Game 1 ALCS Preview: Texas Rangers

Here are a few notes I have on today’s game and the entire series.

Weather

The Rangers need to take notice that the weather is cooling down and batted balls will not travel as far when hit. As Robert Adair notes in the Physics of Baseball, a 400 foot fly ball hit to center field will travel four feet less for every ten degrees in temperature drop. The temperature for today’s game is projected to be about 10 degrees cooler than many of the late season night games. Acknowledging this change is especially important when the Rangers are at home. All players should be running as if the ball is in the park until they know for sure that they hit a home run.

Umpires

The umpires have been announced for the series and they probably will work home plate in the following order: Gerry Davis, Tony Randazzo, Jim Reynolds, Angel Hernandez, Fieldin Culbreth, and Brian Gorman. Game one’s home plate umpire, Gerry Davis, has one of the smallest strike zones in the league. Here is a comparison of Davis’s, Tony Randazzo’s (umpire in the crew closest to a standard zone) and Brian Gorman’s (most pitcher friendly umpire of the crew) strike zones for right and left handed hitters.

The scale given is the ratio of called strikes to the total number of called strikes and balls. The box is the rule book strike zone with the inner circle for reference only.

Right Hand Hitters

Gerry Davis

Tony Ranazzo

Brian Gorman


Left Handed Hitters

Gerry Davis

Tony Ranazzo

Brian Gorman

C.J. Wilson, or any pitcher throwing today, will not be getting any borderline pitches called strikes because of Davis’s small zone. Pitchers are going to have to pick their poison of either pounding the small zone or walking a few batters.

In-Season Starting Pitcher Match-up Results:

The Yankees were able to single C.J. Wilson to death in the three games he pitched against them. He was only able to make it 14.1 innings over 3 starts (one start was a complete game though). The reason he struggled wasn’t because of control (he had a K/9 of 9.4 and a BB/9 of 1.67). Instead, the Yankees had a BABIP against him of .400. Of the 18 hits against Wilson, only three were extra base hits and those were all doubles. C.J. looks like he pitched fairly decent against the Yankees and was a little unlucky with the high percentage of batted balls ending up as hits.

CC Sabathia owned the Rangers in the one game he faced them this season. Over six innings he allowed three hits, no walks, one run and struck out nine in the process. It was a fairly dominate dismantling of  the Rangers by CC. Hopefully the Rangers do a little better today.