Some Phillies Links for You - April 9, 2010: Too Much Pitching, Shilling for Vitamin Water
by WholeCamels on Apr 9, 2010 8:28 AM EDT
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PrintPhiladelphia All-Star Shortstop Jimmy Rollins Launches Balls Over Downtown Philly With Souped Up Bat - MarketWatch
Sponsor Red Bull and Jimmy Rollins announce that Jimmy's going to try to hit a baseball really, really far on Tuesday, April 13th. Ben Franklin Parkway, 11:45 AM.
Gillies, R-Phils lose opener
He called the Phillies a "winning organization." Still feels weird.
BlueClaws Defeat Tourists 10-7
Two hits from Jiwan James. Jarred Cosart, pitching prospect of the moment, starts tonight.
PhillyBurbs.com: Figueroa falters in his second debut with Phils
Poor headline choice; Nelson Figueroa was far from the Phillies worst pitcher yesterday. That box score is yet another exhibit into why pitcher win-loss records are just dumb.
Romero happy after good rehab outing | Philadelphia Daily News | 04/09/2010
Well, that's terrific.
Phillies Notes: Phillies had their chances | Philadelphia Inquirer | 04/09/2010
They sure did.
Life's ducky for Phils' minor league pitcher | PoconoRecord.com
Ugh, this article is like reading about an ex-girlfriend who did not turn out so good.
Abreu draws high praise from Thome | angelsbaseball.com: News
Too bad no one on those teams could pitch.
NL EAST
Fish Wrap - Marlins 3, Mets 1 - FishStripes
The Marlins beat the Mets. I can't think of anything of note to say here.
Cubs 2, Braves 0 - Talking Chop
Randy Wells and four relievers combine to shut down the Braves, "scattering" eight hits.
The most horrendous video in human history. I'd rather see snuff films.
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The video ruined my breakfast.
Rollins hitting a near 600’ air mail, I might have to show up to see that. I’m guessing he’s going to need a metal bat to get that kinda distance, unless they bred a super tree to make bats out of.
Scar tissue is stronger than muscle tissue. Realize the strength, move on.
Every team in the league should show that video when he comes up to the plate just to mock him. To think I had some respect for the guy. hoo boy.
by Wet Luzinski on Apr 9, 2010 12:01 PM EDT up reply actions
I gots your super tree
From Wikipedia:
Lyptus is the trade name of a wood made from a hybrid of two species of Eucalyptus tree, Eucalyptus grandis and Eucalyptus urophylla. Developed for quick harvesting, and grown on plantations in Brazil, Lyptus is marketed as an environmentally friendly alternative to oak, cherry, mahogany, and other wood products that may be harvested from old growth forests. Lyptus trees can be harvested for lumber in approximately 15 years, much sooner than woods from cooler climates
Apparently as a result of such rapid growth the wood stores an usually high amount of tension and when milled from log to lumber has been known to explode as the tension is rapidly released, sometimes resulting in the destruction of very expensive saw mill blades.
might make for a heavier bat though…could use ironwood, only wood dense enough not to float. Although it’d be way heavy and probably cost 500 duckets a bat
the louisville is good old ash…don’t know what the wonderboy is made of. can’t see the signature on the louie.
A tree that ca blow up saw blades? Now imagine the look on everybody’s faces when that baby breaks on a pitch. It would be a bloody mess at home plate.
Scar tissue is stronger than muscle tissue. Realize the strength, move on.
If I remember correctly, no stink was made over the maple bats which their should have been. greater density=harder wood which means in the eq. force = momentum / time, time is less because there is less deformation to the bat and it also allows the handles to be thinner which means the wrists can turn over quicker. I also think the thinner handles give the bat more bend which means the bat head travels more like whip…just my theory. That being said i wonder what a cocobolo bat would be like. It’s used to make night sticks. It would be expensive and I’m not not sure about the weight, but it could make a one kick ass super bat.
1. That mascot and Hip-Hop from the 76ers should fight to the death.
2. A lot of people are going to give Kyle Kendrick a long leash because they invested their credibility in his success during spring training. The desire not to have to admit you’re wrong is a strong motivator. It’s the main root cause of the unfair treatment Donovan McNabb received throughout his career as an Eagle.
3. It’s a shame about Duckworth because he actually had some ability. He once even struck out 167 in 163 innings. But too many walks and too many homers.
