Archive for Daily Graphings

A couple days ago, the Orioles and Rays played an ordinary, nine-inning baseball game. The Orioles won, 5-3, and the official time of game was three hours and 36 minutes, excluding a short delay. In the low minors on Wednesday, Clinton and Burlington played an extraordinary, 12-inning baseball game that Clinton won 20-17. The official time of game was three hours and 28 minutes. That could make for a story in and of itself, but with the particular game in question, such a story would kind of bury the lede.

By now, you’ve probably heard about what happened, because what happened has shown up on news sites and television shows across the country. And when something from a minor-league baseball game goes viral, you know you’re not dealing with just any other game. In part, it’s just crazy how many total runs were scored, but the real story is about the sequencing — host Burlington scored 17 of the first 18 runs. Clinton scored the remaining 19, erasing a 17-1 sixth-inning deficit. These aren’t teams that play in the California League. It was classic minor-league insanity in a way that wasn’t really classic at all, and whenever you see something like this, you always want to check out a win-expectancy chart. Or, I do, anyway.

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Gregory Polanco is one of the very best prospects still in the minor leagues. He’s currently hitting .395/.444/.613 as a 22-year-old in Triple-A, and he was a consensus top prospect before he lit up the highest level of minor league pitching. The Pirates have a hole in right field, and Polanco could easily fill it, but he remains in the minor leagues instead.

GM Neal Huntington told Jon Heyman last week that the Pirates will call Polanco up when they deem that he’s ready for the big leagues, and are determined not to rush him too quickly.

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To put it mildly, the 2014 season hasn’t gone exactly the way the Cleveland Indians would have hoped. As play began on Wednesday, the Indians stood in last place in the AL Central at 14-19, 7 1/2 games out of first. In this year’s 14-car-pileup-plus-Houston that is the American League, they are far from buried, but the clock is ticking. All it takes for a club to have a chance in this year’s AL, it would seem, is a singular clear team strength. At least on the surface, it doesn’t take long to find what appears to be the Indians’ forte, as their team FIP of 3.40 entering Wednesday’s games is over a half-run lower than their ERA of 3.97. What’s going on here? Do the Indians have markedly better pitching than the traditional numbers indicate, or is something else afoot? Read the rest of this entry »

At the request of Major League Baseball Advanced Media, Apple removed several baseball-related podcasts from iTunes on Wednesday. HardballTalk broke the news Wednesday morning when Aaron Gleeman, one of HBT’s lead writers, learned that his Minnesota Twins-related podcast known as “Gleeman and the Gleek” had been taken down by Apple. By midday, the list had grown to include another Twins-related podcast “Talk to Contact,” a Yankees-themed podcast on the site “It’s About The Money, Stupid,” and the Cubs-centered podcast on “Bleacher Nation,” among others. Awful Announcing catalogued the reaction on social media, which was swift, fierce and uniformly negative.

MLBAM publicly released the letter it Apple after news of the podcast takedowns spread. HardballTalk published it:

As we have done in the past, yesterday we notified Apple about certain podcasts on the iTunes Store whose titles and/or thumbnails include infringing uses of trademarks of Major League Baseball and certain Clubs.  And, as we have done in the past, we asked Apple to have these trademarks removed from the podcast titles and thumbnails. Although we did not ask for or seek to have any podcast removed from the Store, it has come to our attention that Apple removed them.   Given our many years of experience in notifying Apple about trademark issues on the Store, we trust that removing the podcasts was an oversight, and ask that you please look into this matter as soon as possible.

Thank you for your cooperation.

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Plate discipline is easy. You’re supposed to swing at hittable strikes and lay off of everything else. Two-strike discipline is also easy. You’re supposed to swing at basically all strikes and lay off of everything else. The problem is pitchers have conspired to throw baseballs both wickedly fast and wickedly darty, because they are the hitters’ very opponents, and this makes the ideal theoretical discipline impossible to achieve. But when you have two strikes, you definitely don’t want to get caught staring at a third. That’s a pitch a hitter should’ve swung at. It’s an inevitability that called strikeouts happen, and that’s even inevitable for Victor Martinez, But for the longest stretch, he was clean. For 641 consecutive plate appearances, he was clean.

Understand what we’re talking about: Over just about a full season’s worth of plate appearances, Martinez didn’t strike out looking. His streak started on May 22, 2013, carried through the playoffs and ended on Monday. Now, this isn’t always necessarily indicative of success. Last year, Endy Chavez struck out looking once, and he was bad. Josh Phegley struck out looking once, and he was bad. This year, Alex Presley has yet to strike out looking. Back in 2012, the lowest ratio of called strikeouts to swinging strikeouts belonged to Delmon Young. If you swing at everything, you’ll never watch strike three. But the same numbers can be different indicators for different players, and for Martinez, this seems like an accomplishment to celebrate.

