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.
Jeff, one of the authors of the fantasy baseball guide,The Process, writes for RotoGraphs, The Hardball Times, Rotowire, Baseball America, and BaseballHQ. He has been nominated for two SABR Analytics Research Award for Contemporary Analysis and won it in 2013 in tandem with Bill Petti. He has won four FSWA Awards including on for his Mining the News series. He's won Tout Wars three times, LABR twice, and got his first NFBC Main Event win in 2021. Follow him on Twitter @jeffwzimmerman.
“Hopefully the Rangers do a little better today.”
+1 to you
nice comparison of umps. I havent seen that before. Given lee a huge strike zone will be death to the yanks with his masterful control. Try to keep things as biased as possible though when doing a piece for an analytical site though. Hopefully it’s a good game might be fairer. I know its the texas preview (there is no yankees preview per usual) but at least pretend at impartiality?
Come on, just because the content is supposed to be unbiased doesn’t mean we can’t root! It’s supposed to be fun, remember? GO YANKEES!!!!
If you want a Yankee preview, you could always try every other sports website on the internet
Lee is already pretty masterful without the help of a larger zone. So I’d say this is more of a help for Pettitte, who would have more trouble with a small zone.
I am not that upset about it, just so you know. I was just commenting that analysis and rooting for a team should be separate. And that most times the analysis is skewed against the yankees. I understand that most people hate the yankees because of their payroll and arrogance from winning so often, but that should be put aside when analyzing a matchup or previewing a game.
Agree with JohnnyK
A bigger strikezone levels the playing field between pitchers. Since Lee has such good control he would likely be less impacted by a small zone. Though Pettitte is not exactly a wild pitcher, his stuff is not as good so he may be able to gain more from having a wider/bigger strikezone.
To put it to an extreme if you had Lee vs Burnett and were a Ranger fan would you prefer a big strikezone called or a small one?
Awesome post, the ump zone breakdown was great.
Seconded. I love those heat maps.
Where can I find these charts on umpire strike zones? Very cool.
I have my own personal application that creates them.
Hopefully if everything goes as planned, they will be available for everyone this winter. The main hurdle is that they are very processor intensive.
Thanks for posting the results either way. What program/ language are you using to do the calculations??
combination of SQL for the pitch fx data, R for the visuals and Perl to tie it all together.
Do the maps show the plate from the pitcher’s perspective or the umpire’s perspective?
Umpire
I could see that small zone hurting C.J. Wilson a lot more than Sabathia. He walks a fair amount of people already.
Wow, Tony Ranazzo has a very odd looking heat map (especially for lefties).
These are awesome by the way, and exactly why fangraphs is great.
CJ’s cg vs NY was a 6 inning, 100+pitch, rain shortened game.
ah he forgot to mention that. how did CJ fair in that game?
if i recall, his defense (and maybe CJ himself playing defense) let him down a bit.
Just a note. the 4/16 game where CJ lost to CC (6IP 3ER) he was still recovering from food poisoning.
Where in the world did you come up with CJ Wilson having “had a K/9 of 9.4 and a BB/9 of 1.67” against the Yanks in his 3 starts this year? Wilson had 9 walks in his 14.1 innings against the Yanks this year, a far cry from a BB/9 of 1.67 you cite. Also, while technically Wilson did have a complete game against the Yanks this year, saying that as evidence of pitching him having pitched well against the Yanks is more than a bit misleading given that it was a rain-shortened game 6 inning game in which Wilson went 6 innings, struck out 5, gave up 3 walks, and allowed 5 runs (3 earned). While CJ Wilson may very well do fine against the Yanks in this series, looking at his 3 starts from this season certainly isn’t strong evidence in making that case.
[…] sure you check out Joe’s preview at FanGraphs, ditto Jeff Zimmerman’s for Texas. Here are the […]
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