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Netzer

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If only statcast had the technology to measure the launch angle and exit velocity of yankee balls that have been hit off of your chin.

Goo Punch
Goo Punch
Hank Chinaski
Hank Chinaski

Good fucking riddance. 

TheFlagship

TheFlagship 466

Posted
Posted
5 minutes ago, Pato del Muerto said:

So...throw the last 4.1 innings and save it for Chicago?

You obviously don’t want to give up, but the offense looks lifeless and your starter is already out of the game. Dodgers win % now close to 95%. Put in a long guy for the last 3 innings, see if you can get something going, but otherwise start prepping for tomorrow.

Aka don’t pitch Adam Ottavino today

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Vic Mackey

Vic Mackey 47435

Posted
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8 minutes ago, UTexasFight said:

F selig, but tip of the cap to the 2018 Brewers for winning games 156 to 163 and not losing since Autumn started to get in as Central division champs and best record in the NL.

They could be this year's 2007 Rockies or 2014 Royals. Today was the first time I got to watch them play and were a fun team. Hopefully they can make a deep run. I have always loved their older uniforms.

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Zepol87

Zepol87 9263

Posted
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11 minutes ago, UTexasFight said:

F selig, but tip of the cap to the 2018 Brewers for winning games 156 to 163 and not losing since Autumn started to get in as Central division champs and best record in the NL.

yea they are on fire. Spent a week up in Wisconsin last week. The people up there are fully behind them and it was cool to see.

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Sbbruin

Sbbruin 21938

Posted
Posted

My predictions:

NLWC: Rockies over Cubs

ALWC: A’s over Yankees

NLDS: Dodgers over Braves;;  Brewers over Rockies

ALDS: Astros over Injuns; Sox over A’s

NLCS: Dodgers over Brewers

ALCS: Astros over Sox

WS: Dodgers over Astros (so it is written, so shall it be done)

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Beau Vine

Beau Vine 55032

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Posted

Really good Stark column from theathletic.com:

Quote

Numbers. For six months, the great sport of baseball has been churning them and burning them every darned day. Little did it know we’ve been paying attention.

And it especially didn’t know we’ve been paying extra attention to seven numbers in particular, because we’re sneaky like that.

Six months ago, in this very space, I wrote a column about numbers. But not just the usual goofy numbers I have so much fun with. These were the most important numbers in baseball.

What made them important is that they seemed to be telling us something. They seemed to be shining a light on baseball in the 21st century. We called them the 10 Numbers That Define Baseball in 2018.

So for the last six months, we’ve kept our eyes on those numbers – particularly the seven you’ll find below. Have they gone up, gone down, gone sideways, gone away entirely? We thought you’d be interested. So here they come (again) – Seven Numbers That Define(d) Baseball in 2018.

THE MAGIC NUMBER: 8,000

WHAT IT MEANS: You thought teams shifted a lot last year? Ha. They doubled down this year. There were nearly 8,000 more shifts this season than last, according to our friends at Sports Info Solutions. Eight thousand! That’s about a 30 percent increase – in just one year. That’s staggering enough. But the true measure of how much the art of defensive positioning has, um, shifted is this: From 2013 to 2018, the number of shifts is up by approximately 500 percent! In five years! So never has that “6-3” in your scorecard been less revealing than it was in 2018.

There’s no truth to the rumor that teams shifted this season on every single hitter in every single inning. The facts are, there was a shift deployed on less than 20 percent of all plate appearances. So there. Feel better now?

Oh, really? Well, the hitters don’t. That still means that somebody is being shifted on in pretty much every inning of the average game – usually multiple somebodies. And that constitutes an earth-rattling change in this sport, in just the last few years.

Check out the uptick in the raw shifting data, according to our friends at Sports Info Solutions. It’s mind-blowing:

Shifts in 2018: 34,673
Shifts in 2017: 26,705
Shifts in 2013: 6,882
Shifts in 2010: 2,463

So clearly, the question baseball faces isn’t: Is The Shift going away? That ain’t happening. The question is really: How is baseball going to react to the most dramatic change in how this sport is played since the lowering of the mound a half-century ago?

I’d love to tell you the answer. But even within baseball itself, there is deep division over where this is heading (or needs to be heading).

