February 10, 2012
Now Available for 2012 THT Essentials: Now Available The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2012, an annual "must buy" for all baseball fans, is now shipping. Read this article to learn more about it.
THT's latest e-book Most Recent Comments
A baseball card mystery: Ontiveros and Schmidt (6)
A baseball card mystery: Ken Holtzman’s 1974 Topps card (16) 20,000 days since Herb Score’s injury (1) A baseball card mystery: Bill Sudakis and the strange light (5) Super at the right time (2)  
Lucas Apostoleris
Rich Barbieri John Barten Brian Borawski Vince Caramela Chris Jaffe Brad Johnson Mat Kovach Kevin Lai Myron Logan Chris Lund Bruce Markusen Jeff Moore Troy Patterson Harry Pavlidis Dave Studeman Steve Treder David Wade And here's the full roster. Dish TV Packages options for all televised baseball games.
Or you can search by:
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.  All content on this site (including text, graphs, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. Part of the USA Today Sports Media Group |
Thursday, October 01, 2009Mr. LaRussa, meet Mr. McGrawEarlier today the Cards inflicted a considerable butt-whipping on the Cubs, 13-0. The big story was Chris Carpenter's 6-RBI performance. Not bad for a pitcher. Still, it wasn't the most impressive achievement on the day. That honor went to his manager, Tony LaRussa, who filled out the lineup card for the 4,769th time, tying him with John McGraw on the all-time leaderboard. Only Connie Mack has done more. Sure, games managed is a far from glamorous stat - but as many games managed as John McGraw?!? He (and Connie Mack) have been atop the career leaderboards for managers for so long I never imagined it was possible for anyone to catch either one. In three more years, LaRussa should pass him up in victories, too. Corey Hart finished for season; did plate discipline impact his power?Corey Hart's season is over after x-rays showed possible compression fractures in his right hand, stemming from his fourth and fifth fingers. Bone scans will later confirm the story, but there's no way Hart returns to the ballfield in 2009. Click for more... Quality start streaksLast night, Bronson Arroyo threw his 13th straight quality start. Pretty impressive, huh? One quality start is a middling achievement, but 13 in a row usually means you are regularly beating the 6 IP, 3 ER baseline. For instance, Arroyo has posted a 1.91 ERA during his stretch. So, how impressive is it? It's the second such streak this season: Adam Wainwright strung together 13 QS earlier this season, and both CC Sabathia and Tim Lincecum managed an equal feat last year. Also last season, Johan Santana made 14 consecutive QS. None of those streaks hold a candle to the Retrosheet-era record, however. Back in 1968, when Bob Gibson ruled the earth, the Cardinals ace posted 26 consecutive quality starts. (The streak started in September of the previous year.) 19 were complete games, 8 were shutouts, and if Bob Gibson wants to say anything about how men were men back then, I think you should let him. Chris Carpenter is also the owner of an impressive tally, having strung together 22 QS in 2005. Three runs? Pshaw.What's striking about Wainwright's streak, though, is that he beat the quality start standard every time out. He never gave up three earned runs. Just as impressively for 2009, he went 7+ IP in 11 of the 13. But that's not a streak. Let's focus on the earnies. Change the threshold to 6+ IP, 2 ER, and now you've got an elite group. The Retrosheet-era record is 15 straight, held jointly by Dwight Gooden, Gaylord Perry, Luis Tiant, and Don Drysdale. Both Tiant and Drysdale accomplished the feat in 1968. They would've gone on longer, but then they faced Bob Gibson.* * I originally wrote this as a joke. But, sure enough, Drysdale went for his 16th straight on July 1 against the Cardinals and Bob Gibson. Judging from the boxscore, it was the sort of day where every time a Cardinal made contact, the ball squibbed through to the outfield. Not so for the notoriously weak Dodger offense; this was part of Gibson's QS streak. Gibson gave up one run and threw a complete game. Tiant, of course, pitched in the wrong league. On July 7 he beat the Angels, but he settled for a conventional QS, giving up three runs. Wainwright is the first person to put together a streak of 13 or more 6+ IP, 2 ER outings since Randy Johnson threw 14 in a row in 1999. Perhaps most impressively, Wainwright holds the Cardinals club record. Gibson's best such streak was 11 straight, in June and July of 