2019 MLB thread

[Fudge Nuggets 19,146]

2 hours ago, Pato del Muerto said:

Interesting how some teams are now choosing to use club controlled years as leverage for buying some FA years, instead of riding players near minimums thru arbitration.  Feels like this is becoming more common.  

It's almost like they know the current CBA is about to expire.

[spystud13 2,371]

Poor Mike, look at his help tonight. 

Quote

3B Zack Cozart R
CF Mike Trout R
SS A. Simmons R
1B A. Pujols R
C J. Lucroy R
RF Kole Calhoun L
DH Kevan Smith R
2B D. Fletcher R
LF P. Bourjos R

 

[Scraps 13,540]

I would plunk Harper his first AB if i were Max just to have the DC fans love me even more than they already do lol

But I'm sure he will settle for a K

[Scraps 13,540]

Well now I wouldn't

[TheFlagship 432]

The Blue Jays are a dumpster fire of the highest order.

[spystud13 2,371]

But they got Socrates Brito today, all is well. 

[Sbbruin 21,708]

3 minutes ago, spystud13 said:

But they got Socrates Brito today, all is well. 

[Pig Bellmont 8,691]

1 hour ago, Scraps said:

I would plunk Harper his first AB if i were Max just to have the DC fans love me even more than they already do lol

But I'm sure he will settle for a K

Meh that’s low class. Simply winning would be enough. 

[TheFlagship 432]

1st to home on that is some special D

[Scraps 13,540]

Only thing that would made it better was if it was Astudillo

[Beau Vine 53,986]

10 hours ago, ATLLonghorn said:

 

I seriously think that when that day finally comes when Mike Trout is no longer the best player in baseball, it will be Acuna that passes him.  

Well, either Acuna or Luke Voit.

Edited April 3, 2019 by Beau Vine

[spystud13 2,371]

 

Listen to the very end. 

[spystud13 2,371]

Bad night for the Nats. 

 

 

[Beau Vine 53,986]

 

[spystud13 2,371]

2 bombs for Greinke tonight, should probably IBB him. 

[spystud13 2,371]

5 hours ago, spystud13 said:

Poor Mike, look at his help tonight.

4 total bases for the non-Trouts tonight. 

[spystud13 2,371]

Holy fuck, Laureano did it again! 

[UTexasFight 9,376]

My god he did it again

[UTexasFight 9,376]

Xander, just stop at first base from now on.

2 nights in a row:

 

 

[UTexasFight 9,376]

Red Sox offense in April is off to a solid start....
18 innings. 0 runs.
The mighty 2-headed SP monster of Aaron Brooks and Mike Fiers account for 12 of those 18 shutout innings

[UTexasFight 9,376]

Red Sox and Astros each 4 games out of first place after 6 games.
Yep about what we all expected.

[MC Fresh Breath 4,074]

A couple of years or ago or so, some dude on Shaggy tried to argue with me that Nelson Cruz was a failure. Said real mean things, man.

F that guy, whoever it was.

 

https://bdata-producedclips.mlb.com/fd8ac75a-ca79-4faf-93b4-5113f52c826a.mp4

[shnsajax 3,589]

11 hours ago, spystud13 said:

4 total bases for the non-Trouts tonight. 

At least he can buy a small portion of Disneyland now.

[shnsajax 3,589]

10 hours ago, UTexasFight said:

Red Sox and Astros each 4 games out of first place after 6 games.
Yep about what we all expected.

2001 Arod leave, Ichiro signs with the Mariners and they win 116 games. 2019 Ichiro retires and the Mariners start 7-1. Scott Servais might be one of the most underrated managers in baseball when you look at his teams the last couple of years.

[UTexasFight 9,376]

This is good
Eno Sarris.
A lot of time his stuff is over my head but even this I can get

Punchline: we’re going to see another record for punchouts. # of fastballs is down, but velocity is up and exit velo is also up. (More offspeed pitches keeping batters off balance but when a fastball is thrown is causing more swings and misses and batters aren’t adjusting trying to put ball in play, but instead still searching for all or nothing exit velos)

Our minds want to make sense of the world. Call it narrative if you will, but our environment provides us so much input that our brains put together scripts that chunk experiences and render them easier to process.

We’d be a mess if we didn’t do this. Imagine something as simple as your daily commute, if you came to it fresh every single time and tried to examine every element of it. These “stories” we create make it easier to complete a task at home, and they can help us solve some of the angst of being a fan, too. The “they just can’t buy a break this year” script is powerful — even if it’s probably not true yet.

