Utley Plunked Three Times
Chase Utley was hit by three pitches in today’s game to tie a Major League record. Oliver Perez hit him twice and then Scott Schoeneweis decided that twice wasn’t enough and hit him again! Utley was actually hit a fourth time if you count Carlos Delgado’s errant throw which nailed him right in the back.
The last player to get hit three times was Nomar Garciappara on July 3rd, 2006.
Johnny Cueto made his second big league start and struck out 8 with no walks in 6.1 innings of work. He gave up 5 hits and 1 home run in what turned out to be a no-decision instead of a loss thanks to….
Eric Gagne! The 2003 Cy Young award winner blew his second save of the season by giving up a solo shot to Corey Patterson. Gagne has now allowed 2 home runs in 3 innings of work. His fastball velocity appears to be at 88.5mph, which is down 4 from last year’s 92.3mph. It may be is just a sample size issue and considering the Brewers other options, I think it’d be wise to give Gagne a bit of breathing room.
Mark Reynolds hit his MLB leading 5th home run tonight and he’s making a strong case for his Reynolds being Reynolds approach at the plate. Apparently his hitting coach believes he’s been chasing pitches outside the strike zone considerably less. His hitting coach is indeed correct since the data shows that he’s cut down on swinging at pitches outside the strike zone by 6%.
In some site related news, FanGraphs has updated it’s leverage index (LI) tables to Tangotiger’s latest and greatest. You may see some very (very, very) slight changes in LI related stats.
The Great Clutch Project tracker page has been updated and now includes BABIP. Also, the wildcard players now have gray backgrounds so you differentiate between them.
David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.
Good job, thanks again.
Question: I just noticed that there is no league standings. I’d hate to go elsewhere to see who’s leading their division.
A “standings” tab would be nice, along with team totals on that page of all the team-by-team stats you have.
On Gagne’s fastball. The pitchF/X data had it as 92-94 last night with him throwing a lot of changeups and splitters in the 80s. It may just be a pitch identification problem.
Definitely possible. The gap between the FB and CU should be around 9 or 10 mph. His 2008 splits are showing 6 mph. Not sure what kind of quality check BIS is doing, but the standard deviation would have to be very very small for each pitch. If you average a 90mph FB, that basically means that most of your fastballs are 88-92, with a possibility of being outside that. One standard deviation must be around 1 mph. You won’t have both a 94mph FB and 86mph fastball. If you do, it would be fairly rare.
David: are you precluded from showing the pitch speed/type on a pitch-by-pitch basis?
Yeah, I can’t show things on a pitch-by-pitch basis, but I do see where the problem is. Most of Gagne’s velocity records are nulls, so the velocity had not been recorded and the couple of fastballs that were recorded were 88 & 89. Pitchf/x has those same fastballs at 93mph. The BIS vs. Pitchf/x pitch types do match up quite closely for Gagne.
Also, I wrote this before I had Gagne’s data from last night, just his previous two starts, so I can’t speak for last night’s game in particular and the data still isn’t complete.
BIS tends to continue correcting data all season long and it’s not like there was a lot of Gagne data to begin with, so I think it’s mainly a very small sample size and some poor radar gun readings.
Funny you should mention standings. I’m working on that right now and it will have the team aggregated WPA & LI stats for batters and pitchers so you’ll be able to see how many “Clutch” wins a team has.
Good write up, but I was curious at to what you looked at to determine Reynolds not swinging at the outside pitch as much?
The swing analysis is done from the BIS pitch location data. I’ve looked at it the past couple years, and will take another look at it soon. Here’s the most recent research:
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/more-on-plate-discipline/
Is there a permanent place that we can see the Clutch results, or will you just post it every so often?
If you mean Tango’s clutch project, the results are updated daily here: http://www.fangraphs.com/clutch.aspx