Will the game react naturally? Can it react naturally? Maybe. There is still a school of thought that eventually, hitters will adjust and adapt – if enough clubs make that a priority.

“If you look at the history of baseball, any time you see the pendulum swing in one direction, it inevitably swings back,” said one NL executive. “And I still think we could see this one swing back – if teams start paying guys who can control the barrel of the bat. We need to start valuing the ability to hit and put together quality at-bats … the ability to make contact and use the whole field. We need to get away from the willingness of too many hitters to accept the swing and miss, even when the situation calls for making contact. I still think we can see that change – but it’s going to take years.”

By “years,” he doesn’t mean a couple of years, either. He means many, many years. So that leads to another question: Are the people who run baseball willing to wait that long?

I think the honest answer to that question, inside the commissioner’s office, is no. Which means that one of the most fascinating mysteries of this offseason is: Will MLB press for a rule change to limit shifts?

“All I can tell you,” said one AL exec, “is that that would be very unpopular. And not just in front offices. Even with Baseball Twitter. I honestly don’t think that with the general population, banning shifts moves the needle much.”

THE MAGIC NUMBER: .192

WHAT IT MEANS: If you’re a left-handed hitter and you pulled a ground ball between first base and second base this year, that was your chance of reaching base. Not just on a hit, but by any means at all – fielding error, throwing error, earthquake, divine intervention. Anything.

Do shifts work? Heck, yeah, they work. And no baseball species is being crushed by The Shift more than that species known as “The Left-Handed Hitter.” And especially “The Left-Handed Hitter Who Can’t Run.”

Sports Info Solutions tracks a stat it calls the Reached Base Rate. It’s like On Base Percentage, except that it counts all methods of reaching base. On a hit. On an error. Via any sort of defensive calamity. What that stat tells us, more clearly than ever, is that, if you’re a left-handed hitter and you pull a ground ball, you’re going to be out.

Might as well run to first base just to make sure. But you’re going to be out – more than 80 percent of the time. Here’s how that rate looks for left-handed hitters who pull a ground ball between the first-base line and halfway to second base:

2018 – .193
2017 – .197
2016 – .193
2015 – .207
2014 – .208
2013 – .222
2012 – .221
2011 – .235

That, friends, is ugly. And getting uglier. But when I ran that figure past another AL exec, whose team is one of the heaviest shifters in the game, his reaction wasn’t exactly oozing with sympathy for the Chris Davises of the planet.

“Good,” he said, almost merrily. “It’s not up to the commissioner to change some sort of rule. It’s up to players to adjust. Hit it up the middle. Hit a line drive over the second baseman’s head. Square a ball up. So what if all the pitchers throw 95 now, and defense is played better than it’s ever been played, and defensive positioning is better than it’s ever been? Adjust. Look at the MVP candidates. Christian Yelich doesn’t have a .192 On-Base on his ground balls. Adjust. The game changes. It’s time for players to adjust.”

THE MAGIC NUMBER: 800

WHAT IT MEANS: This is the story of the Vanishing Ball in Play. So that number – 800 – represents about how many fewer balls were put in play this year than just one season ago. But if you’ve mastered subtraction, you could easily compute the dramatic trend line here: We’re now at about 6,000 fewer balls in play than a mere four years ago. And about 11,000 fewer than just 10 years ago. This is a major motion picture waiting to happen: Who Kidnapped the Ball in Play?

It isn’t getting better. Sorry. You know what we saw more of this season than ever before? Strikeouts. What else? The most strikeouts in history, in fact (41,207). And that comes as no surprise – since it’s the 13th consecutive year we could say that.

But here’s the ripple effect of all that swinging and missing: It’s accompanied by the fewest hits in almost 50 years (41,019 – which computes to just 8.44 hits per game). And here’s what that’s produced:

  • More strikeouts than hits – for the first time in any season ever played.
  • The fewest balls put in play of any season in history.

The decline in balls in play can sometimes seem almost imperceptible – until you see how the numbers pile up from year to year. It’s actually shocking to view them in a 10-year window. Take a look.

