FFFF Award
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=== Flying Fickle Finger Of Fate, Dept. ===
The most outside-the-box post of the year, maybe? :- )
The solution, IMHO, is to rotate the park 90 degrees.
They did it at the Kingdome...they can do it here. Right now the wind generally blow sin from left. If they turned the park clockwise 90 degrees, the wind would simply be a crosswind blowing mostly out to RCF.
Without any doubt, rotating the field of play WOULD affect the batted balls. A lot. It's a creative suggestion.
I actually would be interested to see you do a point-by-point as to how a 90-degree rotation would be handled in terms of suites, broadcast facilities, the cheap benches in the LF stands vs. the stuffed chairs behind the plate, the glamor entrance taking you to home plate, the kitchens to the Diamond Club being walking distance from the $5000 seats, foul balls going out of the stadium, the scouts' glass and area being behind home plate, the clubhouses being attached to the dugouts by short runways the way they are now, the pitchers' bullpens being down the 3B line, and all that stuff :- ) Are we talking $200M to make it work and look nice? Or what?
When did they rotate the Kingdome field? They moved home plate 10' away from LF one year.
Are there any (other) precedents here? Because rotating the field of play WOULD affect the batted balls, a lot. It's a creative suggestion.
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Aroldis Chapman's FIP = 0.55
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BSR with a disconcerting visual for us, regarding Video Game Chapman's 2012 rampage:
[He has 47 K in 27 IP and an 0.00 ERA...] It's just funny, if he was on the Yankees doing this there would probably be a dedicated Chapman Watch minisite on ESPN.com tracking every pitch...on the Reds I didn't even know this was happening.
That IS funny, and true, too. I watch SportsCenter twice a week maybe and have not yet, this season, seen Chapman on the screen. I usually take Chapman in SBNation's "Pick Six" game; for a long time you could buy him for $3 of your $120 daily budget. He's still only like $11.
Hasegawa had a 0+ ERA at the ASB once ... it's probably not historically unusual for a reliever to take a 0.00 ERA into July. Eck had like an 0.64 ERA to finish one season ... but as to 0.00 ERA at 15K+ per nine innings, I wonder if this is the latest it's ever been done like this.
Chapman's FIP right now is 0.55, meaning that he "deserves" an ERA that is essentially zero, would have a near-zero ERA if the batted balls and fielding behind him were completely typical. You are witnessing a Sidd Finch-style perfect baseball pitching performance, or as close as you're going to see.
Links for May 7, 2012
M's 7, Tigers 4: Gameflow
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=== Chapter 1: M's take a 4-0 lead ===
The Mariners, coming off a brutal thrashing at home, must have enjoyed their TSA shakedowns. They came out on Tuesday afternoon cool, focused, and apparently on an 8-game winning streak.
Chone Figgins expertly worked a 6-pitch walk off Max Scherzer. Dustin Ackley hawked and spat squarely in BABIP's ugly face, knocking a medium-strength groundball back over second base. Jesus Montero grinned and knocked a medium-strength groundball between short and third.
In the third inning again the Mariners practically swaggered their way to a 4-0 lead. Ackley walked - his 5th, thanks - and then Ichiro (infield hit) and Kyle Seager (seeing-eye grounder) showed BABIP that it hain't seen nuthin' yet. The box score would show 15 hits; SSI's mainframe would see just one more game in which the Seattle Mariners lasered the ball to all corners of the globe.
Michael Saunders took one deep off the left-center wall to make it 4-0. Is he swinging better? Any time Michael Saunders goes 400 feet the other way, you have Dr. D's permission to call it a good swing. But we'll split that out.
The M's came into the game with a .243 line drive rate and a .265 BABIP; the gap is supposed to be 100. The gap won't be 100 on Wednesday morning, but it will be more than 22. As a result, the Detroit Tigers are one loss sadder but wiser.
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=== Chapter 2: Jimmy, Your Payroll is Showing ===
M's 1, Indians 2
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=== 30,000 Foot View ===
The story of the game wasn't League's blown save. Tell ya something: 97 MPH is serious cheese from a sidearm pitcher. Brandon League can close my ballgames.
Story was that the Mariners should have scored more than one run. By "should have," we don't mean that they blundered away the game with bonehead plays. By "should have," we mean that more balls should have missed fielders.
If games were scored by average MPH off the bat, the M's would have again cruised. The bottom of the 4th was one such. Dustin Ackley doubled sharply, and moved to 3B on a wild pitch.
Justin Smoak hit a ball that I didn't see; I miss about 0.2% of all live pitches at the park, but on this one I looked away for a second. My teenage son John stated that it was the best defensive play he'd ever seen, a 110-MPH* blast with glove specialist Casey Kotchman playing wayyyy in on the grass, trying to cut the run off a fast runner at the plate. A line drive like that, with the infield in that far, and you are talking at least 10:1 odds against the defense surviving.
The very next play, Seager singled up the middle for the RBI ... except that the shortstop dove, flung desperately to 1B, and Kotchman made a play that looked, from the third deck, like the best diving foot-on-the-bag play I've seen in about five years.
... M's 4. "Hitterish" you say?