Anyway, this might all make sense when it comes to our daily lives, but the drive to boil things down to something easily understandable hurts us when it comes to the first month of the season of baseball. It’s been a week. We can say practically nothing about what the 2019 season will look like.

Practically nothing. Probably not things like “this team is going to be great” or “this player is a bum.” But there are some things we can say about this early season, yes, even five games in. Because, while players and teams are giving us measly samples, there’s one entity that’s churning out data points on the order of 900 a night: the league as a whole.

Any one player can only put together four or five plate appearances in a game, but if you add them all up, a full night on the schedule can give you 1,000 plate appearances as a league. Start adding up those thousands and you’re quickly going to make a number that’s hard to move.

So, it follows, if there’s any one thing we can say about this season this early in the season, it would be about the league as a whole. Oh, and look at that: The league is sporting the highest strikeout rate of all time, a full tick above where it was just last year when it set the previous strikeout rate record.

Given what we know about samples and how the league churns it out every night, it might not take that long for a league to establish a new average strikeout rate, right? We might be looking at a “real” number already.

Let’s take a look at how long it takes for three key statistics to become immovable numbers. For the purposes of this graph, we asked what was the league rate in this category on this date — what was the league’s strikeout rate on Day 1 last year? Day 2? Day 3? And so on. Below is the graph for strikeout rate, walk rate, and isolated slugging percentage (slugging minus batting average) for 2018.



What we are looking for is how quickly each statistic enters its “straight-line” phase. Once it becomes a straight line, the number is virtually unchanged between that moment and the end of the season. Makes sense; it’s hard to move a number that’s backed by 1,000 plate appearances a night.

We can throw isolated slugging percentage (green, in the middle) away for our purposes right now, and that makes sense. There are fewer balls in play than there are walks and strikeouts, so you almost always need a larger sample when working with balls in play. Confounding the situation is also the fact the ball flies farther as the temperature warms, so there are underlying effects that are changing over the course of the season. In any case, we wouldn’t want to report what the league slugging rates are until a couple of months into the season.

So let’s focus on strikeout and walk totals. Right now, the league is adding a top 15 walk rate of all time to that strikeout rate high. Should fans of the ball in play be panicking?

Let’s take a five-year average of each day so we can look at five-year trends instead of just what happened in 2018. So now we’re asking, for this range of years, how quickly did the league find its yearly average strikeout and walk rates? And now that we know it happens quickly, let’s zoom in on the left side of the chart.



Look at that. League strikeout and walk rates stop changing significantly after the 1oth game and are mostly where they will be for the season by the fifth game.

The reasons for the high strikeouts are myriad. Hitters are still taking a fastball-centric approach at the plate — even with two strikes — despite declining fastball rates. And those fastball rates have declined again early this season as well. Through Monday’s games:

Season Fastball Percentage
2019 53.2%
2018 54.7%
2017 55.3%
2016 55.9%
2015 56.6%
2014 56.6%
2013 57.2%
2012 57.3%
2011 57.6%
2007 58.3%
2010 58.4%
2009 59.5%
2008 60.1%
But it’s not only strategy that’s leading to this moment. It seems teams are valuing exit velocity at the plate and don’t mind if it comes with some swing-and-miss. Again, through Monday’s games:

League Average Exit Velo
2019 88.3
2018 87.7
2017 86.7
2016 87.7
2015 87.3
But the biggest driver of strikeout rate has to be velocity. The average fastball velocity in the league is likely to be around 93 mph again this year as the weather warms (fastball velocity peaks in August), and that’s up nearly four ticks from when we started tracking these things publicly in 2002. That’s a meteoric rise for fastball velocity, and the strikeout rate surge maps right on top of that curve.

So when you see that baseball is trying things like moving the mound back (in the Atlantic League), this is part of the reason why. It looks like we’re already headed to another historical high in strikeouts. And that’s a story you can believe, even if we’re only five games into the season.

 

[Beau Vine 53,986]

2 hours ago, MC Fresh Breath said:

A couple of years or ago or so, some dude on Shaggy tried to argue with me that Nelson Cruz was a failure. Said real mean things, man.

F that guy, whoever it was.

 

https://bdata-producedclips.mlb.com/fd8ac75a-ca79-4faf-93b4-5113f52c826a.mp4

I think that was EsTyne.

[spystud13 2,371]

Bases loaded, 1 out, scoreless in bot 6 for Tampa, 6-3 DP. 

2nd & 3rd, 1 out, still scoreless in bot 7, K & a fucking SICK barehanded play by Arenado on a good bunt. 

