Anybody in baseball could have had these guys. Gregor Blanco, Yusmeiro Petit, Javier Lopez. Sure, the Giants spent a little to get them, but that little has meant a lot to them in return. All three came up huge in Wednesday’s Game Four victory. And the tweaks those players made to get where they are today weren’t big tweaks. The Giants just saw the talent underneath some iffy results.
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: I’ll be here at the top o’ the hour!
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| 11:30 |
: In the meantime… chill out with URoy
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Wil Myers projection for next year and beyond. |
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: Without looking, I still like him for like .275/.360 25 homers next year, with a peak of .280+, 30+. We’ll be talking about that Shields trade forever.
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Enooooo, let’s talk about La Stella. Not the debut I wanted as a Braves fan, but where do you see his future going? Can he hold off Gosselin and Peraza? |
It was the inning that shouldn’t have been.
First, in the tenth inning of Game Three of the National League Championship series, the Giants saw Brandon Crawford stroll to the plate against Randy Choate. It’s easy to say that the matchup didn’t favor the hitter based on Choate’s career splits. Choate has struck out 27% of the lefties he’s seen, and only walked 7.7%. Crawford walks 8.7% of the time against lefties, but his strikeout rate jumps to 24.5% when he’s seeing a southpaw.
There’s a sort of check list you can go to when a pitcher’s performance changes. You run down the possible reasons, and if there’s no box checked, you shrug and figure a few bounces have gone differently and that was all that happened.
So what do you do when a pitcher has a breakout performance, then suffers a setback and then looks like he’s re-found what he’s lost? Especially when that pitcher doesn’t have any obvious checkmarks on the checklist? What do you say about Shelby Miller’s up-and-down year so far?
Every year, there’s a gaggle of young guns, ready to take the league by storm. Wether it’s Clayton Kershaw, Jose Fernandez, or Matt Harvey, there’s a new face that everyone can dream careers upon. Unwrinkled faces, unworn arm ligaments, and the bright unknown future might be the stuff Spring Training dreams are built upon.
And here we are, October 14, 2014, and we’ll be watching 39-year-old Tim Hudson go up against 35-year-old John Lackey in game three of the National League Championship series. If, at the beginning of this decade, you had these guys down as top-25 pitchers for the next 14 years, congratulations. This game is your reward.
But that won’t stop us from looking back and trying to figure out how we got to this moment.
Alex Gordon, as we know him now, is a top-five outfielder on a team surging in the playoffs. We can’t forget the Alex Gordons who came before, though. Because it was those struggles that minted the current version. In terms of mindset and mechanics, we wouldn’t have today’s Gordon without yesterday’s. And we might be seeing some of the lessons Gordon learned in play with his younger teammates, too.
Three walks don’t seem like a big deal. Even if Doug Fister only gave up three walks once all year, you could look at the box score for Game Three of the National League Division Series and think, sure he had a Fisterian game. Nine ground balls to six fly balls, not many walks, a few strikeouts, and you look up and the Nationals have won behind him.
Except it didn’t really play out like that. Fister walked two of those three batters in the first inning. He went to eight pitches to get Joe Panik out. He went to five-plus pitches six more times before he got six outs. This was a man who averaged 3.7 pitches per batter faced during the regular season, averaging 4.8 pitches per batter in the first two innings. A man who once told us that he wants bad contact “in the first three pitches.”
After the game, Fister admitted that there was something going on early.
You might hear a lot about how Pablo Sandoval is better in the postseason over the next week. His career .333/.372/.609 batting line and a seminal three-homer performance are easy enough to point to. The problem, of course, is that we’re talking about 94 plate appearances, the equivalent of about three weeks of regular season play. Not a great sample.
On the other hand, somewhere around 100-150 plate appearances, certain things do actually accrue enough sample to become meaningful. Things like swing and contact rates, since they are on a per-pitch basis and we get close to four pitches per average plate appearance, tend to tell us if a player has changed in a meaningful way over a short period of time. Ground ball and flyball rates can do the same.
So let’s pretend that Pablo Sandoval’s postseason history is the first month of a season. Has he changed? Does he do anything significantly different in the postseason? Because if he has, than maybe we can smile knowingly and pass on Sandoval’s postseason OPS. Because we know some of the underlying skills look different once the lights shine brighter.
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: Why you wanna get funkee with me
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Thanks for chatting, Eno! What do you make of Yost’s decision to start Vargas over Guthrie tonight? |
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: Just looked this up: Angels best in baseball against lefties, and best in baseball against changeups. I don’t love either pitch, but that sorta stands out.
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Thanks for the chat. Dominated my 5×5 Roto OBP league this year. Won all 5 offensive categories. I like to stay ahead of trends and I’m wondering if I should be shopping Adam Jones this offseason. Good idea or am I tinkering too much since I already led the league in OBP? |
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: I’d shop him. This seems peak value. No more power coming, and speed dropping off, and his batting average needs to have all of these skills peaking or it’ll get worse.
Dang. I’m having trouble seeing things I post. This sucks. Refreshing screen. |
The Giants saved their ace for the Wild Card game. Though Madison Bumgarner has been a snot-rocket champion for some time, and a top pitcher, he’s turned it up a notch the last two seasons. A couple adjustments — one in approach and the other in mechanics — seem to have fueled this latest improvement. Those changes can also provide us the nitty gritty to watch for when he takes the mound with the Giants’ postseason on the line tomorrow.