Archive for Daily Graphings

Yankees Global Enterprises, the parent company of the New York Yankees, has teamed with the Manchester City Football Club of the English Premier League to bring a new Major League Soccer team to New York. The team will be known as the New York Football Club and will begin action in 2015 MLS season. The New York Times reported that the Yankees have invested as much as $25 million toward the $100 million purchase price.

Manchester City is owned by an investment group led by Sheik Mansour bin Zayed al-Nahyan, a member of the royal family of Abu Dhabi. That group has been working with MLS for several years to launch a new New York franchise. The New York Red Bulls play in Harrison, New Jersey.

The Yankees’ involvement in the Manchester City bid came together quickly in the past several weeks. The two sides know each other well as the Yankees’ Legends Hospitality provides services at Manchester City’s home stadium. As Howard Megdal reported for Sports On Earth, the New York Mets were once considered by MLS as the group that would team with a partner for a new New York pro soccer team. The Mets’ financial difficulties made that impossible, which opened the door for the Yankees. Read the rest of this entry »

Used to be the hipster thing was to talk about pitch-framing, or pitch-receiving, and how it’s more important than it’s been given credit for. That was all well and fun, but people have a pretty good idea now, as the concept has gone borderline mainstream. And it turns out we don’t actually know that much about the effects, since it’s not as simple as calculating the difference between a ball and a strike. Of course, all else being equal, a good receiver is more valuable than a bad one, but we don’t know how much more valuable. The new hipster thing is to talk about receiving realistically. To distrust the idea of a guy being worth something like 50 runs above average. I live in Portland so you can trust me on my evaluation of hipster things.

Over the rest of this post, not everything is figured out. You could argue that very little is figured out, and so much more research could be done. Research by people with more time and way better technical skills. But I’ve decided to mess around with some numbers, and I’ll try to make this as reader-friendly as possible. I’m not going to lay out for you the true effects of good or bad pitch-receiving. Hopefully this’ll just make you think a little, before you think about something else.

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Vance Worley just got clobbered again, this time by the Braves. There’s no set and certain point at which a start turns into an official clobbering, but looking through Worley’s 2013 game log, I’d say this was the fifth or sixth time he’s been clobbered, in ten games. That’s an ugly ratio, and to make matters worse, recall that Worley was Minnesota’s opening-day starter. The Twins’ de facto ace owns an ERA over 7, with 82 hits allowed in just under 49 innings. His strikeouts are way down and on Wednesday he was chased by a double that followed an Evan Gattis grand slam. Two seasons ago, Worley finished third in the voting for the National League Rookie of the Year.

On May 17, Worley allowed one run in a start against the Red Sox, and he credited his improvement to mechanical tweaks he’d made in recent side sessions. He finished that start with three walks and a strikeout. At the end of April, following a rough appearance, Worley said he was throwing the way he wanted to be throwing. His pitches were fine, and his movement was normal. The results just weren’t present, for him. They still aren’t, and the only consolation for Minnesota is that Ben Revere has been bad, too.

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Is there an ideal ground ball rate for hitters? Should they be thinking about how many grounders they hit? Armed with some spreadsheets and a couple conversations with some Royals’ hitters, let’s see what we can discover.

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All winter, there were rumors that the Dodgers were open to trading Andre Ethier. All winter, the Dodgers declared that there was nothing to those rumors, and that they weren’t having second thoughts about the five year, $85 million contract they gave him last June. When spring training rolled around and Cuban import Yasiel Puig became The Hot New Thing, those rumors picked up again, since the Dodgers will need to open up a corner outfield spot for Puig at some point in the not too distant future.

But, LA remained patient and optioned the 22-year-old Puig to Double-A, giving him some experience against professional pitchers without throwing him immediately into the fire. They also gave Ethier a chance to play most everyday, and while they were unlikely to admit it publicly, they likely hoped that he could get off to a strong enough start to re-establish some trade value after his power fell off in the second half last year.

Today, though, manager-of-the-moment Don Mattingly sent a pretty clear signal that he is not Andre Ethier’s biggest fan, and you can probably start the clocking ticking on both of their exits from Dodger Land.

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The lowest ERA on the Diamondbacks right now belongs to Matt Reynolds. The lowest ERA on the Diamondbacks belonging to a pitcher who’s thrown more innings than a really long baseball game belongs to Patrick Corbin. Monday night, Corbin took the mound in Coors Field with an ERA of 1.52. He came away with an ERA even lower than that, and at present his ERA is the second-lowest in baseball among starters. Only Clayton Kershaw has Corbin beat — Matt Harvey, Shelby Miller, Felix Hernandez, and everyone else is behind him. And Kershaw’s allowed three unearned runs. Corbin has yet to allow his first.

It’s been a brilliant season-opening stretch for a guy who now looks to have been underrated in the past. To pick on Keith Law, here he is calling Corbin a back-end starter, and here he is calling Corbin a No. 4. To pick on us, here’s Corbin as a potential No. 3, and here he is as a potential No. 3 again. Previously, it was thought that Corbin’s ceiling would be that of a mid-rotation starter, perhaps. Already, he’s exceeding that, and I’m not blaming the prospect evaluators. Corbin’s just beating expectations, and that’s worthy of a deeper dig.

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Johnny Cueto came off the disabled list and started for the Reds last night. He had been on the disabled list due to a sore right oblique; it was the same injury he experienced during last season’s playoffs. His unique twisting windup seems to be the reason that he’s suffered the same ailment twice now, and he has said he might consider changing his delivery to correct the problem in the future.

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A couple of weeks ago, you the attentive reader, will surely have observed the introduction of our depth charts and standings pages. It was a long time coming, and we remain pretty freaking excited about it. As such, we thought that every two weeks that we’d take a look at some sort of change or happening or goings-on that occurred.

We’re not going to cover every team, because let’s face it, there really is only so many times that one can write a variation of “the Marlins aren’t even trying” without wanting to scrape out your eyebones with a rusty screwdriver. But we’ll still try to pry out an objective look in some way. This week, we’ll take a look at the three biggest movers — one positive and two negative — in terms of ranking of projected full season winning percentage. (One note — the looks here are from last Tuesday, the 14th, to this morning, but in future editions we’ll likely use Monday as the cut-off day for a number of reasons, nearly all of which involve my sanity.)

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Last night, Alex Sanabia gave up a home run to Domonic Brown in the second inning, and as he was walking back to the mound, the video appears to capture him spitting on the baseball. Sanabia then proceeded to retire 14 more batters without allowing any more runs, and the Marlins beat the Phillies 5-1. Based on the video evidence, it seems as though Sanabia may have been throwing a spitball last night. Based on the fact that he had one of his best starts of the season, by results, it appears as though the spitball might have fairly effective.

Of course, this is all still highly speculative. We only have that one video clip of him spitting that one time, and because the clip is very short, we don’t actually know what happened before he threw the next pitch. Maybe he dried the ball off. Maybe the spit didn’t actually hit the ball, and it’s all a camera angle trick. If we’re going to assume that Sanabia was throwing a loaded baseball, we should investigate a little further.

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Let me preface all of this by saying that it’s always possible that a quick video replay could be missing necessary context and misrepresenting what actually happened. There is some uncertainty when viewing events from afar, especially in a narrow timespan. It is possible that what you’re about to see isn’t what it looks like.

But, uhh, it sure looks like Alex Sanabia was caught on video spitting all over the baseball after allowing a home run to Domonic Brown tonight. As pointed out by one of our commenters, you can see the video here, and pay attention at around the 13 second mark.

Or, if you’d rather, just watch this helpful GIF, care of Jeff Sullivan.

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