2018 Houston Astros Season Thread

[Johnny Sack 8397]

I want Tucker to play every day.  And Kemp as well.  Marwin being on the bench would be just fine.

[Tommy Nobis 905]

3 minutes ago, maninblack said:

Wish I could have heard it on tv. Coors was rocking last night. Behind the dugout tonight. Looking for another W.

definitely sounded like a pro astros crowd in the top of the 10th

[Seasick Sailor 3747]

23 minutes ago, TonyTexas said:

Meh. Eovaldi is the definition of mediocre. Sub .500 record with a 4.22 lifetime ERA. Had 1 good year, 14-3, in 2016 with a 4.20 ERA.

I was more intrigued by the possibility of turning him into a multiple-inning reliever. He has no place in the Astros rotation barring injury.  

[Seasick Sailor 3747]

47 minutes ago, Telegraph_it said:

Tucker’s triple is the start of him turning the corner. We are good. 

I think this may be true. One of the knocks I heard against him in AAA was that he would carryover a bad AB or misplayed ball in the outfield into his next AB, which is not terribly surprising given how young he is. He came through in a big spot last night. Hopefully that will give him the confidence that he can hit MLB pitching. I expect him to be in the lineup today and to have a productive day at the plate. 

[Pablo 494]

all the contenders have made a move in the AL.  

[henrygandorf 29191]

4 minutes ago, Pablo said:

all the contenders have made a move in the AL.  

you come at the king...

[tx 3 putt 76979]

Just keep racking up W’s

Win the division early enough to rest arms a set up the playoff rotation

LMJ will be the bullpen pick me up come post season

get Correa healthy and back in the lineup. That’ll give Marwin a rest too

[tx 3 putt 76979]

19 minutes ago, Pablo said:

all the contenders have made a move in the AL.  

The road to the WS goes through Houston !

[Telegraph_it 3357]

I am not feeling the upcoming 8 game road series on the west coast. Let’s win today, sweep the rangers, and go into Seattle taking two hopefully. 

[UTexasFight 9454]

Josh James may end up being the pen upgrade - 38% K% as a SP in Fresno.  10+ Ks in half of his appearances there.  

I could definitely see him being part of the September call ups.
I get super nervous with his control though.
Walk rates are decent and 1.08 WHIP in 65 IP at Fresno is solid, but there is absolutely no margin for error in the role you’re asking him to take.

[UTexasFight 9454]

I am not feeling the upcoming 8 game road series on the west coast. Let’s win today, sweep the rangers, and go into Seattle taking two hopefully. 

6 of next 12 against NL West, so no Gattis.
Probably not the worst thing right now with him 1 for his last 31.

I’m not worried about Seattle. They are already in a dogfight with Oakland for the 2nd WC and depending on what those teams do before the deadline (and Paxton’s back), I could see them being 2-3 games behind Oakland on aug 22 (astros/mariners play 10 times between now and then).

[Mitch Hedberg 2090]

2 hours ago, David Dennison said:

Who do you want us to trade prospects for? Who is out there?

I think that ship may have pretty much sailed for big difference makers in the pen. We aren’t privy to all the analytics or who is truly available so they may have their own ideas on someone they think can help besides the guys all of us recliner managers talk about. We shall see. 

[henrygandorf 29191]

49 minutes ago, UTexasFight said:

6 of next 12 against NL West, so no Gattis.
Probably not the worst thing right now with him 1 for his last 31.

I’m not worried about Seattle. They are already in a dogfight with Oakland for the 2nd WC and depending on what those teams do before the deadline (and Paxton’s back), I could see them being 2-3 games behind Oakland on aug 22 (astros/mariners play 10 times between now and then).

fwiw, we're scheduled to miss kershaw.  they could shift things around, but not sure why they would.  either way, more lefties in that series i'm sure (hill, wood).

