Finding a designated hitter is very easy. The skills required to be a successful DH aren’t rare, and there are an abundance of guys with offensive abilities and defensive problems that a team can generally count on getting quality production from the designated hitter spot. Unless, of course, that team is the Seattle Mariners, who simply can’t figure out how to find a guy who can hit and do nothing else. So far, in 2008, their DHs have combined to hit .208/.268/.308, a pathetic .575 OPS that translates into -0.71 WPA/LI. That’s brutal. For comparison, Arizona Diamondbacks pitchers are hitting .242/.292/.333 (thank you, Micah Owings).

The main culprit has been Jose Vidro, whose collapse was the easiest thing to see coming this side of a neon freight train. However, the Mariners haven’t gotten any improvement from switching to Jeff Clement a week ago, as he has struggled to adjust to major league pitching since coming up from the PCL. His problems ran so deep that the team used Willie Bloomquist to pinch hit for Clement in the 9th inning of last night’s game. Willie Bloomquist!

Greg Norton had 11 successful at-bats before he was discarded as a less useful part than Miguel Cairo, a decision so unfathomable that I don’t even know which wall to begin banging my head on.

The Mariners offense has been horrendous the last few weeks, and the lack of production from their DHs is one of the main reasons why. When you have a group of players whose entire value is derived from their offense and they’re getting outhit by another team’s starting pitchers, you’re in trouble. And the Mariners are certainly in trouble.

All win probability stats, game graphs, and play-by-play are now available for the years 1974 through 1980.

The most productive batter in terms of WPA over those 7 years was Rod Carew with 28.9 wins, closely followed by Mike Schmidt with 28.6 wins. Jim Palmer led all pitchers with 23.2 wins, with closer Goose Gossage not far behind with 22.1 wins.

I’m hoping to have 1981 – 2001 available soon.

On a side note: FIP is now correclty adjusted by year and FIP career totals are also weighted appropriately.

All the stats made available yesterday in the player pages are now on the leaderboards.

Interesting to see the afore mentioned Nick Johnson with the second best O-Swing% (percent of pitches swung at outside the strike zone) this season. He truly does have great plate discipline.

About two years ago I attempted to delve further into plate discipline with two articles: Dissecting Plate Discipline Part 1, Part 2.

And then a year later I took an additional look at plate discipline: More on Plate Discipline

All batters now have plate discipline stats available dating back to 2005. Here’s what they are:

• O-Swing%: The percentage of pitches a batter swings at outside the strike zone.
• Z-Swing%: The percentage of pitches a batter swings at inside the strike zone.
• Swing%: The overall percentage of pitches a batter swings at.
• O-Contact%: The percentage of pitches a batter makes contact with outside the strike zone when swinging the bat.
• Z-Contact%: The percentage of pitches a batter makes contact with inside the strike zone when swinging the bat.
• Contact%: The overall percentage of a batter makes contact with when swinging the bat.
• Zone%: The overall percentage of pitches a batter sees inside the strike zone.

What you’ll want to know is the major league averages for each stat:

Season O-Swing Z-Swing  Swing  O-Contact Z-Contact Contact   Zone
2005     20.3%   68.0%  46.0%      51.8%     88.3%   80.8%  53.8%
2006     23.5%   66.6%  46.1%      57.4%     88.5%   81.0%  52.6%
2007     25.0%   66.6%  45.9%      60.8%     88.2%   80.8%  50.3%

All the location data is from Baseball Info Solutions and you can find all these stats in the player pages at the very bottom: Vladimir Guerrero

Rich Lederer over at Baseball Analysts asked me to write their “DH” guest column for today and I decided to take a look at the ever controversial “Clutch” statistics of starting/relief pitchers using Leverage Index.

You might be surprised who’s been “clutch” and “un-clutch” over the past 6 years, so go check it out!

Good news! We have 1974 play-by-play data with all usual goodies including all 1,945 game graphs and the leaderboards.

And I bet you thought that 22 inning game was long:

When I saw the Rockies score in the top of the 14th inning, I called it a night. And when the clock struck 3 AM on the East coast, our live Win Probability called it a night. So if you missed it, here’s the complete 22 innings of Win Probability goodness. You may never see this many points crammed into one of these graphs again.

Sal Baxamusa wrote an article in today’s Hardball Times about some of the fastball velocity data on FanGraphs and how they correlate year-to-year.

And Chone Smith over at Anaheim Angels all the way wrote about 2002 Baseball America prospects and how their fastballs have fared over time. He’ll be working on aging curves next. Hat tip to Tango!

I’d also like to say there are two new writers joining the FanGraphs team today. David Cameron already introduced himself and Eric Seidman of Statistically Speaking will be stepping up to the plate a bit later today.

Projections will be hidden by default later today, but will still be available if you click the “Show Projections” button. I wanted to thank all the projection system owners for contributing their projections this year, so… I give a very big thanks (in no particular order) to Dan Szymborski, Baseball Info Solutions, Bill James, Chone Smith, Jeff Sackman, Tom Tango, and John Burnson.

Chase Utley was hit by three pitches in today’s game to tie a Major League record. Oliver Perez hit him twice and then Scott Schoeneweis decided that twice wasn’t enough and hit him again! Utley was actually hit a fourth time if you count Carlos Delgado’s errant throw which nailed him right in the back.

The last player to get hit three times was Nomar Garciappara on July 3rd, 2006.

Johnny Cueto made his second big league start and struck out 8 with no walks in 6.1 innings of work. He gave up 5 hits and 1 home run in what turned out to be a no-decision instead of a loss thanks to….

Eric Gagne! The 2003 Cy Young award winner blew his second save of the season by giving up a solo shot to Corey Patterson. Gagne has now allowed 2 home runs in 3 innings of work. His fastball velocity appears to be at 88.5mph, which is down 4 from last year’s 92.3mph. It may be is just a sample size issue and considering the Brewers other options, I think it’d be wise to give Gagne a bit of breathing room.

Mark Reynolds hit his MLB leading 5th home run tonight and he’s making a strong case for his Reynolds being Reynolds approach at the plate. Apparently his hitting coach believes he’s been chasing pitches outside the strike zone considerably less. His hitting coach is indeed correct since the data shows that he’s cut down on swinging at pitches outside the strike zone by 6%.

In some site related news, FanGraphs has updated it’s leverage index (LI) tables to Tangotiger’s latest and greatest. You may see some very (very, very) slight changes in LI related stats.

The Great Clutch Project tracker page has been updated and now includes BABIP. Also, the wildcard players now have gray backgrounds so you differentiate between them.

2008 minor league data has started rolling in and will of course be updated daily. The minor league stats are available in both the leaderboards and the stats pages.

We’ve also reluctantly updated the Devil Rays name to the Rays.

And spring training stats are now hidden by default, but if you still want to see those oh-so-meaningful stats, you can always click on the “Show Spring Training” button.