YEAR             TOTAL            DECREASE SINCE ‘08

2008                131,860            n/a
2009                130,236           -1,624
2010                129,307           -2,553
2011                 129,633           -2,227
2012                126,616            -5,244
2013                127,325            -4,535
2014                126,629           -5,251
2015                125,598           -6,262
2016                123,246           -8,614
2017                121,494           -10,366
2018                120,737           -11,123

(Source – Sports Info Solutions)

 

Feel free to read that 2018 line again. More than 11,000 balls in play have literally disappeared over the last decade, most of them drowning in that sea of swings and misses. So this sport is now creeping closer than ever to a point where the average time between balls in play is four minutes.

And that’s how we can connect the dots to another of the biggest story lines of this winter – MLB’s aggressive push for a pitch clock. There is 100 percent probability that that’s coming. And you should know there’s massive support for it – in front offices, at least.

“There isn’t much that every team agrees on,” said one exec. “But we’re all on board with a pitch clock. I think we all agree it’s not time of game that’s the problem. It’s pace of action.”

THE MAGIC NUMBER: 100

WHAT IT MEANS: Remember when a 20-homer season actually made you “a power hitter?” – a much-feared middle-of-the-order long-ball force? OK, so much for that. There were 100 different players who hit at least 20 home runs this year. A hundred. That makes three straight seasons in which at least 100 hitters thumped 20 homers or more. And when was the last time we saw three straight seasons with at least 100 20-homer men? That would be NEVER. Not even in the Steroid Era. So remember when GMs used to dig the long ball? Now they almost take it for granted.

I computed this stat a little differently than I did in April, but the bottom line hasn’t changed. The ability to hit 20 home runs in a season is no longer a unique skill in baseball. And isn’t that a fascinating development?

Take a look at how dramatically this tide has shifted, just in the last few years:

20-HR HITTERS

2014 – 57
2015 – 64
2016 – 111
2017 – 117
2018 – 100

So the number of 20-homer men has pretty much doubled – just since 2014? Wow. I don’t need to spend much time on why that’s happened. But I can sum up my theory in two words: “the baseball.” Why would it be “the baseball” and not “launch angle?” This explains it:

  • Increase in the rate of fly balls hit since 2014 – just 3 percent.
  • Increase in the rate of fly balls that leave the park since 2014 – 34 percent.

But we can thrash around that diagnosis some other time. The big point here is that nowadays, teams can find power pretty much anywhere and everywhere. The average team got 19 home runs this year from its shortstop. It got 21 home runs from its leadoff hitter.

And this isn’t an age where a bunch of guys are hitting 50, 60 or 70 home runs. Remember, 38 was enough to lead the National League. So the rise of the 20-homer guy is literally just that. It’s a proliferation of hitters with 20-to-30-homer power, up and down the lineup.

Well, you know who should look at that as a frightening development? The free-agent class of 2018-19. That’s who. Because the power numbers that used to get these guys paid have now transformed themselves from rare to ordinary. And “ordinary” doesn’t ring the cash registers.

“When we look at free agents now, 20 home runs is pretty much the baseline,” said one AL exec. “When we talk about 20 home runs, I mean, we can find that. We can back into guys who can hit 20 almost by accident. So unless you have some other unique ability – unless you play incredible defense or you’re [an elite] runner – why would you be in demand? It’s hard to be an every-day player in baseball right now if you can’t get to at least double-digit home runs.”

THE MAGIC NUMBER: 130

WHAT IT MEANS: There once was a fellow named Rickey Henderson. His specialty in life – aside from reconfiguring the English language in ways it had never before been reconfigured – was stealing bases. He once stole 130 of them in one season. And he was just one person. Now compare that with this season, when, for the second straight year, only one whole TEAM in the entire sport (the Indians) stole 130 bases. See a trend in there anywhere?

The average baseball game in 2018 season featured a whopping one stolen base – by both teams combined. It was the lowest stolen-base rate since 1972. That’s almost half a century ago.

Just one team stole 130 bases. As recently as 2011, nine teams stole that many. The year that Henderson swiped 130 by himself (1982), there were 16 teams that stole that many.

Base-stealing felt like an art back then. It feels like a science now. It’s about leads and jumps and pop time. And if that math doesn’t add up, teams are not going to run. Period. Doesn’t matter if you’re Billy Hamilton or Willians Astudillo. Too much risk.