[henrygandorf 29191]

28 minutes ago, Mitch Hedberg said:

I think that ship may have pretty much sailed for big difference makers in the pen. We aren’t privy to all the analytics or who is truly available so they may have their own ideas on someone they think can help besides the guys all of us recliner managers talk about. We shall see. 

i think someone like my eovaldi idea.  in a perfect world, we snatch up a starter for our pen and make it harder on the teams looking for sp.  

i'm fine with the eovaldi move, because i think boston wants to make him a sp3 because porcello has been pretty inconsistent.  he would be better in a joe kelly role, but they'll probably use joe kelly in the joe kelly role.

[henrygandorf 29191]

yankees just lost their series to tampa and are now 5.5 gb of boston pending sox-o's game tonight.

if i'm a nyy fan, i'm a little pissy they went and got britton if it means not bringing in a legit sp2.  lets say they don't acquire anyone better than what they have.  and let's say they throw severino in a wc game and win.

severino in g3 at home looks like the only game you would give the advantage to the yankees in a 5 game set where you face sale/price 4x (if you're lucky).  not an enviable position.

[Scraps 13561]

I dont think the weather is supposed to be that great tonight so if there was a delay last night for pussy shit then no telling what happens tonight

[huge 3793]

5 minutes ago, Scraps said:

 for pussy shit 

is that a technical weather term?

[mbtex 683]

Not worried we had a crappier bullpen last year. Once we add LMJ and Keuchel to the pen in the playoffs we will be fine.

[HtownHorn 14687]

4 minutes ago, mbtex said:

Not worried we had a crappier bullpen last year. Once we add LMJ and Keuchel to the pen in the playoffs we will be fine.

lulz.

[TonyTexas 10515]

I dont think the weather is supposed to be that great tonight so if there was a delay last night for pussy shit then no telling what happens tonight

Yep. 50% chance of rain all night. If they can’t get it in, I guess they would stick around and play tomorrow. Both teams have a scheduled off day.

[Fozzz 152]

3 hours ago, UTexasFight said:

I could definitely see him being part of the September call ups.
I get super nervous with his control though.
Walk rates are decent and 1.08 WHIP in 65 IP at Fresno is solid, but there is absolutely no margin for error in the role you’re asking him to take.

His walk rate isn't too bad for a potential reliever, and moving him to the pen may help suppress his walk rate.  I do though think his lack of control could limit his ability to be a successful SP in the majors.  

Edited July 25, 2018 by Fozzz

[Hank Chinaski 6315]

Adam Conley of MIA is interesting...lefty, has been pretty good since moving to the pen this year. Apparently his velocity is up as a reliever. 

 

 

[UTexasFight 9454]

Guess who made his major league debut two years ago.











.

[4th and 5 4914]

I don't know that this warrants a new thread but it's gotta go somewhere, read this story and check out this guy's Twitter account

 

The Athletic

The ‘Pitching Ninja’ gives fans insight into the game — and helps major leaguers steal each others’ grips

By Lindsey Adler Jul 20, 2018 42 

At his home in a suburb outside of Atlanta, Rob Friedman checked Twitter. In his notifications, people are quote-tweeting his GIFs of the best pitches of the day with fire emojis, and in his direct messages are established major-league pitchers reaching out and asking for his help in finding a competitor’s changeup grip. He’s the rare outsider ushered inside by the most talented people in the game.

Friedman has a slew of his own pitching contraptions arranged in his unfinished basement. Some nets, a wedge mound, and a Rapsodo pitching monitor — a $3,000 portable sensor system similar to a Trackman sensor.

It’s here that Friedman helps his son train as a pitcher. It’s also here that his dogs, Roo and Darvy (as in Yu) chase down baseballs of varying weights and sizes for their personal pleasure. It’s here that Friedman hands me a standard-issue ball and invites me to try out the Rapsodo system, showing me the interface on his iPad that will instantly show him the spin rate, the spin axis, the ball trajectory — all of the components of effective pitching that have become increasingly well-known as a result of MLB’s proprietary Statcast system.

