That sounds like the terms of a prison sentence. The Friday after, we’ll be back in business, and now on this particular Friday, we’ll proceed with the list, in the usual descending order. I think this has been enough words.
Let us begin with a few notes! First, hello, welcome to the first part of the fourth edition of The Worst Of The Best. Thank you for reading because without you I would be literally penniless unemployed. Second, this post has a lot of .gifs in it. All of the posts in this series have a lot of .gifs in them, and you have no right to complain about browser locking, because you should know what to expect by now. If your machine can’t handle .gifs, it’s not going to handle these posts, and you don’t complain about the river when you can’t float across in a measuring cup. Third, per usual, this is all PITCHf/x-derived, and we’re just examining the five pitches the furthest from the center of the strike zone. Here’s last week’s edition. Sometimes people like to ask why so-and-so’s pitch didn’t make the list. It’s because the pitch wasn’t bad enough. But to sate your curiosity, guys who just missed the top five include James McDonald, Cliff Lee, and Jaime Garcia. Over the course of a week, Cliff Lee threw baseball’s seventh-wildest pitch. All right.
And a final note: don’t look for these posts next Friday, because I’ll be away, attending none of your business. I figured it was probably for the best to give you guys a warning, and I haven’t yet decided if the Friday after that will review the previous week or the previous two weeks. I probably won’t make that decision until the morning of that Friday, because I don’t deal with things ahead of time. Now we should be all good to go, so let’s watch some really wild pitches, together. You can pretend we’re family.
Earlier Thursday, Dave Cameron made a simple observation regarding the Los Angeles Angels and their batch of position players:
Every Angel with 40+ PAs has been an above average hitter this year, except for Josh Hamilton. fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?p…
— David Cameron (@DCameronFG) April 25, 2013
All right, neat. Now keep that in mind as we go forward.
Used to be, earlier in his career, Alfonso Soriano was the very model of an undisciplined hitter. He got a lot of press, because he was a Yankee, and back in 2002, Soriano drew 22 unintentional walks while striking out 157 times. He also mashed 39 dingers, so it’s not like there was much reason for Soriano to change. But as time has gone by, it seems like Soriano has drawn less attention for his hacking, probably because it’s become entirely familiar. And probably because he’s managed to have a hell of a career, so it’s not like the hacking really dragged him down. Soriano with a different approach might not have been as good as the Soriano we’ve been able to observe.
But Soriano’s still very much a hacker. As a rule of thumb, if a young hitter is pretty undisciplined, he’s likely to remain pretty undisciplined as an older hitter. That is, if his career survives. Soriano, for his career, has four times as many strikeouts as unintentional walks. That makes for a similar ratio to those belonging to Reed Johnson and Jeff Francoeur. During the PITCHf/x era, 515 players have batted at least 500 times. Soriano’s rate of swings at pitches out of the strike zone is the tenth-highest in the group. That Soriano has a career .351 wOBA is a testament to his ability to punish a variety of pitches, but the hacking still gets him in trouble, and Thursday provided a wonderful example. Thursday, in a game between the Cubs and the Reds, Soriano went and had himself an unforgivable plate appearance in a critical spot. Or what would have been a critical spot, if the Cubs weren’t dreadful.
Earlier, we took a look at the young season’s most impeded home run so far, which is the home run that faced the most opposition from the game conditions at the time. All necessary data was recovered from the ESPN Home Run Tracker, which is among my most favorite of Internet resources. If we look at one extreme, then, it follows that we should look also at the other extreme, or else the matter will feel incomplete, and this is a website devoted to completeness. And so we now turn our attention to the home run that has gotten the biggest boost from the game conditions. Home runs like this are probably more interesting than home runs that remain home runs despite strong winds and cold conditions, because these might be identified as “lucky”.
In terms of impeded home runs, we had one dinger at -20 feet, and another dinger at -17 feet. So it was a close race, and the error bars probably overlap. Here, in terms of aided home runs, we have one dinger at +64 feet, and another dinger at +43 feet. That’s a much bigger difference, but there might still be some error-bar overlap, for reasons we’ll get into. Let’s look at the home run in question!
In the first game of a Tuesday doubleheader in Colorado, the Braves and Rockies played in a temperature that was measured at 23 degrees at first pitch. It’s hardly impossible to imagine temperatures that low — in some places temperatures are that low all of the time — but it’s hard to imagine playing baseball, and specifically hitting a baseball, when it’s below freezing out. Nevertheless, the Braves and Rockies played, and the Braves emerged victorious, having slammed a trio of dingers. That got my mental gears whirring.
Take an ordinary fly ball. At room temperature, it would have a given distance. In hotter conditions, it would fly farther. In colder conditions, it would fly less far. So I found it impressive that the Braves hit three home runs when it was around 23 degrees, and my initial thought was that the cold canceled out the effect of the altitude. From there, I started messing around on the ESPN Home Run Tracker, and I looked beyond Tuesday’s first game in Colorado. I started looking for the 2013 home run that has lost the most distance due to non-standard conditions.
The Marlins and the Twins are playing a doubleheader on Tuesday. In the first inning of the first game, Giancarlo Stanton faced Kevin Correia with a man on, and Correia threw a first-pitch fastball at 89 miles per hour down the heart. Stanton swung and grounded into a double play, and one of the Marlins’ broadcasters remarked that it was probably Stanton’s best swing in a week, since returning from injury. Stanton finished the first game 0-for-3, dropping his average to .176. He has the worst average in the Marlins’ lineup, and the Marlins’ lineup sucks.
Let’s now go back a few months. Several months, I guess, depending on where you draw the line between “few” and “several”. After the Marlins swung the big trade with the Blue Jays, Stanton tweeted that he was pissed off. Now, I’ve been pissed off at lots of things I love and am loyal to to this day. I do, after all, still watch the Mariners. But that was a tweet of particular interest, because it helped to fan the trade-rumor flames. Already, the Marlins were probably eventually going to have to trade Stanton. Then the Marlins made Stanton upset, and who wants a surly ballplayer?