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Wednesday, September 16, 2009Murray Chass makes negative senseIn honor of FJM's triumphant return to the interwebs today, I want to go ahead and put together my own FJM-style piece (call it Ken Tremendous Karaoke, if you will) on the one and the only, Murray Chass. After reading Dak's whooping of the guy earlier today, I felt compelled to check out Chass's not-blog and see what he was up to. He did not let down. As the season dwindles down to a precious few weeks, attention is focused on remaining races - not that there are any - I love those non-existent races. Go, the eventual end of the season, go! and the playoffs ahead. But pause for a moment in your excited anticipation and think of how Pittsburgh Pirates fans approach the post-season. Getting ready to watch their defending champ Steelers kick some ass, all the while waiting for the also defending champ Penguins to hit the ice again? They may actually look forward to it eagerly because once they get beyond Oct. 4, the Pirates can’t lose any more games this year. They probably can’t make any more trades either because they have already traded everybody of value. First off, don't forget the 1894 Cubs, who were so bad they lost three games after the season ended. But I'm pretty sure the Pirates have guys of value, and that they can trade anyone they want, even if guys don't have your subjective definition of value. On second thought they have Andrew McCutchen on their roster, and if they traded Nyjer Morgan they can trade Andrew McCutchen. Ohhhh yessss....I forgot the rule about how trading one player means you can trade anyone. Ya know the Cardinals traded Chris Duncan two months ago. Hey Albert, you're next. Simply put, the Pirates are an embarrassment to Pittsburgh and an embarrassment to Major League Baseball. It’s not just that the Pirates are a poor team, a losing team, but they are an embarrassment because of the way they have become a worse team than they already were and how they are trying to hoodwink their fans. I had to read that last sentence about three times before it hit me: Murray Chass has no understanding of the English language. The Pirates this year traded Nate McLouth, Morgan, Adam LaRoche, Freddy Sanchez, Jack Wilson, Eric Hinske, Ian Snell, Tom Gorzelanny, John Grabow and Sean Burnett. You could almost put a team on the field with that lineup. Click for more... FJM reunites for a dayOver at Deadspin, Ken Tremendous, Dak, and Junior are hosting the FJM Reunion. I feel like it's a holiday, only scrappier. Searching for the most hackiest man in the world
That got me thinking about how he compared to the rest in terms of swinging at pitches waaaaaay out of the strike zone. Besides the obvious candidates in Vlad and Bengie, there are bound to be plenty other undiscovered talents, who deserve to be exposed as the hackers that they are. So I thought I would create a stat, that looks at how often a batter swings at a truly pronounced bad ball. Let's call it True Hack %. To start off, we have to define what constitutes a True Hack. Since the goal of this excersize is to identify the most improbable pitches that a guy will swing at, using the standard deviation to define the ranges of the population seems fitting. This year, the standard deviation for swings on pitches in the horizontal axis was .64 feet with a mean of .095, and the standard deviation for swings on pitches on the vertical axis was .67 with a mean of 2.46. In layman's terms, that means that 68% of swings will be on pitches that are within .67 feet from the mean (2.46) on on the vertical axis (up and down), and 68% of swings will be on pitches that are within .64 feet of the mean (.095) on the horizontal axis (side to side). For the purposes of defining a True Hack, we'll use 3 SD's on each axis, meaning that 99.7% of pitches are with with 3 standard deviations from the mean. Or, in the form of a picture:  That Hacker Zone represents the normal limit for most people's swings. Less than 1 percent of pitches swung at fall outside of the zone, so any swing that is on a pitch outside of the zone will be referred to as a True Hack. For reference on how far off the plate those pitches are, each corner is about 1 foot off of the real strike zone. Anyway, here are the leaders in True Hack %, which measures the percentage of pitches swung at that are outside of the black box (which is customized for each batter based off of height), with at least 100 pitches seen in the True Hack Zone: 1) A.J. Pierzynski: 13.7% 2) Alex Rios: 12.2% 3) Vernon Wells: 12.2% 4) Erick Aybar: 11.7% 5) Jermaine Dye: 11.3% 6) Freddy Sanchez: 10.4% 7)Victor Martinez: 9.9% 8) Jeff Francoeur: 9.7% 9) Alexei Ramirez: 9.7% 10) Kendry Morales: 9.3% That certainly is a pretty interesting list. Jeff Francouer, Alexi Ramirez and Freddy Sanchez aren't too surprising, but guys like Victor Martinez and Jermaine Dye have put up solid walk rates over their careers. Also, the absence of such hacktastic luminaries in Vlad Guerrero and Miguel Olivo is shocking (although, Guerrero ranks 11th, and Olivo didn't have enough pitches to qualify, or else he would rank 8th). Still, I guess that A.J. Pierzynski is the most hackiest man in the world. Congrats! Now, here are the guys who are best at laying off those pitches: 1) Adam Dunn: .45% 2) Hanley Ramirez: .59% 3) Joey Votto: .61% 4) Shin-Soo Choo: .62% 5) Todd Helton: .64% This list makes a little more sense. All of those guys are known for having excellent plate discipline, and they each have only swung at 1 pitch outside of the Hacker Zone. A couple of other oddities are that Carlos Villanueva his 5/5 on pitchers outside of the Hacker Zone, meaning every single pitch he's seen this year that's at least 1 foot out of the strike zone has been swung at by him. Also, Miguel Tejeda only has one True Hack, despite being considered one of the most aggressive hitters in the game. For the entire list, you can consult this Google Docs page. Click for more... | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