The first ball I throw isn’t skilled enough to even be registered by the system. Friedman goes to check on the set-up, wondering if he has it turned on and calibrated properly. It doesn’t register the second throw, or the third, but when Friedman gives it a shot and fires a strike, the machine lights up blue and within seconds shows us exactly how the ball traveled, and why.

Friedman is part of the social family surrounding the guys at Driveline Baseballin Seattle. But he is not making his name and livelihood maximizing the playing abilities of established major leaguers or operating a fully functional gym with attendant branded products. Instead, he’s a dude with a day job and a hobby.

On Twitter, Friedman is a beloved phenom who goes by @PitchingNinja. He spends hours of his free time watching for great pitches in major league games, isolating them with a video program on his laptop, and turning them into quick and easy GIFs with labels of their pitch types and velocity. His biggest passion, and seemingly most popular work, are the GIFs in which he combines two different pitch types from the same pitcher to show how long the two follow the same trajectory before breaking off in opposite directions, known as “tunneling.”

“Sometimes I’m just trying to illustrate like ‘Boy, this is just crazy,’ and get people more excited about pitching,” Friedman says. “I view my role as to just make people more excited about baseball — pitching specifically. Pitching is kind of unique from hitting because it’s more like golf, or a sport where you’re totally in control of what you do. The batter has to react to you. You control where that ball is going to go, how it’s going to come off your hands, the way it’s going to spin, whether it’s gonna mirror another pitch or not.”

Friedman doesn’t do this work with the intention of building a business — though after MLB shut down his account earlier this year over copyright violations, he says they sent over a contract to make him a paid “independent contractor” so they could benefit from his work — but instead to share the art and skill of major-league pitching with fans. Friedman wants his work to shorten the knowledge gap between what major leaguers do, and what fans at home see.

But it’s not just the can’t-dos at home who find themselves riveted by his account. Major leaguers love him. There’s the simple vanity and excitement of finally making it to the @PitchingNinja timeline, but his collection also serves as an open-source database of pitcher grips and releases, which some of the game’s craftiest players use to tinker with their own pitches and deliveries.

Friedman has no meaningful background in pitching himself. “I played growing up, but I wasn’t all that great,” he says. “But I always enjoyed the game like a lot of folks and it really changed more when I had a kid and my son started playing baseball.

 

(Photo by Lindsey Adler)

“I started, at first, like everybody. You find people to take your kid to — the local guy who teaches everything — and you know he was a successful player, and I started wondering why they were teaching stuff that wasn’t what I saw actual successful pitchers doing.”

Friedman says that he has a habit of “digging deep” into his interests (he used to be a lawyer), and from there, he says he “went on a quest to kind of find what I thought would be the truth.”

He began to replicate things he saw successful pitchers do, to understand how a certain muscle group affects movement or velocity, and brought those lessons with him as a travel ball coach. As his son, Jack, got older and became more serious about pitching, Friedman’s home set-up became more extensive.

The science of pitching turned into an obsession for Friedman, one that’s flipped the script for him on the conventional narrative that you can’t be a baseball expert if you haven’t played at a high level yourself. That transcendence is something that drives Friedman to share his knowledge with more casual observers of the sport.

“I wasn’t personally successful, but I think that actually shows more being able to teach it, rather that to be able to do it,” Friedman said. “Just because you are successful doesn’t mean… you might have just been born freakishly talented or strong or fast, and maybe you can’t communicate that to anybody, and you can’t explain why that is and you try to replicate yourself in everybody.”

At his home he uses a simple system to create his GIFs, a PC laptop on which he runs a video capturing program. Between his computer, iPad, and television, he can monitor most games on any given night with fair regularity. With a 76,000+ Twitter following, he often receives suggestions from fans on pitches he might have missed. To streamline it even more, he knows by now which pitchers tend to produce the most interesting work — Kyle Hendricks, Lance McCullers, Blake Treinen, Jordan Hicks — and monitors them specifically.

