Lots of good stuff on the web again this week, including a metaphor comparing the World Series to women — when you lose out on a hot chick, do you start rooting for the other guys to get her? Didn’t think so.
Here’s a way to decide who you’re going to root for between the Diamondbacks and Rockies if you’re a fan of another NL West team — over-analyze the situation with trivial information. (And I mean that in a good way.)
Derek Jeter uses the pseudonym “Johnny Drama” when staying in hotels.
Jim Tracy has an obsession with the Dodgers, who he used to manage, and would tell his Pirates to be more like guys on the Dodgers. Ok, so maybe baseball does have a psycho-logical component.
Clint Hurdle used some creative in-game tactics in the NLDS, which might have won the Rockies one of their three games against the Phillies.
Curt Schilling’s blogging frequency has taken a dip, but you have to enjoy reading a playoff series recap by one of the participating starting pitchers, no matter how many cliches are involved.
Yes, I have more wiffle-ball clips to share. This one is of Freddy Sanchez, 2006 National League batting champion, striking out on three pitches.
This week’s entry in the “strange things to analyze” department is bIBLemetrics, a blog dedicated to analyzing the Israeli Baseball League. I didn’t think I’d care about the IBL, but it’s interesting to see how its level and style of play differ from MLB.
Squawking Baseball has their first bit of financial data available. If you’re into baseball, money, and data-gathering projects, check them out.
If you haven’t voted in enough MVP, Cy Young, RoY, and MoY polls, go vote for the Internet Baseball Awards. The IBAs use ranked ballots and receives thousands of votes from non-casual baseball fans. Past award winners were way better choices than who the BBWAA picked.
The NFL has the Bill Walsh coaching tree, and now MLB has the John Hart general manager tree.
Albert Pujols is obviously really good, but Josh Kalk examines exactly why he can hit a baseball so hard, so often. One interesting observation is that Pujols struggles (relatively) with off-speed pitches.
Do you get annoyed when you see graphics on tv listing the average age of a baseball team, but know in the back of your mind that the three old guys are barely playing at all, skewing the average? Um, no, me neither… Dave Pinto computed the weighted age of each teams’ hitters based on the number of plate appearances they had. Cleveland, Arizon, and Colorado are all in the youngest ten. Yup, it’s all about experience.
Joe Posnansky is quickly becoming my favorite writer for his fun, yet intelligent blog posts. (He’s also a “real” Royals beat writer.) In this article, he runs through the 26 major sports cities and ranks them by Heartbreak Quotient. Cleveland and Buffalo are numbers 1 and 2 and are also the two closest cities to where I live. Great.
I hate all the ridiculous Joe Torre and ARod talk as much as you do, but I think George Steinbrenner’s relationship to his team is an underrated angle of it all. Questioning his mental state borders on disrespect, but it’s a real issue for the organization. Tyler Kepner from the NYTimes takes a look at the whole situation.
And lastly, how about a stathead article which points out that the current definition of isolated power is unfair to low-AVG hitters, even though the point is not to be. Instead of using SLG minus AVG, we should be using SLG divided by AVG. The first one is really extra-bases per at-bat (which is influenced by at-bats), while the second is total bases per hit (which solely compares how good your results are when you actually have a good result). Simple, yet smart, I like it.
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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.
October 12th, 2007 at 11:10 am
TB/H is pretty useless, IMO. If you want to really measure raw power, I would take the approach of Jim Furtado and measure extra bases per ball in play. In other words, instead of having the denominator be only positive events, have it be all events in which an extra base hit was possible.
Also, ISO is not really meant to be a pure measure of power–it is an approximation of the value of power. 100 extra bases are no less valuable if they come in a package with 100 singles or in a package with 75 singles. Perhaps the 75 single player has more “raw power”, but that doesn’t do squat for his team.