Category: Baseball

Crash Davis was wrong. Strikeouts are neither boring, nor fascist. They’re vital.

“[E]xtensive research…shows that the vast majority of pitchers wind up giving up hits on about 30 percent of balls in play over the course of their careers.”

I did a little algebra. For the sake of discussion assume nine innings with no walks or home runs.

First case. No strike outs. 38 balls put into play. 27 outs. But 11 hits (38 X .3). Eleven hits is a lot of hits. Has to be more than one hit in some inning(s). That probably means runs scored.

But say you strike out 10. Then only 34 hitters come up. 10 strike outs. 17 fielding outs. 7 get hits (24 X .3). Seven hits are fewer than one an inning. The seven could be all in one inning, but the chances of runs scoring with 7 hits are considerably less than runs scoring with 11 hits.

Just an idle thought and a little math and not well argued. But Crash Davis was wrong.

Game Score is a statistic developed by Bill James. It is one way of measuring a pitcher’s performance in any one game. 50 is about average and 100 or greater is extremely rare.

— Start with 50 points.

— Add a point for each out, and two more for each inning completed after Inning 4.

— Add one point for each strikeout.

— Take away two points for each hit, 4 points for each earned run, 2 points for each unearned run and 1 point for each walk.

That’s it. That’s the whole thing. It really is an elegant little formula.

Roy Halladay’s no-hitter Wednesday scored 94 (the same as Don Larsen’s no-hitter in the 1956 World Series).

And guess what? Last night’s little gem by San Francisco’s Tim Lincecum scored 96, the fourth best postseason pitching performance (according to Game Score) in baseball history.

Joe Posnanski has all the details.

Two personal observations. Watching Tim Lincecum pitch may be my current favorite thing in all of sports. Reading Joe Posnanski’s baseball writing is near the top, too. I think I’ve learned more about baseball from Poz in the past two months than I have since I stopped reading Bill James 20 years ago.

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Bats blog agrees. A little background excerpt:

Although most fans have been led to believe that good pitchers can “induce” weak contact and generate easily fieldable balls, while bad ones will surrender a parade of blistering line drives, extensive research into the subject shows that the vast majority of pitchers wind up giving up hits on about 30 percent of balls in play over the course of their careers.

As a result, the only ways for most pitchers to reduce the number of hits they allow are to avoid surrendering home runs and to get more strikeouts, so batters never put the ball in play to begin with. This is why the list of pitchers who have whiffed 15 batters in a game over the last decade is so much more impressive than the list of pitchers who have thrown no-hitters in that timespan.

Our latest fav Joe Posnanski is blogging about baseball. Just different, interesting stuff — baseball tools, Halladay, ballparks.

Joe Posnanski » Posts Baseball Thoughts: Day 2 «

Joe Posnanski » Posts Baseball Thoughts: Day 1 «

Only the second postseason no-hitter in 107 seasons. And two no-hitters this year for Roy Halladay — been 37 years since a pitcher threw two no-hitters in one season and he’s just the fifth to do it in 135 years.

Karen, you may be my only reader (of seven) who cares, so this one’s for you. Congratulations on your team, the Giants, winning the division. (They will win one game this weekend, won’t they?)

Here’s a little fact for you: If the Giants go to the playoffs — they’re one win away — that will mean that in the last five seasons all five NL West teams have reached the playoffs. All five in five years — no other division can claim anything even close to this. Here’s how many seasons back you have to go to say that every team in a division has made the postseason:

AL East: 18 seasons (Toronto last made it in 1983)
AL Central: 26 seasons (Kansas City last made it in 1985)
AL West: 10 seasons (Seattle last made it in 2001 — and remember there are only four teams in the AL West)

NL East: Infinity (Washington has never made the postseason; if you want to go back to their days in Montreal you have to go back to 1981).
NL Central: 19 seasons (PIttsburgh last made it in 1992 — have not had a winning season since).
NL West: 5 seasons (The Padres last made it in 2006)

From a post on the NL West by Joe Posnanski.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5iMSrwVUB8

And come to think of it, why did the ball hitting a wooden bat ping like that?

BTW the Rays fielded the ball and Jeter was out at first (unless it brushed his hip, then it was a foul ball).

But the umpire got it wrong and Jeter was given first — and scored. (He’s batting just .262.)

UPDATE: Joe Posnanski on “The Jeter School of Acting.”

Great baseball stat stuff from Joe Posnanski.

Gotta love the national pastime. Baseball is so great that we (me at least) can enjoy reading not only about baseball, and not only about baseball stats, but analysis of the nature of the stats.

As Posnanski says, “This is all just a goofy Batman could beat Superman talk.”

Precisely!

Look: One of the great things about watching and enjoying sports is that there are no rules. You can believe what you want to believe. It’s supposed to be fun. Dan Quisenberry said the best thing about baseball is that there’s no homework … I would add there are no pop quizzes. If you want to believe that baseball is won entirely by heart, that RBIs and wins are the two most important numbers, that defense can be measured best and entirely by what you see, that Jack Morris and not Bert Blyleven belongs in the Hall of Fame, that numbers deaden the sport, you are absolutely entitled — more than entitled, you are empowered to see the game as you want to see it, enjoy it as you want to enjoy it. I’m not sure what you’re doing here, 2,000 or so words into this essay about WAR, but you absolutely should watch all sports for the joy of it. I just hope you’re not running a team I like.