=== Figgins ===
Is cutting his zone nice and tight, is taking good swings, and .... the reason his production is not too swift? He gets no walks. Chone Figgins with an 0.33 EYE can't succeed, period. No version of Chone Figgins, such as Brett Butler or Luis Polonia, can succeed with an 0.33 EYE.
Of course, the 0.33 EYE goes up when Figgins starts hurting pitchers. He started hurting pitchers tonight. In this chapter of the story, Figgins has to do his damage with doubles, triples, and homers. If there's another chapter, if, then that one will include some BB knights and paladins.
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Rangers 5, M's 3
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=== Tale of the Tape ===
In the four games at Texas, we saw what, 300 or so at-bats and over a thousand pitches. Bill James points out that each pitch is worth like $10,000. In the course of those 1,000 - 1,200 pitch events, we got a good look at things.
Jus' the fa'ax, ma'am:
| Hits | TB | BB/K | Hits | TB | BB/k | ||
| Sea G1 | 11 | 13 | 4/7 | Tex G1 | 12 | 24 | 5/7 |
| G2 | 4 | 4 | 2/5 | G2 | 7 | 10 | 1/4 |
| G3 | 11 | 18 | 0/10 | G3 | 8 | 16 | 3/4 |
| G4 | 7 | 13 | 0/9 | G4 | 9 | 14 | 1/6 |
| TOTAL | 33 | 48 | 6/31 | TOTAL | 36 | 64 | 8/21 |
The hits and walks were about the same, but the M's had only 7.5 bases for each 10 that the Rangers had. Why? Because the Rangers out-homered the Mariners 7:1.
About 5 of those 7 Ranger homers would not have been out of neutral parks, much less out of Safeco Field; the key blow today was a 25-mph windblown fly ball that found the front row in right field. Wedge moaned about it just like I'm doing. The Mariners swung a game that would work at Safeco; the Rangers swung a game that works at The Ballpark. Throw those 1,000 plus pitches at Safeco, and the M's go 2-2 or 3-1.
An early 3:1 series loss is an owie, but the Mariners have the right kind of young team for Safeco.
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=== Potpourri, Dept. ===
Felix' Career Transition 2 - Pattern Recognition
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Of all the hard-throwing young stars I've seen, I can think of only two who DID maintain their rookie velocity into their 30's -- say age 32 and up. Those two being Randy Johnson and Nolan Ryan. Of course, the Big Unit is a local hero, and he threw as hard at 35 as he did at 25, so that contributes to our misconceptions on the issue.
Think about it for a minute. How many 33-year-old starters have you ever seen, who clocked 96 MPH on pitch after pitch? None. Except Unit and Nolan Ryan. True, Justin Verlander is holding his velocity pretty well so far. But...
A couple of cases in point:
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=== Bartolo Colon ===
Old-timey M's fans remember Colon as a rookie, 1997, since that was around the time the Mariners made the playoffs and faced the Indians a time or two.
What Are Sabermetrics?
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No disrespect, I just don't think we can completely figure out baseball based off of sabermetrics alone.
Jack Zduriencik does not primarily use Baseball Prospectus or Fangraphs to decide whether Shawn Kelley is coming north. Statistics are backwards-looking! What Zduriencik needs is a reliever who will get outs in the 2012 season.
Most people would understand "sabermetrics," as Andrew uses it, to mean "the statistics you can find on Baseball Prospectus and Fangraphs." So, the comment would bring derision in some quarters. But let's remember that Jack Zduriencik and Eric Wedge are in profound agreement with this. Neither do they think that you can make roster decisions based on 2009-11 statistics alone.
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It is not because we fail to understand WAR that we, at SSI, refuse to limit ourselves to its implications. Tony Blengino his ownself comes, as the years go by, to see himself more and more as a scout/saber dual class. Most of the stats-based, "pure sabermetrician" types who get hired, wind up blossoming into stats/scouting blended analysts. Every GM who ever lived --- > used methods that transcend WAR.
My own approach is based on organizing our thinking about any given baseball question -- directing our attention to the right questions. For example: what are the causes of Felix' lack of velocity, and if he does lose velocity, what does that mean? What patterns are there here, and what precedents apply to the problem?
It's a chess paradigm. Whatever position you've got, it's been played before. Felix Hernandez' velocity loss has been seen before, in Pedro Martinez and in other great pitchers. Find the games that have looked like this before, and review them from the standpoint of the masters who won those games.
We try to begin, sincerely, with questions, as opposed to beginning with what are in essence position statements. If we find a good clear question, it is not so hard to find historical patterns that illuminate the questions.
The Dynasty Is In Full Swing
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We sent the Blues out against the A's Opening Day lineup, and they never stood a chance. Halfway through the first spring game, the M's have four HR's and counting. These include the two most important ones possible - a Boone-style, off-field shot from Jesus Montero -- while playing the catcher position -- and a two-run GWRBI from Michael Saunders.
Admittedly, the Japan-bound M's have been in camp a lot longer than anybody else, but baseball isn't a sport in which game sharpness matters very much. Let the march of the SoDo Hit Men begin.
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