1968. Baseball in SwedenI stumbled across an interesting post on Xconomy today about the Baseball World Cup qualification in Sweden. This got me thinking about the great potential for baseball to spread its market into Europe and across the globe. We have already seen the Latin American community and emerging asian markets embrace the game, why not Europe? Europe likely remains as one of the largest untapped resources in the baseball. We have already seen the Netherlands achieve some success on the national stage when they upset the Dominican Republic earlier this year during the World Baseball Classic. Sweden is new to the game and their stadium seats on about 2,400 spectators but I would not expect this to hold back the game's development abroad. Baseball might not be an instant hit in Sweden or other countries but with time and effort baseball could earn a large following in these foreign nations. This will only help the game here in America. More fans means larger merchandising revenue and it could also lead to potential scouting camps in these nations down the road as the game continues to be played and grows in popularity. Wednesday, September 30, 2009The Case for GriffeyIf you look at Ken Griffey's numbers this year, they sure don't stay a lot: wOBA: .321 OBP: .324 SLG: .402 WAR: 0.1 For a DH, these numbers are not exactly "pretty." Junior was signed in the off-season to $2 million dollar deal that could reach up to $4.5 million if Griffey reached certain incentives. He's played in 113 games and has 438 plate appearances, so he may have earned himself some extra cash in the process. Looking at it on a purely statistical level, the deal has been a bad one for the M's. However, maybe there is something to the fact that Griffey has provided a calm, veteran presence in the clubhouse. Either way, I want to make the case for Griffey on a purely statistical level. Let's look at Griffey's peripherals: BB %: 14.1% BABIP: .224 LD %: 14.7% GB %: 38.1% FB %: 47.2% HR/FB %: 12.1% Some interesting stuff here. Safeco Field does favor left-handed hitters over righties (thank you, readers), so that could be why Griffey is getting some production out of his fly balls . A HR/FB rate of 12.1% is pretty good for a guy with a below-average wOBA. Let's check out his road/home splits: Road: .174/.278/.306 (154 at-bats) Home: .273/.388/.539 (219 at-bats) Wow. Maybe Junior really does love being back in Seattle after all? Or it could be just some random variance thanks to a relatively small sample size. Still, it's encouraging to see Griffey being able to put up a .539 slugging percentage in any amount of time. But back to the other peripherals for a moment. Griffey's walk rate of 14.1% is his highest since 2000 and the fourth best of his career. He has clearly kept his phenomenal eye, and considering that his lowest BB% each year from 2007-09 has been better than each year from 2004-06, age doesn't seem to be affecting his ability to walk to first base. Just to drive home the point a little more, Griffey's F-Strike % (rate of first-pitch strikes) and Swing % (rate of pitches swung at) are his lowest since the stats began being recorded in 2002. Griffey also seems to be suffering from a lower than expected BABIP. Yes, Junior is pretty slow and lethargic right now and only has a LD% of 14.7%. However, according to Dutton and Bendix's Simple xBABIP calculator, Griffey should be in line for a .297 BABIP on the year. Even if you want to regress that to something around .260-.270, that's still much better than his miserable .224 rate for this year. In 2007 he was at .291 and last year he was at .272. That's a pretty big drop-off. Finally, we have Griffey's batted ball data. This isn't as encouraging, as Junior has clearly begun to hit the ball with less authority. However, Griffey is a talented enough hitter than even if he can't improve much from these numbers, we shouldn't expect a significant drop. Griffey can't play the field anymore. His UZR has been consistently terrible, and he should only be a rare spot-starter in left or rightfield. He's a DH, which certainly hurts his value. However, if given a cheaper, incentive-laden deal, Griffey can certainly earn his keep with a line of something like .240/.345/.430. Give him a 1-year deal worth about $1.5 million and add some incentives to boost it up just a bit. His clear choice has to be Seattle, as it seems like they want him back. Hopefully he decides to lace his straps once again, as it'd be sad to think we've seen the last of Mr. Junior. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||