So it made me wonder: What would happen if Rickey Henderson arrived in the big leagues today?

“If Rickey came up today, he’d still lead the league in stolen bases – just with 43 stolen bases instead of 130,” said one of the execs quoted earlier. “And there’d be a great piece in The Athletic about `Rickey Henderson – old-school leadoff hitter.’

“Now if Vince Coleman came up today,” the same exec mused, “he’d be Terrance Gore.”

THE MAGIC NUMBER: 678

WHAT IT MEANS: No, that’s not how many times Yoán Moncada struck out. That’s how many more relief pitchers came bursting through the bullpen gates this season than last season. And that number is up nearly 2,000 compared with just five years ago. Hey, everybody loves a parade. Now you don’t have to wait until the 4th of July to see one. Head for the ballpark. There’s a bullpen parade every night!

“Bullpenning” was already A Thing before 2018 came along. But this was the year that moved many folks to ask whether it’s becoming The Thing That Ate Baseball – because it isn’t only October now when the relief pitchers take over the game.

            YEAR             TOTAL           PER GAME

            2018                16,335             6.72
            2017                15,657              6.44
            2013                14,334             5.90
            2008               14,151              5.83
            2003                12,957             5.33
            1998                11,960             4.92

Once there was a time when the bullpen door didn’t swing open until the starter’s fuel gauge hit “E.” Now you find yourself settling into your seat, and a relief pitcher is in the game in the first inning.

You can thank those Tampa Bay Rays for that. But they proved that The Opener wasn’t merely innovation for innovation’s sake. This was innovation with a purpose. And it worked. The Rays were 10 games over .500 (44-34) when they used an Opener. They were only eight games over (46-38) when they used a regular old starter. Oh, and they led the American League in first-inning ERA, too.

“I think you’re going to see a lot more of this,” said one AL executive. “A lot, lot more. I wouldn’t be surprised if half the teams in baseball do it next year – not every day, but in one or two spots in the rotation.”

That, however, isn’t the only reaction to watch for. It wouldn’t shock anyone if MLB proposed some sort of limit on mid-inning pitching changes this winter – a change that would help move games along and force teams to prioritize more versatile relievers, instead of stocking up on those sidewheeling situational relievers who now show up as early as the fifth inning.

“If someone had proposed this to me at the beginning of the year,” said another of the execs quoted earlier, “I’d have said that’s not a great idea. I feel different now. We are so by-the-book now in the way we manage to get those platoon advantages. And I’m not sure it always makes sense, based on the rhythm and flow of the game. So it’s something worth thinking about.”

Hey, you know who agrees with him? The artists formerly known as “starting pitchers” – because look how this is affecting them….

THE MAGIC NUMBER: 953

WHAT IT MEANS: For the first time in baseball history, there weren’t even 1,000 games in which starting pitchers were permitted by the proper authorities to work their way through a lineup at least three times. You think 953 is still a lot? Uh, not really. It means the average team does it only slightly more than once a week. It once was more like five days a week.

I had a conversation with Max Scherzer recently about the future of his favorite position on a baseball team – The Starting Pitcher. He’s worried. He should be.

Never in the history of baseball have starting pitchers been leaned upon less than they are right now. There is powerful data that tells us all we need to know about why that is and why it makes sense. But it’s true. And it shows up in trends like this:

  • As recently as two years ago, according to baseball-reference.com, there were 1,405 games in which starters were allowed to go through the opposing order at least three times. Just in the last two seasons, that number has dropped by more than 32 percent!
  • As recently as 2011, there were 173 complete games pitched in the big leagues. By 2016, that rate had been cut in half (to 83). By this year, it was cut in half again (to 42).
  • There was no pitcher in the entire sport who threw more than two complete games this year. In 2011, James Shields threw 11 by himself!

This is another one of those trends that obviously makes folks in baseball leadership uncomfortable. Just the marquee value of “Max Scherzer is pitching tonight” – or Jacob deGrom … Justin Verlander … Chris Sale … Clayton Kershaw, etc. – is a reason to go to baseball games.

