January 9, 2009
Now shipping The 2009 Hardball Times Annual is now available. You can read about it here, but just make sure you order it directly from ACTA today. 
Rich Barbieri John Barten John Beamer Brian Borawski John Brattain Craig Brown Evan Brunell Derek Carty Mike Fast David Gassko
Brandon Isleib
Chris Jaffe Josh Kalk Dave Studeman Steve Treder Bryan Tsao Tuck! John Walsh Colin Wyers Geoff Young And here's the full roster. StubHub is where fans buy and sell Yankees Tickets, Red Sox Tickets, White Sox Tickets, Mets Tickets and all other baseball tickets. If you are looking for World Series Tickets, ALCS Tickets or NLCS Tickets, you can find them at StubHub! More hot selling tickets include: Cubs Tickets, Astros Tickets, Dodgers Tickets, Angels Tickets and Detroit Tigers Tickets. Gear up for baseball season with Chicago White Sox tickets and New York Yankees tickets. LA Angels tickets, Houston Astros tickets, and Atlanta Braves tickets are hot sellers! You can get Boston Red Sox tickets, San Diego Padres tickets or Chicago Cubs tickets for your favorite baseball fan. Coast to Coast Tickets has the best MLB tickets like Minnesota Twins tickets, LA Dodgers tickets, Milwaukee Brewers tickets, New York Met tickets and St. Louis Cardinals tickets.
Or you can search by:
THT's Toolbox All content on this site (including text, graphs, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
Wednesday, May 21, 2008Strike zone sillinessPosted by Mike FastJoe Posnanski says the umpire saved Jon Lester a walk. Did he really? Let me say up front that the silliness in this post is all mine. I'm not accusing Joe Posnanski of silliness. He's a great writer who wrote a good article about Jon Lester's no-hitter against the Royals, and I'm lifting things out of context when I quote him: The seventh was a key inning with Grud (the league’s leading hitter coming into the game), Alex Gordon and Guillen coming up. Grud bounced back to the pitcher — it wasn’t his night. Gordon had a feisty at-bat. He worked the count to 3-1, then watched an obvious ball four go by — way up and way in — only the umpire Brian Knight, now getting in the spirit of things, called it a strike. After a foul ball, Lester threw a fastball up, and Gordon just couldn’t get around on it, he lofted a fly ball to left. Guillen went down swinging. Posnanski's not really even complaining about the umpiring that much, and he's certainly not saying that call changed anything about the outcome of the game. However, I'm using Posnanski as a scapegoat to address an issue I see raised a lot: obviously blown strike calls by the umpires. I see fans and writers raise the issue fairly often; it's no question that the call was wrong, but how wrong was it? And then I go look at the data for that pitch from the PITCHf/x system, the accuracy of which has been demonstrated to be consistently within an inch around home plate, and the vast majority of the time I find that the umpire was either correct or the pitch was right on the borderline where the call could have gone either way. That's not to say that umpires don't make mistakes. I'm sure they do, but I don't think fans and sportswriters make very good judges of when those mistakes happened. So was the 3-1 pitch to Alex Gordon really "way up and way in"?  Those are all the ball-strike calls on pitches from Lester to left-handed hitters on Monday night. The pitch to Gordon is identified with the arrow. What do you think? | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||