“Some send me messages that say ‘Hey, this pitch this is kind of interesting,’” Friedman says. “I can’t call anybody out, but some will tell me what they were trying to do and say ‘Hey, I was trying to tunnel these two, can you check on that?” Or they’ll say ‘You might want to take a look at this pitch a guy threw against my teammate.’”

“Last night a major league pitcher was DMing me about trying to get slider grips from certain pitchers they were interested in,” Friedman said. Subsequent interviews with pitchers around the league revealed this to be a not-rare occurrence.

It takes Friedman only a few minutes to create his work, especially if it’s a straightforward single-pitch GIF. For his overlays, he visits ESPN Gamecast and looks at their pitch tracking icons to look at pitch location and result, following the rule of common sense that if a major league hitter swung at a slider five inches out of the zone, it must have looked like another pitch they’d been served — until it broke.

It’s this phenomenon, the pitch tunneling, that Friedman believes best explains what might otherwise look inexplicable to the layperson watching from home. Why would a hitter swing at that slider? Take a look at it now, overlaid with a four-seamer, and see for yourself how long they followed the same trajectory. It shows how deceptive an elite pitcher can be.

“I’ve also had major league hitters ask me about how to combat tunneling stuff with, What would you do? And I thought that was really interesting, because I can say ‘Hey pitchers, you should do this’ but I couldn’t necessarily tell you as a hitter how sometimes you kind of have to guess because there’s really no way to figure it out,” Friedman says.

Friedman says he began tweeting out pitching GIFs because he wanted amateurs and fans to have a place to find examples of expert pitching, but it can also serve as a de facto database for established major leaguers to rip off each others’ pitch types and grips.

“Everyone has been doing that for a while,” Blue Jays pitcher Marcus Stroman says. “He’s just centralized it.”

The most notable example of this — though not the only one who has used Friedman’s account for his own research purposes — is Indians starter Trevor Bauer, of course.

At the major-league level, clubs receive reams and reams of data every night and have access to all varieties of video from their games (and others) for the purpose of scouting and breaking down their own mechanics when needed. Ostensibly, all 30 clubs could pull video from pitchers around the league to distribute to players who might want to learn more about, say, Luis Severino’s slider or Corey Kluber’s breaking ball. But Bauer says that a database like Friedman’s simply doesn’t exist elsewhere.

Bauer could ask the Indians’ video research department to pull and overlay, say, two of Stephen Strasburg’s pitches from the previous night, but as he said, “it’s just not a streamlined process.”

“Plus,” Bauer adds, “it’s hard to watch every game to know what to ask for. Like, I’m not watching when the A’s play the Astros because we’re playing the same time.”

“There’s very few other people who actually do pitch design work, but it’s a hobby of mine to try to find the best pitches around the league and try to steal them and add them to my repertoire. It’s very convenient to just go on Rob’s account and say ‘Ok, well, let’s see here. What was the nastiest pitch today?’ and just scroll through and say ‘That one’s pretty good, so now I need to check into Stroman’s slider and see what the characteristics are,’” Bauer says.

“So I would go to Brooks Baseball or something like that and find pitch movement on his pitch type on average. Then I’d compare that to other sliders around the league — ‘oh wow, he happens to have one of the most laterally moving sliders in the league, and he has a similar arm slot to me.’ Then you can find like slow motion GIFs of it or replays of it on Rob’s account as well, so you can kind of see how it comes out of his hand and how it’s spinning and whatnot.”

Stroman’s not just being stolen from, though. He often retweets GIFs of his own pitches from Friedman’s account, and before a recent game in Toronto he offered up that he’s one of the players who reaches out for close-ups of grips and releases.

“I reach out to him all the time,” Stroman said. “I’ve asked him for changeup releases on guys, or Scherzer’s grips. Certain guys he’s able to find the video, then zoom in at a pretty high quality and get the grip. He’s a pretty good resource, man.”

Add Braves starter Brandon McCarthy to the list, too.

“I enjoy the visuals of his account because I can look for specific releases, as well as the overall tunneling of pitches. But behind-the-scenes-only things I’ve asked him for are other GIFs that I couldn’t find on my own.”