But is there any way to change the rules to require teams to start an actual starting pitcher? How would that work exactly? As people in front offices keep pointing out, there’s no real precedent for that sort of rule in any sport. Manu Ginobli could tell you all about it.

So as MLB contemplates all of these trends we’ve laid out in this piece, it may be tempting to lock the competition committee in a room and order them to “fix” this. But around the game, we hear wise men warning: Beware of what you “fix” – because soon, you might be fixing what you just fixed.

“It’s the law of unexpected results,” said one of the execs quoted above. “Everything in the universe is inter-connected. If you make these changes, there can be unexpected fallout from these things that you can’t anticipate. You could make the game far worse. And I’d rather see the game change organically than see that.”

Then again, every trend in this piece is a product of what happens when you do let the game change organically. Except nowadays, the organics are fertilized by voluminous chunks of data – data that didn’t exist 10 years ago.

That data is driving the game in a direction Earl Weaver and Whitey Herzog never would have anticipated – and that John McGraw and Connie Mack never would have recognized. So that’s exactly why the numbers of today are more important than ever.

The numbers of baseball have always told a story. But you know what’s changed? In 2018, we’ve reached the point where those numbers aren’t simply defining the story. They’re actually driving the story. So now more than ever, we’d all better pay attention.

 

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Guest Lobo

Guest Lobo

Posted
Posted
1 hour ago, shnsajax said:

Today will be the Cubs 43rd day at a ballpark in 44 days they said on the radio this morning.

That is an interesting tidbit, so is going from being by far the best team in the National League just weeks ago to being a few outs from tapping out before the LDS begins.  

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Beau Vine

Beau Vine 55032

Posted
Posted

torbush.gif:

Quote

— One particularly remarkable document shows that Dodgers executives in 2015 went so far as to develop a database that measured the perceived “level of egregious behavior” displayed by 15 of their own employees in Latin America. That is, using a scale of 1 to 5—“innocent bystander” to “criminal”—front-office executives assessed their own staff’s level of corruption. Five employees garnered a “criminal” rating. 

agent-rankings-2.jpg&w=800&q=85

— Internal communications by the Dodgers show concerns about what team officials called a “mafia” entrenched in their operations in the Caribbean and Venezuela, including a key employee who dealt “with the agents and buscones” and was “unbelievably corrupt.” Other personnel were suspected of being tied to “altered books” or “shady dealings,” according to the documents.

— There is an additional reference to how the Dodgers “f-----” over a prominent agent by signing an international player before the agent could secure him as a client.

— The dossier also appears to describe efforts to circumvent federal laws and MLB rules requiring Cuban players to establish residency in another country before negotiating and signing with a team. (Because of the U.S. embargo of Cuba, Cuban players cannot enter the U.S. directly under current immigration law. Yasiel Puig, the Dodgers’ star outfielder from Cuba, famously spent a month in a Mexican hotel room before he found safe passage to the United States in 2012.) Among those efforts to circumvent, the dossier includes a transcript of a Nov. 21, 2015, text message conversation between two Dodgers executives in which they discuss the need to “shred” a contract signed with a player before MLB had approved the document. There are also indications that dates on other official documents were doctored before they were forwarded to the MLB office.

Click the link in the tweet.  Wow.

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spystud13

spystud13 2371

Posted
Posted

CF C. Blackmon L
2B DJ LeMahieu R
3B N. Arenado R
SS Trevor Story R
LF M. Holliday R
1B Ian Desmond R
RF David Dahl L
C C. Iannetta R
P K. Freeland L

 

RF Ben Zobrist B
LF Kris Bryant R
1B A. Rizzo L
SS Javier Baez R
CF A. Almora R
2B D. Murphy L
C W. Contreras R
3B David Bote R
P Jon Lester L

 

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UTexasFight

UTexasFight 9661

Posted
Posted (edited)
On 9/26/2018 at 12:23 AM, UTexasFight said:

959acfd305e0eed0b31d84b22c13adbe.png

 

So Cubs have the best record in the NL entering play on Wednesday, September 26 and it’s not inconceivable they could be packing their bags for the offseason end of play Wednesday, October 3.

Welp...from exactly one week ago:

Edited by UTexasFight
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