Monday, July 16, 2012

They're Not Booing ... Are They?: The Return of Kevin Youkilis

Kevin Youkilis, "the Greek god of walks", started his professional baseball career as a relative nobody, a late-round flier that surprised everyone to become a hero of the 2007 World Series winners. Over time, though, his star dimmed thanks to injuries and less irritating replacements from Pawtucket. He was recently traded to the White Sox and returns this week to Fenway for the first time since the trade.

What better opportunity for "sources within the Red Sox organization" to besmirch his reputation with a classless character assassination?

Thursday, July 12, 2012

Rise of The Machine: An Albert Pujols Update

One of my first posts of the baseball season was a look at Albert Pujols' home run drought. It took a grand total of like three days for Pujols to make me look foolish.

At the time, I used FanGraphs' player page to point out that Pujols was swinging at more pitches outside the strike zone -- from a career number of 21% up to 41%. Here's what I concluded:

Pujols just signed a $240 million contract, might be (understandably) feeling the pressure to earn that contract in a new city, and is pressing, going after pitches he normally would lay off, causing more strikeouts when he misses and a little weaker contact even when he connects.


Since that time, Pujols has seen 388 pitches out of the strike zone, and swung at 33% of them, right in line with last season's numbers. And wouldn't you know it: Pujols has hit 14 home runs in the last two months. That's a home run in 5.4% of those 261 plate appearances, closer to his career rate of 6%. It's also worth pointing out that Pujols' HR/FB rate over that time is 16.9%, a bit below his career rate of 19%. That means you should expect more home runs in the second half.

Monday, July 9, 2012

Baseball IIINNN SPAAAAAACE!

Baseball's All-Star break is the slowest time on the sports calendar. In fact, these three days are the only days of the year where none of the four major professional sports have games*.

* - Real games. Sorry, Bud, this one still doesn't count.

If you're really -- and I mean REALLY -- desperate for some action you can watch the Home Run Derby. There are two problems with this strategy: first, you have to deal with Chris "Uma" Berman, and second, it's really not that interesting. You'd think a bunch of professional baseball players trying to hit the ball as far as they can would be fun to watch but, let's face it: it gets old after awhile.

There are ways to spice it up, of course, like this clusterfuck the Reading Phillies came up with for the Eastern League All-Star Game.

Or! Or. You could put it on the moon.

Saturday, July 7, 2012

WAR Stars

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, the All-Star Game meant something. You hear this all the time from Werther's-loving, fedora-wearing, chair-rocking, old-timey sportswriters, so it must be true. It's not fair to call this narrative a "dead-horse": this is like some proto-horse ancestor, found primarily in cave paintings, that died out in the last Ice Age.

Pictured: Mariano Rivera's rookie season


These days, the players treat the game as a glorified exhibition game -- which it is -- and have some fun with it -- which they should -- while trying to protect themselves from injury -- which is just smart*, considering the size of their contracts, but for some reason is treated as sacrilege.

* - Ask Ted Williams, who shattered his elbow crashing into a wall in 1950, or Pedro Martinez, who pitched his arm off in 1999.

But I don't want to talk about that.