4. Isn’t the Situation on roids? Does David Wright really want to be associated with that guy?
this guy
would have been so much better. But the Nats can’t afford high-priced free agent mascots.
by Wet Luzinski on Apr 9, 2010 11:57 AM EDT up reply actions 1 recs
In the past year both the Phanatic and HipHop came to where I work. The differences were amazing. The Phanatic was supposed to visit a young boy, who once he got near his room got frightened and said he didn’t want to see him. So, Phanatic spent a good half hour camping it up with employees instead- I mean, amazingly acrobatic stuff too, good schtick, hopping up on desks, very funny. Then he left, but upon changing got the word the boy had changed his mind, so he got back in the costume and saw the boy.
HipHop just showed up, never gave any notice, and prompted a Security response.
by Wet Luzinski on Apr 9, 2010 12:09 PM EDT up reply actions
interesting how you put up a muppet and the phanatic was made by the same co. that made Henson’s puppets. He is undoubtly the best mascot in the biz.. My favorite phanatic memory was in 2006 interleague game against the yanks. He did this whole New York , New York routine and then at the end of the song took out a tamping bar and crushed a yankee bobblehead [if i remember correctly]. Me and my pops couldn’t stop laughing and I believe we went on to win the game…myers pitched a gem and looked the ace we hoped in vain all those years he’d become. Hopefully we will crush him when we see the sukstros. And the Muppets, instant happy place for moi…i love those fuzzy fuckers
by j reed on Apr 9, 2010 12:31 PM EDT up reply actions 1 recs
Wow, that’s pretty good.
I’ll admit it: I thought that commercial was hilarious. Part of it was being a fan of Jersey Shore (one of the finest examples of “We’re not laughing with you, we’re laughing at you”), and other part of it is that I don’t really hate David Wright all that much. I know he’s a Met, but he’s a class act. It’d be like Mets fans hating Utley.
A little early this year, but it's a good one
According to cbssportsline fantasy baseball
Braves third baseman Chipper Jones said he might miss a three-game series at San Francisco after straining his right oblique forced him to leave Thursday night’s game against the Chicago Cubs. Jones said he first felt discomfort during batting practice before the Cubs’ 2-0 win over the Braves. He said he thought he could play through the pain before feeling more intense discomfort following swings in his third-inning at-bat. Jones drew a walk from Chicago’s Randy Wells and was forced out at third later in the inning. Omar Infante replaced Jones to start the fourth inning.
Chipper is basically a 120-140 game player at this point in his career. That’s still plenty valuable if he’s OPSing in the .900s, but otherwise…
http://www.thegoodphight.com
Ok whatever...
But I thought the video was stupidly funny…like it was supposed to be.
For Who? My teammates.
For What? To Win.
How Much? Where do I sign?
I agree, AND I still think every team in the league should use it to mock him.
The homo-eroticism in&of itself makes it giggle-worthy.
by Wet Luzinski on Apr 9, 2010 12:03 PM EDT up reply actions
The video is marketing genius
Mets fans will like it. Mets haters (to wit: me) will laugh at it like mad and send it around to friends. And vitamin water gets mind share over and over and…
The person behind this ad should be the one running our national intelligence programs. Seriously.
Remember the Phitans
by RememberthePhitans on Apr 9, 2010 12:38 PM EDT reply actions
Kendrick in a nutshell
Was at the game yesterday. Kendrick was getting crushed, even when outs were the result.
K/9 (career)/(last full MLB season):
KK: 3.9 (2008)
Moyer: 5.2 (2009)
Bottom 20% of starters have a K/9 of 4.89. Top 20% have a k/9 of 7.56.
Strikeouts are not necessarily a function of throwing hard (KK v. Moyer, for instance). Great pitchers do not need to have dominant strikeout skills (Greg Maddux: 6.61 career k/9). A great pitcher, or even a good one, cannot have really poor strikeout skills and succeed over the long term, however.
This is all pretty well established — Bill James’ note about Mark Fidrych pretty well covers it. Here’s a nice blurb with the percentiles that I referenced: http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/get-to-know-k9/
Why can’t KK strike any one out? He throws low nineties (per the park gun in DC on 4/8, anyway), and Moyer throws softer than that but strikes out nearly 50% more hitters even as he asymptotically approaches decrepitude. Lack of deception? No “movement”? He’s a righty? Lack of lefthanded craftiness? I dunno, but the results are pretty clear.