For some pitchers, the allure of Friedman’s account is less experimental.

Mets reliever Jerry Blevins likened the @PitchingNinja feed to a regular segment that aired on Baseball Tonight called “That’s Nasty,” that focused specifically on pitches.

“You’d see a lot of Corey Kluber two-seamers, Rich Hill curveballs, it doesn’t exist anymore,” Blevins said. “Now it’s all about home runs and highlights on defense. You don’t see much pitching anymore, and that’s the craft that I’ve chosen.”

Still, Friedman is just a guy in Georgia. Baseball players, and pitchers in particular, can be cagey about their work, and some of the smartest ones in the game have chosen to accept a professionally inexperienced guy as one of their own?

“He shows really interesting picks,” Blevins says. “You know he knows the game from a pitching standpoint.”

It doesn’t hurt that Friedman chooses to show the best these players have to offer. Typically you’ll only see a GIF of a pitcher embarrassing himself if he’s an AL pitcher striking out in a three-pitch at-bat.

But while it’s clear Friedman is somewhat blown away by his own proximity to established major leaguers, he insists that’s a side effect, not the main pursuit of his hobby. He’s passionate about making good pitching — and what that entails — more accessible.

“I have the time to do it,” Friedman says of his claim to fame in his kitchen as a Nationals-Yankees game gets underway on his TV. “And I’ve accumulated all this knowledge about pitching, and I want to make sure it doesn’t die with me.”

(Top photo of Stroman’s slider grip: Steve Russell/Toronto Star via Getty Images)

[Scraps 13561]

Just started raining at the park

[Scraps 13561]

Not hard though and looks like its already stopped

[henrygandorf 29191]

good news scraps.  hopefully.

that friedman story, it must suck to get bombarded with dm's from trevor bauer.  weirdo.

[Scraps 13561]

Beautiful weather right now

[Scraps 13561]

..

[Scraps 13561]

..

[TonyTexas 10515]

Bregman made is MLB debut 2 years ago today. Amazing. He sure plays like a seasoned vet.

[thetruth 149]

well fuck a duck

[Scraps 13561]

Getting dark and wind picking up. Not looking good

[Fudge Nuggets 19191]

9 hours ago, maninblack said:

Wish I could have heard it on tv. Coors was rocking last night. Behind the dugout tonight. Looking for another W.

The Altuve MVP chant was pretty damn awesome for being an “away” game.

[Gut Wagon 8079]

Second time around is where we rough up this Sooner trash. 

[WBT 20580]

That graphic just showed Bregman with 23 runs and 23 rbis in his last 23 games.  That seems good

[UTexasFight 9454]

Reddick CI returns!

[WBT 20580]

Is Desmond playing this inning with a board glove?

[Guadaloopy 10973]

10 hours ago, TonyTexas said:

Meh. Eovaldi is the definition of mediocre. Sub .500 record with a 4.22 lifetime ERA. Had 1 good year, 14-3, in 2016 with a 4.20 ERA.

It’s moot now, but your description of Eovaldi applied to CFM before the Astros’ data guys and pitching gurus helped him flip the switch.  

[Seasick Sailor 3747]

What's up with, Altuve?

[Slacks 6821]

I saw Altuve limping when he scored.

[Seasick Sailor 3747]

Perfect: 

 

[runthebone 7989]

Hopefully the fact he's just hanging around is a good sign

[maninblack 7974]

Has the broadcast said anything about Jose?

[Player 4575]

Wow that was almost a Canseco.

[WBT 20580]

dumbass fan

probably should call him out

Edited July 26, 2018 by WBT

[Seasick Sailor 3747]

Was that Scraps?

[Lat22 4014]

That goddamn idiot. 

[Horny Bull 2759]

Nice move, dipshit.

[David Dennison 18863]

10 minutes ago, maninblack said:

Has the broadcast said anything about Jose?

Right knee discomfort.

Edited July 26, 2018 by David Dennison
Derp. Just saw the tweet.