FG on Fox: The Most Quietly-Excellent Aspect of the Quietly Excellent Howie Kendrick

by
January 9, 2015

I want you to look at three pictures. They’re all from the same play, and it would appear to be a fairly unremarkable play. But it was a remarkable play indeed, for reasons I’ll share with you right after the pictures. If you want to make a game of it, when you look at the pictures, try to figure out the significance before I tell you what it is!

Let’s go in order. What other way is there? One:

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Two:

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Three:

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Some of you have surely guessed why this matters. Most of you, presumably, haven’t. This is a sequence in which Howie Kendrick popped up. More specifically, this features the very last time that Howie Kendrick popped up. For timing purposes, I don’t spot useful visual clues — Jonathan Villar, Marwin Gonzalez, and David Martinez all played for the Astros in 2014. But, see, I can cheat, because I know the answers. This didn’t happen anywhere in 2014. This happened in the middle of September in 2013. Howie Kendrick hasn’t hit a pop-up since September of the year that came before last year.

So Kendrick didn’t pop-up once over a full season. Now, he wasn’t the only one. Last year, Shin-Soo Choo didn’t register a pop-up. Neither did Joe Mauer. Christian Yelich only popped up on the very last day of the season. But, Kendrick batted a lot more often than Choo or Mauer did. And, this isn’t just a 2014 phenomenon. It’s not just that Kendrick didn’t pop up — it’s that Kendrick has always only very seldom popped up. And that’s an indicator of the very thing that makes him successful at the plate.

Read the rest at Just A Bit Outside.





 

Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.

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mch38
10 years ago

Really disappointed that I read that Yelich popped up on the last day of the season. Someone had written an article a few months ago about how sweet his swing plane was and that he was the only player in MLB history to start their career with “x” amount of at bats with no infield pop up.

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