Here are some interesting links from the past week that I didn’t find time to write about. Enjoy.
Lookout Landing dispels a trifecta of myths. For example:
[Myth:] Ken Griffey Jr. is still a superstar. Even ignoring the health problems, Griffey has put up an OPS in the low-.800s away from that Cincinnati bandbox over the past two seasons, while playing some of the worst defense anyone’s ever seen. His time as a contributing player is just about up.
Here’s an amazing video of a guy throwing crazy pitches with a wiffle ball. Talk about rising fastballs. And evidently you can join official wiffle ball leagues complete with uniforms and a metal rectangle that calls balls and strikes.
Aaron Gleeman wrote a nice piece about Joe Mauer, wading through everybody’s perceptions and framing Mauer’s abilities in the way they should be viewed.
From The Book Blog, Tango highlights part of a Tom Verducci Jon Papelbon article about injury prevention. Data = power.
I’m sure you all know about Fire Joe Morgan by now, but I think this is the best one in a while.
In the spirit of Joe Morgan, evidently baseball players don’t know why they’re any good. (And cnnsi.com doesn’t know it’s bad form to ask extremely vague questions.)
Nate Silver took an interesting view of the Milton Bradley situation — wondering about Todd Helton’s ethical responsibility to discuss what he overheard.
Justin posted his NL (hitter) MVP analysis using the patented “value = hitting + fielding” approach. The top five are Wright, Pujols, Utley, Chipper, and Holliday. Helton, Reyes, Tulo, Beltran, Bonds, and Brandon Phillips are surprisingly high, while Rollins, Fielder, and Howard don’t crack the top 10.
This link is more about potential, but Squawking Baseball is a new site aiming to “collect, organize, and distribute financial data relating to Major League Baseball.” No data’s available yet, but keep an eye out for it.
Bronx Banter posted an excerpt of the new Baseball Prospectus book, “It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over”. It’s by Steven Goldman and discusses how the Yankees have been their own worst enemy with awful player development.
In the PITCH f/x category, Joe P. Sheehan gives a scouting report on Jake Peavy. Yes, more scouting reports from computer geeks. Here’s the summary, but the details are just as fun:
Peavy?s fastball and slider are his two best pitches and he throws them the majority of the time. His slider has a couple different types of movement and could actually be two different pitches, although it looks more like the differences are variations of the same pitch. He also has a changeup and curveball that he throws much less frequently, and which aren?t as good. In pressure situations, it appears that he relies a little more on his fastball than normal, even though his slider creates more swings and misses. In the first inning he throws more fastballs than an average RHP, and throws a lot more fastballs than sliders, relative to how he pitches the rest of the game. He doesn’t let the other team see all his pitches in the first inning and introduces his slider in the second inning, his changeup in the third inning and cuvrevball in the fifth inning.
Sticking with PITCH f/x, Josh Kalk has posted player cards for all hitters and pitchers. You can see how hitters handled different pitches in different locations, sliced and diced in a few different ways.
Finally, I spent some time playing around with Tango’s “Runs Created, Run Expectancy, Run Frequency, Linear Weights Generator”. You can enter any batting line (full-season for a pitcher, a pretend one-game team performance, whatever) and you’ll be given the linear weights for that run environment, frequency tables, and expected number of runs scored per game. For example, a team that hits 10 singles in a game with no other hits, walks, strikeouts, etc. will average 1.9 runs per game.
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Sky is a baseball fan and racket sport afficianado living in upstate NY. His favorite color is orange and is just about ready to give up on his life-long dream to become the next Magnus ver Magnuson (World's Strongest Man). His favorite baseball teams are the Yankees and Red Sox, proving that there's hope in the Middle East.