Edited April 3, 2019 by spystud13

[spystud13 2,371]

1st & 3rd, 1 out, still scoreless for Tampa in bot 9, Col playing 5-man, Adames up. 

[spystud13 2,371]

Holy fuck, that spare tried to bunt on both pitches from 1-1, failed to so much as draw wood on either. What a shit-tastic effort. 

[Beau Vine 53,986]

Whoa.

[Goo Punch 4,275]

jesus. 

[Goo Punch 4,275]

also, something tells me that Mr.Alvarado won't be winning a gold glove any time soon. 

[huge 3,788]

Rob Friedman does good work for my twitter dollar

[spystud13 2,371]

Iannetta solo yack in top 11 holds up. 0-10 RISP, 13 LOB for Tampa. 

[spystud13 2,371]

That’ll hurt the ol’ WHIP. 

[WBT 20,415]

Lulz, Jake Noll's 1st MLB RBI in his 3rd plate appearance is a walkoff walk.  And he even gets interviewed by the dugout chick.

Edited April 3, 2019 by WBT

[UpperWestside 6,134]

17 hours ago, Beau Vine said:

 

I watched him on opening day up here. If the Orioles were not trying to lose 110 games and they didn't owe him what they do, he would never have another at-bat as a major leaguer. I think Davis knows it as well. Worst player in baseball, by far.

[SuingToGetAMessageBoard? 3,861]

They have to figure out how to put him out of his misery.  It’s sad. 

[Pato del Muerto 52,340]

All those baseball writers that wrote about the rangers kicking themselves for letting him go had no problem a couple seasons later writing about his performance and huge contract. 

[UTexasFight 9,376]

Holy. Fuck. He actually did it. 3 straight walks to lose the game. Wow

Kapler does realize there isn’t actually a 3 batter minimum right?

[Helobious 9,480]

On 3/28/2019 at 12:40 PM, Helobious said:

Luke Voit will have a better year than Paul goldschmidt. Change my mind.

So it's been 6 games and I've changed my mind. Fucking christ Voit and the rest of the team look absolutely helpless against trash competition. 

[spystud13 2,371]

Cross him off too. 

Quote

Troy Tulowitzki left Wednesday's 2-1 loss to the Tigers after the bottom of the third inning with a left calf strain and was sent to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital for further testing.

Gleyber Torres shifted to shortstop and Tyler Wade took over at second base. Torres would be the leading candidate to take over at shortstop if Tulowitzki is forced to miss any time.

 

[UpperWestside 6,134]

24 minutes ago, Helobious said:

So it's been 6 games and I've changed my mind. Fucking christ Voit and the rest of the team look absolutely helpless against trash competition. 

I've been to four of the games. Missing very good players will make you look hapless at the plate. At least Boston has been equally atrocious during the first week. I think they'll be fine once the weather warms up. Voit looks like Kevin Maas at the plate so far though. He is guessing on everything.

[spystud13 2,371]

2 hours ago, WBT said:

Lulz, Jake Noll's 1st MLB RBI in his 3rd plate appearance is a walkoff walk.  And he even gets interviewed by the dugout chick.

And already sent back down. 

[youdunnf'dup 2,147]

I’m 99% on the “both leagues should have a DH” bandwagon, but I’m going to miss that feeling of shock every time a pitcher hits a HR. 

[Goo Punch 4,275]

Wilson Contreras just *crushed* one. 453' with 113 mph exit velo off a 3-1 fastball. 

[Goo Punch 4,275]

you know i've seen a bunch of people here trash jessica mendoza, which i think is just crazy and a sign of personal insecurity- but does anyone else here hate listening to John Sciambi? It's like he spends the entire broadcast trying to tell stories and "talk baseball" so that he can prove that he belongs there with the former MLB guys. I just really hate listening to him. 

Edited April 4, 2019 by Goo Punch

[Goo Punch 4,275]

Look at that monster:

 

[Goo Punch 4,275]

What the hell is Clint Hurdle doing right now? 

Bottom 9, tie game, 0 outs, runner on 1st who steals 2B. Batter at the playe has a 1-1 count and had 18 sac bunts last year in AAA, a huge number. Instead of bunting the runner over to third Hurdle has this newly promoted sac bunting machine swing away and he proceeds to whiff at two of the next three pitches for an out. That's beyond moronic. There's no explanation for that. 

Edited April 4, 2019 by Goo Punch

[Goo Punch 4,275]

and the next two hitters are retired. jesus christ, just fire clint hurdle right now. that's utter incompetence.