Archive for Tigers

The A’s Against the Shell of Miguel Cabrera

One of the weird things you just get used to when you’re a hockey fan is the vague, non-informative reportage of injuries, especially around playoff time. If a guy has a broken foot, it’s a lower-body injury. If a guy sustained a concussion, it’s an upper-body injury. No one ever goes into specifics until a playoff run is over, nominally so as not to give the other team some kind of advantage. If a guy’s playing through pain, you don’t want the other team targeting his sore spots, after all. Once a team is eliminated, or wins the Stanley Cup, everything comes out, and everyone admits what they’ve been dealing with. By the end, nobody’s healthy.

Tony Paul’s suspicion is that, whenever the Tigers are done playing baseball, everyone will come clean about what’s going on with Miguel Cabrera. It’s no secret that Cabrera’s playing hurt, and we’ve all heard about his litany of aches and pains, but we might not have a true understanding of how bad things have gotten. I don’t know, that’s speculation, but Cabrera most certainly doesn’t look like himself. He most certainly didn’t look like himself — or perform like himself — in September, as nagging pains mounted. The Tigers, like everyone, are more than just one player, and they’ve still got a shot at a title, but they’d have a better shot with a healthy Cabrera, a Cabrera who doesn’t presently exist.

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The Case For Colon, The Case for Gray

Ahead of game five, Oakland manager Bob Melvin had a tough choice to make. Both Bartolo Colon and Sonny Gray were available on full rest. And though he has indicated that Sonny Gray is his starter, what this post presupposes is: what if he hadn’t told us who was starting. Who would we choose to be his starter?

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POLL: Prince Fielder and a Hit-By-Pitch

Prince Fielder ranks 12th among active players in hit-by-pitches, and you can spare us all the fat jokes because Reed Johnson ranks fifth. There are guys for whom getting hit is basically a skill, and this seems to be the case for Fielder, as he’s happy to find another way to reach base. Some of the balls that’ve hit him have hit him in the back. Some of the balls that’ve hit him have hit him in the butt. Some of the balls that’ve hit him have hit him in the elbow. Bringing us to a Prince Fielder HBP on Tuesday.

Fielder led off the bottom of the second inning against Dan Straily, and after falling behind 0-and-2, he got drilled by a fastball that ran up and in. The next guy struck out and the guy after that hit into a double play, so what happened to Fielder hardly mattered in the end, but this nevertheless seems like an excellent opportunity to gauge reader opinion on something.

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Doug Fister on Pitching

We don’t get a lot of time with the players this time of the year. So it was very nice of Doug Fister to spend some of that precious resource talking with me about his craft late last week. His thoughts could serve well as a backdrop for the six-foot-eight bulldog’s performance in Game Four today.

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Two Big Innings Early in Oakland’s Walk-Off Win

The game stories might end up being about Stephen Vogt and that’s fine. He got the big walk-off hit and he hasn’t been celebrated much so far in his baseball career. But, as with many big moments, the seeds that resulted in that wild finish were sown much earlier in the day.

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A Look at Today’s Pitchers: 10-5-13

The postseason is off to a great start, with both National League Division Series tied at one game apiece. Later today, the Tampa Bay Rays and Oakland Athletics will attempt to even their respective series. Barroom trivia aficionados may be interested to learn that the postseason has never started with all four series split at one game apiece. There is a roughly 25 percent chance of that happening today and if it does, TBS will have another fun fact to share in the next pregame show.

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Max Scherzer Establishes With the Fastball in Game One

Max Scherzer has a great changeup. His slider is sharp. He added a curve this year to keep lefties guessing. But early in games, he likes the fastball best. Friday night’s two-run, seven-inning start in the first game of the ALDS was just an extension of that affinity.

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The Other Extreme Thing About Bartolo Colon

Starting opposite Max Scherzer in Oakland tonight is going to be Bartolo Colon. That sentence doesn’t sound as crazy as it might’ve before — by this point, we’ve grown re-accustomed to Colon being a starter and pitching effectively. One of the best ERAs in baseball, he had. It’s not that the Colon story isn’t amazing anymore. It is amazing, that he’s back and healthy and pitching like he is in the way that he is. But we appreciate change better than we appreciate stability, and Colon isn’t changing. He pitches like he’s 40, going on 29.

Beyond his size and story, there’s something extreme about Colon: he throws almost exclusively fastballs. Susan Slusser just wrote it up well, and though Colon does have other pitches, and though Colon does have different fastballs, it’s still extraordinarily rare to see a starter with so little speed and break variation. Given his repertoire and ability to locate, Colon is our closest approximation to a starter version of Mariano Rivera. There’s something else too, though, if you dig a little deeper. Another statistical extremity, that’s a result of his approach, as I suppose is always the case.

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Analyzing the Umpires: ALDS Edition

After examining the National League division round umpires yesterday, I will look at the American ones today. I will look to see if they have any unique strike calling patterns and post their 2013 K/9 and BB/9 scaled to the league average strikeout and walk rates. Again I have included images of their called strike zones compared to the league average called zone.

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Chapman, Rondon, and Two Types of 100

According to the best data I can access, so far this year there have been 425 pitches thrown at least 100 miles per hour. Andrew Cashner‘s got one. Nathan Eovaldi‘s got one. Matt Harvey‘s got two. Bruce Rondon‘s got 104. Aroldis Chapman‘s got 196. To set a cutoff at 100 is arbitrary, but it feels natural, and 100 definitely has the feel of a magic number. A fastball at 100 is, officially, a fastball in the triple digits. Within the realm of 100+ mile-per-hour fastballs, Rondon and Chapman, combined, have thrown more than twice as many as everybody else. The next-highest total after Rondon’s 104 is Kelvin Herrera’s 45, and there’s long been talk that the PITCHf/x in Kansas City is miscalibrated.

What Chapman’s got over Rondon is peak velocity — Chapman, this year, has topped out at 104. What Rondon’s got over Chapman is consistency — 24% of Rondon’s pitches have reached 100, against Chapman’s 19%. Rondon has the harder average fastball. If you isolate only those fastballs thrown at least 100, Rondon and Chapman tie with an average velocity of 101. Clearly, these are the game’s premier flame-throwers. But while they both throw similar heat — similar, virtually unparalleled heat — the results have been considerably different. We’ve been seeing two types of 100 mile-per-hour fastballs.

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