The Hitters' Amazing Bad Luck
1. The offense needs more hitters. These should have been added during the offseason. That's stipulated, mate.
2. The offense, however, has had a run of bad luck that has put Eric Wedge's sanity to an acid test right out of the gate.
The Big Three Luck Stats used by neo-sabes are:
- AVG on balls hit into fair play
- HR's on balls hit up into the outfield
- Strand rate
Neo-sabermetrics is concerned largely with asking, "What would have happened if these three stats had been average?"
Fangraphs takes it for granted that the above stats are almost purely luck, with a few minor caveats. Dr. D allows considerably more room for the syndrome of a hitter swinging the bat badly and creating his own "unlucky" BABIP ... in the short term.
The Big Three Luck Stats are not only bad for the Mariners ... they're almost impossibly bad. The 2011 Seattle Mariners have:
- A .196 AVG with men in scoring position (should be slightly higher than whatever the team AVG is)
- A measly 3.8% HR/F rate (10-11% being normal)
- A 25.4% hit rate on balls hit into fair play (30% being normal)
The effect, of course, is cumulative. The offense should be weak, sure, but no way is its 3.5 runs per game representative of its bases gained.
The question is, when the bad luck is going to end... I liked Blowers' comment tonight. He said it's okay to not hit many home runs, but you'd better have a good hitting line with men on base then. You can't combine lack of home runs with a .196 RISP. That, in a nutshell, is 4 wins and 10 losses.
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Paracorto notes,
Eric Wedge comments by Shannon Drayer:
"He threw well but I know what you are talking about. What you can't do is get passive up there. We want guys to be aggressive with their mindset have the discipline to get into hitters counts but ultimately a couple of things are happening. When we get pitches to hit we can't miss them. I think that one of the things that is happening is either we are a tad past at times in taking pitches we should take hacks at and when we do take hacks at them we are not squaring them up and rifling the ball all over the place like we need to be doing."
Any mammal's nervous system can be conditioned ... by electric shocks, by sudden food supplies, by getting hit in the eye socket with a pitched ball (or, worse, by psyching up for a Mariners game and then spectating it).
The Mariners have played 14 games, and the only times that anything good has happened, is when they've strung a bunch of walks. ... they swing at a pitch, and it's time to run head down to first base; they hold up on it and sometimes they wind up in a rally.
Wedge's job to serve as conditioning in favor of hitting the ball a long ways.
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BABVA,
Dr D