February 10, 2012
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Wednesday, September 30, 2009Varsity LettersHey, if you're in New York, I highly recommend you drop by Gelf's Varsity Letters reading festival. It will be held at JLA Studios in Brooklyn at 7:30 Thursday night, and guests will include Larry Tye (I reviewed his book on Satchel Paige a while ago) and baseball blogging superstar Joe Posnanski, among others. Admission is free, so check it out if you have a chance. Those Gelf guys are a hoot. Phillies activate Romero; Should he be closer?On the 28th of September, the Phillies activated J.C. Romero from the 15-day disabled list. Click for more... Man vs. Food in ballparksI usually ignore press releases, but there's a TV show tonight that sounds like it might be fun. Man vs. Food travels to three minor league ballparks to gulp down their well-known food. I like the fact that they focused on minor league parks instead of the bigs (obviously, not a live show!) and that he will take on some of America's best, such as a hamburger served between two donuts. Man vs. Food is on the Travel Channel. And I think I get a free t-shirt for telling you about it. Most recent mid-season managerial change for all 30 teamsWord is, the perpetually underachieving Indians just canned their manager, Eric Wedge. Question: When was the most recent managerial change for all 30 teams. Before checking the list can you guess which team has gone the longest without doing it? Longest in the other league? Well, here they are, bunched by fives for convenience sake. I look at games managed for tiebreakers when multiple teams appear in the same season: 2009 CLE 2009 HOU 2009 DCN 2009 COL 2009 ARI 2008 MIL 2008 TOR 2008 SEA 2008 NYM 2007 CIN 2007 BAL 2005 KCR 2005 PIT 2004 PHI 2003 FLA 2002 CHC 2002 DET 2001 BOX 2001 TEX 2001 TBD 1999 ANA 1998 LAD 1995 STL 1995 CWS 1992 SDP 1990 ATL 1990 NYY* 1986 MIN 1986 OAK 1985 SFG I would've bet anything Minnesota would come out on top, but no. I put an asterick by the Yanks because while B-ref lists it as the same guy for every season, I think Zim officially manged them for a month when Joe Torre had a health problem. It's not an official managerial change, but it was a midseason change nonetheless. (Heck, B-ref notes Pete Rose's month-long ump-bump suspension in its managerial record). Tuesday, September 29, 2009Anatomy of a player: Marc RzepczynskIn a complete ripoff of THT great Josh Kalk's old format, I'd like to take a look one of the very talented, yet basically unheard of, young pitchers in the game. As you may have guessed by the title, I'm talking about Marc Rzepczynski, a 24 year old left handed pitcher on the Blue Jays. In nearly 270 innings pitched in the minors over the past few years, he has had a lot of success. He struck out 9.5 batters per 9, walked 3.3 per 9 and allowed just 5 home runs. His FIP was 2.82. To top that off, over 63% of his balls in play have been on the ground. Those are legitimate Brandon Webb type numbers. Earlier this year, Rzepczynski was called up and made his major league debut the potent Tampa Bay Ray's offense, and pitched admirably, giving up just 2 hits and 1 run over 6, while striking out 7 batters. So far this year, he has totaled 61.1 innings for the Jays and has continued to pitch well, with a 4.10 FIP (in the AL East mind you) and a GB rate of over 50%. More impressively, in my opinion, he has continued to strike out nearly as matter batters as innings pitched. Let's take a look at how he's getting it done. First, his stuff, organized by vertical vs. horizontal movement:  His fastball has a lot of variance in the movement; however, it appears that he really only throws a two-seamer. You can see a rather dense cluster at about (9,3), which is classic two-seamer territory for a lefty. Only a small amount of his fastballs were straighter, and given that they were in the exact same speed range as the two-seamers, those appear to be more accidental than by design. It's worth mentioning that he gets a ton of horizontal movement on the fastball. The maximum amount of movement on the fastball was nearly 15 inches, and he routinely gets over 10 inches. Despite only throwing ~1000 pitches, he ranks 17th in fastballs thrown by a lefty with at least that much break. If you put it on a rate stat, he ranks second in the majors behind Ross Detwiler. He also throws a lot of sliders, nearly 40%, and the occasional changeup. Now, let's check out his fastball location:   Given the obscene amount of break that his fastball generally gets, we would expect it to generate a lot of groundballs. To righties, that seems to be the case, as nearly 50% of balls put in play on the fastball have been on the ground. For lefties, the percentage is slightly higher, but it's a much smaller sample size. He's also shown a strong dislike for missing bats with the fastball. Only 3% of his fastballs have been swung on and missed, compared to a league average rate of about 5%. Overall, his fastball doesn't seem like a great pitch, or at least it hasn't been so far. He doesn't locate it very well, throwing just 55% of them for strikes; and while his GB rate is solid, it's not good enough to offset the anemic swinging strike rate. FanGraphs' pitch values agrees, have his fastball worth -1 run per 100 pitches. The good news is that his slider has more than made up for the negative value on his fastball. FanGraphs has it at +2.9 runs per 100 pitches, which means it's been one of the most valuable pitches in the game. While the movement or velocity on it isn't particularly stunning, he gets a lot of separation on it from the fastball and locates it very well:   You can see he gets a ridiculous amount of swings and misses on pitches outside of the strike zone. He's shown the ability to consistently get swinging strikes on pitches down and to the third base side of the zone. His GB rate is also very good, at 46%. As I mentioned earlier, he throws the slider nearly 40% of the time, which is one of highest usage rates in the majors. Rzepczynski is definitely one of the more interesting young pitchers in the game. Guys who can get swings and misses and GB's at the rate he is are usually perennial all stars. The cool part is that he gets it done while throwing offspeed pitches 40% of the time and a sub 90's fastball. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||