March 16, 2010
The "World Champ of Baseball Annuals  Most Recent Comments
Links to get you through the day (2)
Evaluating multi-year free agent deals with THT Forecasts (4) Remembering Willie Davis (4) A note on minor league ground ball rates (8) THT Forecasts update (5)  
Pat Andriola
Rich Barbieri John Barten Brian Borawski Craig Brown Evan Brunell Chuck Brownson Kevin Dame Joshua Fisher David Gassko Jeremy Greenhouse Brandon Isleib Chris Jaffe Max Marchi Bruce Markusen Dan Novick Harry Pavlidis Alex Pedicini Jeff Sackmann Nick Steiner Dave Studeman Steve Treder Bryan Tsao Tuck! Geoff Young John Brattain And here's the full roster.
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. Find premium Chicago Cubs tickets and other Chicago tickets at JustGreatTickets.com. Chicago Cubs Tickets Chicago Tickets  All content on this site (including text, graphs, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
Wednesday, October 14, 2009Texas LeaguersOne of the better reference sites out there is called Texas Leaguers - The Mechanics of Baseball, and is run by Trip Somers. If you haven't been there before, I definitely recommend checking it out. Trip offers mechanical analysis of a lot of pitcher, mainly Rangers, but also has and detailed glossary of a lot of the mechanical terms you sometimes hear, but have no clue what they mean. One of the coolest features on Texas Leaguers is the online Pitch f/x web tool, which I didn't know existed until Mike Fast brought it up a couple of weeks ago. Unlike Dan Brooks' tool, which only gives you game by game data, Trip's allows you to select the exact time frame that you want the data from for both batters and pitchers, and allows you to view multiple splits. For example, here are some charts about Tim Lincecum's changeup this year. You can see that he consistently locates down and to the first base side of the strike zone. No wonder why it's been one of the best pitches in baseball. You can also view charts for individual gamelogs, found on the sidebar, and some descriptive stats on the pitch. So check out Texas Leaguers, and especially the Pitch f/x web tool, for some awesome stuff. THT Live Roundtable: October 14Well the first round of the playoffs ended in about 4 hours, or so it seems. Now we're here in a holding pattern for a few days waiting for baseball to return. No, the AzFL is not a substitute for Chip Caray, Joe Buck, and playoff baseball. Good thing you now have the second installment of THT Live's weekly roundtable to hold you over until the Dodgers and Phillies resume things on the diamond tomorrow evening. This week's participants include Evan Brunell, Nick Steiner, Adam Guttridge, and myself, Dan Novick. And away we go... Question #1: Better shot at contending in 2010; Seattle or Texas? Adam Guttridge: Texas has a core of young position players who aren’t leaving anytime soon—Cruz, Kinsler, Hamilton, Andrus. They have an incredible wave of unproven SP talent—Feliz, Holland, Harrison, Hunter, among others. Yes, Michael Young and Scott Feldman performed way over their heads this year, and were a large part of the team’s success. But still, the bulk of the roster is on the right side of 30, and scary talented (even if raw). The mortal sin is that they’ll be paying a combined $31m to Michael Young and Kevin Millwood next year. Yup…. $31m. Despite that, they should have ~$10m to play with this offseason after arb raises if payroll remains constant (a big if, with the Hicks situation). If they can add enough cheap SP depth to support the inherent risk of the Holland’s and Hunter’s, competing for a weak 2010 AL West is by no means out of reach (the Angels have A LOT of work to do this offseason). The M’s, on the other hand, should not be tempted to abandon rebuilding efforts. They’re probably the more typically constructed contender right now, with stalwarts like Ichiro and King Felix leading the way, and a somewhat patchwork job of vets elsewhere. However, they have nowhere near the internal strength of Texas, and tens of millions of complete deadloss on the roster (Silva, Johjima, others). The Jack Wilson trade was nuts to me, especially since Jack Zduriencik’s first off-season was such a thing of beauty. It didn’t address the team’s needs, and added either a useless, expensive 6 month rental or another highly questionable 8-figure contract for ’10. And the sad thing is, without major FA upgrades, they’re likely to look a lot more like the ’08 M’s in 2010. Click for more... | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||