Strikeouts show the ability of the pitcher to make batters miss. I think it measures the ability to make hitters “Nearly miss” as well. That shows up as additional strikes (fouls) or poorly-hit balls. Also, if a pitcher can strike people out (Halladay) but doesn’t usually (pacing himself), he can do it in a pinch if things are getting tight. There are lots of ways K skills help pitchers, obviously.
Kendrick just can’t miss bats, which we all knew. He can’t “nearly miss” bats as well, either. He’s going to get hid hard all the time unless he does something differently. I have no idea what, but there are lots of people who can throw 90 mph in AAAA who have the same problem he does. There are some in MLB, like Moyer and Maddux, who figured it out, though.
I’m sure Kendrick is a great guy who tries hard. On the other hand, Kendrick has no business starting in this league. I understand that the options available to Phillies are: Nobody and Nobody Else, but anyone expecting anything from Kendrick this year is likely to be sorely disappointed. I’m wondering if the pitcher dumpster has any likely possibilities, or whether it may be time to reach into AAA for Duckworth (spot start, lightning in a bottle) or maybe for someone in AA who’s game for a shot. The results likely won’t be worse.
Remember the Phitans
by RememberthePhitans on Apr 9, 2010 1:07 PM EDT reply actions
It’s in my usual vein of “stating the obvious in a long, drawn-out way”. I can’t do it now, because I have to get through a stack of stuff (this was lunch for me today). I’d also like to add a bit about Happ in it as well (who I have been critical of, but who is a real MLB pitcher, in part because of his K/9 numbers).
Can I promise it in a day or two?
Remember the Phitans
by RememberthePhitans on Apr 9, 2010 1:16 PM EDT up reply actions
Kendrick just can’t miss bats, which we all knew. He can’t "nearly miss" bats as well, either. He’s going to get hid hard all the time unless he does something differently. I have no idea what, but there are lots of people who can throw 90 mph in AAAA who have the same problem he does. There are some in MLB, like Moyer and Maddux, who figured it out, though.
This is what coaches are supposed to figure out…I attribute alot of failure of pitchers and players in genral on poor coaching and antiquated training methodologies (that’s another can of worms i anit got the time to open )
A great pitcher, or even a good one, cannot have really poor strikeout skills and succeed over the long term, however.
With one caveat: unless they’re an extreme ground ball pitcher. Joel Pineiro and Rick Porcello were effective pitchers last year despite middling strikeout rates, but they induced grounders in the 55% range.
Otherwise, well done, I couldn’t agree more. Looking forward to the Fanpost.
Also Aaron Cook. Such is the downside of the sinkerballer…That’s why Doc is the man….he realized the limitation of the pitch and knew he needed a full aresenal of off speed pitches for those days when the sink wasn’t sinking or sinking enough out of the the strike zone to be a ball. Sinkerballers are often overly dependent on thenm (see Pelfrey and Cook) and can get burned by them. Pelfrey’s slider is coming along , I portend a few frustrating night on the board as we watch our potent line-up pound ball after ball into the ground will Pelfrey is on the mound
I don’t think low strikeout pitchers are prevented from having a very successful season here and there, but sustained success over the course of a career is almost impossible.
It would have been interesting to see what Chien Ming Wang would have done had he stayed healthy. I fear he’s totally cooked now.
http://www.thegoodphight.com
i would say he’s cooked from throwing …he has been having problems related to mechanical disadvantages unique to his anatomy. Might be he wasn’t meant to pitch
I mean, I guess it depends upon how you define “sustained success.” A guy who strikes out 4.5 per 9 innings, but walks just 1.5 per 9 and has a 55% ground ball rate is going to make a highly effective mid-rotation or back-end starter over the course of his career.
Cook is probably the best example, though even he doesn’t fit that mold entirely — he’s struck out less than that (3.7 per 9) and walked more (2.6 per 9) with a 57.6% grounder rate). But his career 4.38 xFIP is pretty solid (Joe Blanton’s, for comparative purposes, is 4.41).
I knew I’d hear about tewks, cook, etc. All good points.
I was thinking about the expanded KK post and also about more general issues for another time — mainly about what sets of statistical ranges “work” for pitchers.
There are normalized ranges available for MLB starting pitchers, for instance, but that doesn’t say much about “right-handed control pitchers” or “left-handed power pitchers”. I’m sure it would take about 20 minutes per category to pick out some example players for one category who are bad/average/good and do the age thing — that’s what the “similar player” thing does at BR.
