FG on Fox: Going Deep With Sam Fuld
Sam Fuld is not your typical outfielder, maybe. There’s an active brain at work out there. Often it wonders what the numbers say about this beautiful game.
Fuld’s history sounds like the backstory for a baseball analyst. He carried around a book of baseball stats when he was five. He went to Phillips Exeter, one of the best prep schools in the country. He has a degree in economics from Stanford. He read Moneyball and was inspired to complete an internship at STATS Inc.
Sam Fuld once said “The beauty of numbers is that our minds don’t necessarily capture the whole picture accurately. Our emotions remember certain things for whatever reason, and there are certain things you don’t remember…. that’s the beauty of numbers. It’s fact. There’s no way around it.”
So, before a game against his old team — the also openly nerdy Tampa Bay Rays — I thought I’d ask him what he was thinking about out there when the games got long.
With a phone full of pictures of pitchers' fingers, strange beers, and his two toddler sons, Eno Sarris can be found at the ballpark or a brewery most days. Read him here, writing about the A's or Giants at The Athletic, or about beer at October. Follow him on Twitter @enosarris if you can handle the sandwiches and inanity.
Great article!
Should / could we assume that Chris Tillman is doing something wrong? He has the “highest” rise and yet underperforms even the means for swinging strikes and pop-ups…
His fastball is about the straightest out there when it comes to horizontal movement, about three inches straighter than average. I think that’s a big part of it.
Hey look he’s talking about something nerdy that doesn’t correlate to pitching performance…The Cult of Sam Fuld continues.
hmmm, I didn’t realize that the website CasualFanGraphs also linked here
Is that how you found the page?
I wonder is there a “best” location to throw the riseball? If the sinker is low is the rise high? Or is it better thrown below the strike zone and letting it rise back in?
If the sinker’s best location is low is the rise’s high?*
I think so. Doolittle, McGee, and Young have told me they like to throw it high, throw it so that it looks like it’s in the zone and then it finishes above it.
Sam Fuld sounds like a future GM to me.
We’ll take him.
Watch Billy hire him.
Sum Fuld is a cool player. Great brains and defense! Waaay Cool!
Completely unrelated, but Sean Doolittle’s piece on ESPN today is a must-read.
“It’s not physically possible for a ball to rise” – FALSE.