February 10, 2012
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Thursday, August 13, 2009Maybe this is why Travis Hafner can’t hit home runsA wise man once said, "What happens when you combine Hit Tracker data with Pitch f/x data? You get a whole lot of data." On his Physics of Baseball website, Alan Nathan recently studied home run park effects using data from both Hitf/x and HitTracker. Some of the goodies include how difficult it is to hit a home run at each stadium, using Speed off Bat as a measure of difficulty, and the distribution of "carry" at selected stadiums. Cleveland turns out to be among the worst stadiums for home run hitting across the board, hence the (somewhat joking) title of this post. He talks specifically about the New Yankee Stadium, and presents evidence that seems to debunk the theory that the new stadium is a veritable wind-tunnel. I've been to the stadium twice in the past week, including the 13-6 drubbing of Boston and the walk-off win just yesterday, and it's so obvious that the walls are different than the old stadium. They're straight across instead of curved outward, which should be obvious to anyone who's been to a fair share of games at each, and the walls are lower than they were in the old stadium, which is less obvious. Everyone seems to know this except the weathermen and women who insist that it's the wind. Ok, enough of my own rambling. Check out the article for all the gory details. (hat tip: Tango) More on last night’s Sox-Mariners gameI already wrote one liveblog entry partially inspired by last night's White Sox-Mariners game, in which Seattle won 1-0 in 14 innings. Other stupid thoughts . . . . Last night was the first time the Mariners won an extra-inning game 1-0. They previously lost five such contests, most recently on April 24, 1993 to the Yankees in 11 innings. It was also the longest 1-0 game Seattle ever played, breaking the old record of 12 innings set on June 29, 1988 versus the Rangers. Incredibly, it was Seattle's fifth 1-0 game of the year. Is it 1908 or something in the Pacific northwest? Seattle is 4-1 in those games. Overall, Seattle is now 37-42 in 1-0 games (at least in the regular season). This is the first time they've won four 1-0 games in a season. They previously claimed victory in three such contests in 1979 and 2002. The White Sox, unsurprisingly for a team that's been around for over a century, have played in games that lasted this long without scoring. It was their ninth game where no team scored until at least the 14th inning. The White Sox are 2-7 in those games. They've also played in a pair of games in the 1910s in which neither team scored a run until darkness ended the contest in the 15th and 16th innings respectively. Their last game to go until at least the 14th inning before the sole run was scored was a real great game: September 13, 1967 against the Indians, which Chicago won in 17 innings. The Sox were one of four teams fighting for a World Series birth in one of the greatest pennant races of all-time. Chicago starter Gary Peters walked 10 batters in 11 innings of work, but was able to get away with it because he only allowed one hit. That was a 1-out triple in the second, which means he recorded 29 consecutive outs and faced 37 straight batters in that game without giving up a hit. Cleveland didn't get another hit until the 13th inning. After the third inning, neither team could even get a runner on third base until the game-winning run mercifully ended it. Last night was Chicago's 478th regular season game with 1 run scored (though as any Sox fan can tell you, they had at least one such game in the postseason). They're record in them is 245-232-1. Yeah, a tie. It was on June 20, 1940 versus the Yanks. I don't quite understand it either, but that's how it's listed. The most recent 1-0 game for them until yesterday was the the Black Out Game that won them the AL Central. 0-0 Extra inning gamesTonight, (this morning? - whatever, the game began on August 12) the White Sox and Mariners played a game where no runs were scored until the 14th inning. Five days earlier, on August 7, the Yanks and Red Sox went until the 15th until a run was scored. How often does that happen? Well, I don't have info on 2009 (yet), but here were recent games that went to the 14th inning before a run was scored: July 20, 2004: Oakland 1, Toronto 0 (14) June 8, 2004: Brewers 1, Angels 0 (17) August 13, 2003: Indians 5, Twins 0 (14) May 31, 2003: Cubs 1, Astros 0 (16) May 29, 2001: Diamondbacks 1, Giants 0 (18) March 31, 1998: Mets 1, Phillies 0 (14) September 29, 1993: Mets, 1, Cards 0 (17) July 23, 1992: Indians 1, Royals 0 (14) August 8, 1991: Tigers 4, Blue Jays 0 (14) May 17, 1991: Phillies 1, Cubs 0 (16) August 23, 1989: Dodgers 1, Expos 0 (22) July 27, 1986: A's 1, Blue Jays 0 (15) From 1980-3, there were 9 other games, but from 1984-2008 - a full quarter-century of baseball, it happend only a dozen times. Yet it just happened twice in less than seven days. Cool. Last time it happened twice in one week? Um . .. . it almost happened in 1972: on July 6, 1972 the Padres beat the Mets 1-0 in 14 innings. Eight days later, the Indians topped the Rangers 2-0 in 14 innings. Before that, this happened in 1918: May 15, 1918: Senators 1, White Sox 0 (14) May 22, 1918: Yankees 1, White Sox 0 (15) That sure was some week the Sox had! They won the world championship the year before and threw the Series the next year. 1918 was a rough season for them, though. Even there, the Sox games were seven days apart. Both came on Wednesday, and last time I checked a week doesn't have two Wednesdays. The 2008-twsome came five days apart, not seven. Well, having put all retrosheet gamelogs from 1871-2008 into excel, I can find no examples of two such games coming so closely together as the recent NYY-BOX and SEA-CWS games. To be fair, it may have happened - retrosheet gamelogs don't always list extra-innings for the earlier years (at least they didn't went I exported the info), but unless someone can prove me wrong, I'm guessing this quarter of AL teams just made history this week. More WAR graphing fun!Fearless Leader's entry today on how to improve graphs has inspired some conversation at BtB and Tango's blog. For the most part I agree with everything Dave says - I do think that having the WAR values on the y-axis is helpful, which is about my only reservation with his advice. But. His graphs were aliased, and it drove me insane. Now - and please indulge me a personal aside here - but I really am geekier than I think even most of my readers know. In fact, I'm pretty sure I'm geekier than even the two or three readers who catch the "Babylon 5" references that the editors don't cut realize. (At least, I think one has survived.) And at varying points in my life, I've done things like, oh, four-color separation for printing presses. And at the point today when I learned that Adobe Illustrator has graphing functionality, my doom was sealed. So here's my effort at making a similar sort of graph, but using Illustrator (and some post-processing in Photoshop):  I don't think it's too bad for a first effort. I do know that I only used Illustrator's graphing capabilities about a quarter as well as I think they could be. So, somebody throw out some ideas for me here. I think I need some practice. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||