K/9, obviously. OK, so BB/9 — at what point does that start to overwhelm K/9? To the point of ridiculousness (which worked for Laffer, among others), a K/9 of 27 would be great, unless it was offset by a BB/9 of 27.
More toward the real world, however, if a pitcher just can’t strike anyone out, say 4 or less per 9, that pitcher has less margin for error for walks than someone who has a rate of K/9 of 10 (Timmeh!). There should be something like a distribution curve for this sort of thing, perhaps with overlays – if a player walks 3 per game, then the minimum K number to be effective goes to, say, 8.
I guess I’m thinking about a “what if spreadsheet” using what Tom Tango did with FIP — by working in BB/K/HR/etc., and projecting what a normalized ERA should be. When part of the FIP balloon expands (walks) then there must be an offset in increased K’s or reduced HRs allowed.
xFIP adjusts for HR per fly ball ratio, but is otherwise the same as FIP. GB% gets left out. Surely someone smarter than I am has considered that and tried to figure a way to jigger the numbers to allow for that. The constant used for FIP for GB pitchers is probably different than that for FB pitchers.
Anyway, this has been fun for me — looking at this stuff (even knowing others have plowed the field many times before) has helped me think through what some of the numbers mean and understand at the same time why they are useful.
Just thinking out loud here.
Remember the Phitans
by RememberthePhitans on Apr 9, 2010 4:52 PM EDT up reply actions
xFIP adjusts for HR per fly ball ratio, but is otherwise the same as FIP. GB% gets left out. Surely someone smarter than I am has considered that and tried to figure a way to jigger the numbers to allow for that. The constant used for FIP for GB pitchers is probably different than that for FB pitchers.
SIERA!!!
Come on, dude, what’s so hard about this formula?
SIERA = 6.262 – 18.055*(SO/PA) + 11.292*(BB/PA) – 1.721*((GB-FB-PU)/PA) +10.169*((SO/PA)^2) – 7.069*(((GB-FB-PU)/PA)^2) + 9.561*(SO/PA)/PA) – 4.027(BB/PA)*((GB-FB-PU)/PA)
Just kidding, of course. It’s obviously harder to tweak SIERA to differentiate different pitcher types than it is to do the same with FIP.
In all seriousness, though, I think xFIP handles most of the concerns you have with regard to batted ball types. FIP doesn’t differentiate for GB and FB pitchers, as it’s just a simple plug and go formula. But xFIP does in the sense that ground ball pitchers obviously give up fewer fly balls, so the normalizing of the HR rate will benefit those pitchers. The one issue would be with regard to xFIP ignoring line drives, but I don’t think that’s a deal breaker for our purposes here. Unfortunately — after all that — I don’t know exactly how xFIP is calculated.
Anyway, great discussion you’re spurred here, and if you decide to write something up at some point down the line, I’ll be eager to read it.
Incidentally, I’m hoping that the SIERA conversation and the cry for help in figuring out how xFIP is calculated acts as the Matt Swartz bat-signal.
man that formula is just seriously lacking in elegance…at some point sabermetrics needs to develop better notation
It’s just the limitations of HTML, isn’t it? I’m sure it could be made to look prettier if we had one of those programs that math teachers use.
I was thinking more along the lines of key concepts of sabermetrics being encapsulated into a symbol like the sigma notation used for series. How feasible that would be, I don’t know. Those programs are cool, I did calculus from home and we had to use one . They work great. I think it would work in this case and actually would make it easier to read as you mentioned.
Having extremely (and I mean extremely) good control can also mitigate the effects of a low K rate. The example I usually point to for this is Bob Tewksbury, who was a very good pitcher for several years in the early ’90s or thereabouts.
Unfortunately, Kendrick is not an extreme ground ball pitcher and does not have extremely good control.
It would be interesting to compare an extreme GB pitcher and an extreme FB pitcher with similar BB/9, K/9, HR allowed, etc., to see if the ERA will always, always work out differently. I imagine that’s where the constant used in FIP comes in to play. It’s set at something a little over 3 for the pitcher genus, but within a particular species (flyball, groundball, junk balling loogy, knuckler), a slightly different constant would probably make sense.
Total wild ass speculation here, btw. Nobody bought me BP this year for Xmas. I hinted and hinted. I’d do it, but my billables suffer enough during baseball season.
Remember the Phitans
by RememberthePhitans on Apr 9, 2010 4:59 PM EDT up reply actions
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