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 |
Wednesday, October 21, 20092010 impact rookies: Carlos SantanaContinuing with my look at impact prospects for the 2010 season today we will take a look at Cleveland Indians catcher Carlos Santana. Santana came to the Indians organization in 2008 as part of a deal that sent Casey Blake to the Los Angeles Dodgers. The departure of Victor Martinez all but assures that there will be a catcher opening for Santana next season, at least sharing the duties with incumbent Kelly Shoppach. The 23-year old switch-hitter has emerged as an elite catching prospect with a major league ready bat. He spent the entire 2009 season with the Akron Aeros of the Eastern League (Double-A) putting together an an eye-popping line of .290/.413/.530. His plate discipline is also advanced beyond his age. He drew 90 walks this season compared to 83 strikeouts. These numbers were no fluke either, in 2008 he posted a .431 on-base percentage and .227 ISO at the Advanced-A level. Defensively Santana is still raw. He needs to refine his receiving skills and improve his ability to block balls in the dirt. He has a strong arm but his accuracy is inconsistent at times. Santana makes up for his deficiencies with plenty of agility and athleticism behind the plate. Overall, he projects to be an average defensive catcher. Santana is probably a notch below Matt Wieters or Buster Posey in terms of ceiling but he could still develop into a consistent all-star caliber player. He will likely compete for playing time in spring training and could have the starting spot nailed down by mid-season in 2010. Santana will likely hit for a solid average and decent power numbers, in the range of 20-25 home runs. His real value will be in his ability to draw walks and reach base. I think we can expect a batting line in the range of .280/.375/.450 in the future. Trust but VerifyLast week, I was playing around with creating a BABIP predictor that was simple, intuitive, and calculable with the information available in my spreadsheets. I also stumbled across some brilliant work done by Peter Bendix at THT some time back. As an offshoot of the BABIP estimator, I decided to start with a baseline reading of how predictable BABIP and batted ball types were, if given a decent sample. (I should note, this is BIS data). I took all players with at least 400 PA in each season from 2006-2009 (98 players, 392 seasons). I wanted to see how well a simple 5-3-2 weighting of their ’06-’08 BABIP and batted ball data would predict their ’09 BABIP/batted ball (not weighted for PA). The results:  A few things jumped out at me: --I’m surprised by how well BABIP works at predicting itself. I would have thought we’d see that figure much more towards LD%. That’s somewhat discouraging for me, though… it’s not going to be easy to come up with a BABIP estimator that makes a huge difference in terms of projection accuracy. --LD%... damn. A lot of this is surely attributable to the well-discussed variability and subjectivity involved in batted ball classification, but even absent that, I’d bet this is just a flaky skill that needs to be heavily regressed. --I’m also a bit surprised by how strong of a figure we see for HR/FB. The variability of that figure is the basis for xFIP, and sure, on a seasonal level, it deserves to be factored out. But for an SP with 180+ IP in each of the past 3 seasons, a projection using his (park factored) HR/FB as a component in lieu of the league average rate would likely produce superior accuracy. Also, I checked up on Dave Studeman’s quick-and-dirty method of BABIP prediction; LD% + .12. If you add .12 to the LD% predicted by the ’06-’08 LD%, it correlates at .376 with actual ’09 BABIP. In other words, you’re far better off using plain BABIP. THT Live Roundtable: LCS EditionIt's a busy week this week, so you'll have to do without a fancy intro... Question #1:The Yankees make the World Series and face the Phillies. However, both CC Sabathia and Cliff Lee get hurt along the way. Put together the new, presumably 4-man rotations for both teams. Alex Pedicini: For the Phillies I would roll out Cole Hamels, J.A. Happ, Pedro Martinez, and Joe Blanton. The Yankees rotation might look something like A.J. Burnett, Andy Pettitte, Joba Chamberlain and Chad Gaudin. Jeremy Greenhouse: Well the Yankees have been rolling with Pettitte and Burnett, while the Phillies have used Hamels, Happ, Pedro, and Blanton. So that leaves two spots to fill in for the Yanks and none for the Phils. The obvious choices for the Yanks are Joba Chamberlain and Chad Gaudin. Those are also really the only choices. I have to think this trade-off would favor the Phillies. Click for more... | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||