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I know you’ve got pitch-framing fatigue, and I know this isn’t going to help. I know that some of you are going to skip right over this, and that’s fine. But this post isn’t about a leaderboard, or a specific pitch or pitch sequence. This is about an acknowledgment of the role of the skill, from one of the people we figure catchers are trying to convince. A lot of the time, when a post goes up here about framing, someone chimes in in the comments all skeptical-like, claiming that umpires aren’t influenced by the catchers catching the pitches. The very fact that framing numbers hold up season-to-season suggests strongly that they’re measuring something. There’s also a little something from Tuesday, as brought to my attention by @AaronBell80.

The Dodgers beat the Nationals 8-3, in Washington. The biggest story of the game, probably, wasn’t the start by Blake Treinen. The biggest story about Blake Treinen, probably, wasn’t about his called strike zone. But, Treinen started and threw to Jose Lobaton, with Paul Nauert behind the plate. When the game was over, Lobaton passed a little something along to the media.

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Probably the worst move of the offseason was when the Tigers shipped Doug Fister to the Nationals for a package highlighted by prospect Robbie Ray. It was at least the move most commonly referred to as the worst move of the offseason, and on his own list of the worst transactions, Dave Cameron put it at No. 1. I don’t need to go into all the explanations, but because of all the conversations we’ve had, Ray and Fister might be forever linked. Ray is certainly a pretty well-known prospect, now. And just as everyone expected when the trade was announced, Ray has ended up pitching in the majors in 2014 sooner than Fister has, after making his big-league debut Tuesday night.

There’s only so much you can make of a start, particularly when it’s a first start. You have to account for all the jitters. You have to think a pitcher might not have his normal approach. Ray happened to start against the Astros, which makes for another variable, and then, above everything else, you have the sample size of a handful of innings. Ray survived, which means his start was a success, and he allowed just one run, which means he can feel really good today. Big-time analysis, we can’t perform. But for some analysis, we are already in the clear.

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During a May 2 showdown with division rival Detroit, Kansas City’s ace James Shields put up a horrible start. After mostly dominating batters through the first month of the season, Shields allowed eight runs in just over six innings, a dent in an otherwise good-looking seasonal line. Without analyzing the start in detail, it is fair to say that no matter how bad it was for Kansas City, in itself it provided no obvious cause for concern with regard to Shields. Shields has been one of the top ten or fifteen starters in baseball the last few years, and one game by itself does not change that.

Still, just how bad can it get for good pitchers? Every pitcher puts up a bad start now and then, but how bad have the best been in recent years?

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Race, racism and sports have been at the top of the news cycle for several weeks, thanks to Donald Sterling. But if you look deep enough, they’re in the news cycle every day.

The undercurrent bubbled to the surface among baseball writers this week, when San Francisco Giants beat writer Andrew Baggarly of Comcast SportsNet Bay Area penned a column lamenting the Atlanta Braves’ decision to leave 20-year-old Turner Field in downtown Atlanta at the end of the 2016 season for a shiny new ballpark to built at considerable taxpayer expense in Cobb County, a suburb just north of the city limits. Baggarly didn’t pull punches.

If the grading and construction and everything else goes to schedule, the Braves will make their white-flight move – and yes, that’s precisely what it is — in 2017.

This is outrageous. I don’t live within 2,000 miles of Atlanta and I am outraged.

….

Why are the Braves moving? Braves president John Schuerholz, in a taped statement that sounded thoroughly vetted and polished, cited difficulty with fan access at Turner Field along with lease that is expiring in three years and explained how millions in upgrades wouldn’t have come close to “improving the fan experience.”

“We wanted to find a location that is great for our fans, makes getting to and from the stadium much easier, and provides a first rate experience in and around our stadium,” he said.

I’ll leave you to wonder which fans they care about.

….

The Braves’ new ballpark might make financial sense. It might be too sweetheart to turn down. But every baseball ownership group should see itself as stewards for the franchise and the community, both those who are economically important and those who are less so. And that’s what makes this wasteful flight to Cobb County such a disappointment. It just feels wrong.

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No one in baseball history has ever been better at closing out games than Mariano Rivera. Armed with an unhittable cut fastball and incredible command, Rivera cemented himself as a legend in New York, spending his entire career as a Yankee and becoming the first active player ever enshrined in Monument Park. His farewell ceremony last September was one of the most memorable moments in recent baseball history, but retirement hasn’t taken Rivera out of the spotlight just yet.

In an excerpt from his new book, appropriately entitled “The Closer,” Rivera comments on the active crop of second basemen; most notably, his long-time teammate Robinson Cano and his counterpoint Dustin Pedroia, star of the hated rivals up in Boston. While one might expect Rivera to side with his teammate, or simply to side with any player wearing the vaunted pinstripes, Rivera instead espouses affection for his rival.

“If I have to win one game, I’d have a hard time taking anybody over Dustin Pedroia as my second baseman,” Rivera noted.

Rivera is certainly familiar with the strengths and weaknesses of both players, but on-field greatness doesn’t always equate to a tremendous ability to build a roster; just ask anyone who has ever cheered for a basketball team built by Michael Jordan. So, with all due respect for Rivera’s experience, let’s see what the numbers have to say about Cano and Pedroia.

Read the rest at FoxSports.com