The Rockies are 17-4 over the past three weeks.

Walk-off pinch-hit HR by Giambi today.

Quick, without thinking, can you name the six Major League Baseball teams (out of 30) that do not have a city in their name?

Trailing Cincinnati 5-0 after two innings, the Rockies game back to tie the game 5-5 in the eighth on Tulowitzki’s leadoff home run. Giambi walked and Chris Nelson went in to run, getting to third on a throwing error.

And then, with one out, Nelson stole home.

Rockies 6 Reds 5. Sweep.

Here’s the video.

Nelson spent most of the season with the Colorado Springs Sky Sox. It was his first Major League stolen base.

While summer’s phenom Steven Strasburg prepares for surgery tomorrow, Aroldis Chapman lights ’em up.

Cincinnati’s Chapman appeared in his second game Wednesday, getting the win with an inning of relief.

The Cuban threw 11 pitches, nine for strikes and hit 104 mph twice, four were 102, and he tossed up a 99 mph change of pace.

“[S]ix of the eight pitches Chapman threw were fastballs. Of those six heaters, two registered at 103 mph as well as one each at 101, 100, 99 and 98.”

MLB FanHouse reporting on Cincinnati left-handed pitcher Aroldis Chapman’s Major League debut. Chapman had been clocked at 105 in AAA.

Stephen Strasburg of the Washington Nationals has a tear in his ulnar collateral ligament. The final word isn’t in yet, but he will probably need Tommy John surgery and be out next season.

Update from Deadspin: Strasmas Is Cancelled:

This is how it works in baseball. Power pitchers are delicate little roses, things of beauty only because their mortality is assured. We rarely get more than a few years of them at their peak, so to prolong our enjoyment, we fire up the hype machine. Strasburg was mythologized for years before he put on a major league jersey, and now it’ll be another couple years before he does it again.

The National League East leading Atlanta Braves were at Denver today to play the Colorado Rockies. I’m a Rockies fan so I turned on the game around 2 o’clock.

And it was 10-1 Atlanta in the 3rd. [If it was soccer they’d have sent the Rockies back to France by then.]

But I left the game on anyway. Ken Burns came along to talk up his new documentary and he was more interesting than usual. And the Rockies scored a few runs — one in the fourth, three in the fifth.

10-5 after five.

Three more in the sixth. 10-8.

But none in the seventh. Still 10-8.

Then, four runs in the eighth. Rockies ahead 12-10.

And, to end the game in the ninth an incredible sliding catch by Carlos Gonzalez. What a great, great ballgame.

Well not so much for Atlanta.

Some trivia and stuff along the way. Atlanta’s nine starters each had an extra base (in just the first four innings) — seven doubles, a triple and a home run. That’s happened just five times in 58 years. (And they lost.)

Burns and the broadcasters were, of course, talking about baseball being the only game without a clock; it’s never over until it’s over kind of stuff.

But Burns noted as well that baseball (and softball) are the only game where the defense has the ball. The only game where the player scores and not the ball. The only game where you only get to use your best offensive player just one-ninth of the time (no going to Kobe or LeBron or Adrian Peterson every important play).

Another wonderful essay from Joe Posnanski — this on the most memorable home runs in baseball history. Beautifully done, especially the liberal use of Vin Scully and Red Smith.

Joe Posnanski debates himself at length on whether Mariano Rivera or Derek Jeter has been the most important Yankee. Good stuff for baseball fans.

If you like baseball and like philosophy — and who that likes one of these can fail to like the other — you’ll enjoy A Perfect Game: The metaphysical meaning of baseball by David B. Hart. A sample:

I know there are those who will accuse me of exaggeration when I say this, but, until baseball appeared, humans were a sad and benighted lot, lost in the labyrinth of matter, dimly and achingly aware of something incandescently beautiful and unattainable, something infinitely desirable shining up above in the empyrean of the ideas; but, throughout most of the history of the race, no culture was able to produce more than a shadowy sketch of whatever glorious mystery prompted those nameless longings.

The coarsest and most common of these sketches—which has gone through numerous variations down the centuries without conspicuous improvement—is what I think of as “the oblong game,” a contest played out on a rectangle between two sides, each attempting to penetrate the other’s territory to deposit some small object in the other’s goal or end zone. All the sports built on this paradigm require considerable athletic prowess, admittedly, and each has its special tactics, of a limited and martial kind; but all of them are no more than crude, faltering lurches toward the archetype; entertaining, perhaps, but appealing more to the beast within us than to the angel.

Z

That’s what’s in a name in Major League Baseball. Z.

There are 1,200 ballplayers on major league rosters (40 per team — 25 are active at any given time). The most common surnames are Rodriguez and Hernandez with 15 each. There are 14 named Gonzalez and another 14 named Ramirez. 12 are named Perez, 11 Sanchez, 9 Lopez, 7 Martinez, and 5 each Chavez and Valdez. (That 107 out of 1200.)

There are 14 Johnsons, and 9 each Jones and Anderson. Currently there are just 8 Smiths, but it is the most common name in baseball history.

Some factoids.

Just 11 Spanish surnames account for one-quarter of all the people in the Western Hemisphere.

Approximately one-third of all major leaguers are from the Dominican Republic or Venezuela.

I can remember when Latino ballplayers first made it to the big leagues and announcers pronounced Martinez as Martin-ez.