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 |
Monday, November 23, 2009Greinke and fly ballsIn God we trust. All others bring data. -W. Edwards Deming Along with Zack Greinke's 2009 American League Cy Young Award came a widely-circulated article by Tyler Kepner in the New York Times. In the article, Brian Bannister is quoted, "So a lot of times, Zack would pitch for a fly ball at our park instead of a ground ball, just because the zone rating was better in our outfield and it was a big park." There's quite a bit to digest in Kepner's article besides that one excerpt from Bannister, but it was one piece that I thought would be easy to check. What did I find? Road Home Bunt 5% 2% Fly 30% 33% Ground 36% 41% Liner 21% 16% Popup 8% 8%The batted ball type comes from the MLB Gameday data. The results don't really line up with what Bannister what saying. It may be that Greinke was pitching for more fly balls at home but not necessarily getting them, but that's a question for another day. Update: Here's the batted ball log by game. Date Park Fly Ground LD Pop Bunt 4/8 cha 0 8 2 1 1 4/13 kca 3 4 5 0 0 4/18 tex 6 9 7 1 1 4/24 kca 4 9 3 1 2 4/29 kca 9 6 2 1 0 5/4 kca 7 8 2 4 0 5/9 ana 10 9 2 0 2 5/15 kca 8 7 5 1 0 5/21 kca 5 8 2 1 1 5/26 kca 3 13 3 3 0 5/31 kca 7 11 2 1 0 6/5 tor 11 3 6 2 0 6/11 cle 3 8 5 2 3 6/17 kca 11 7 1 0 1 6/23 hou 6 14 3 0 3 6/28 pit 4 4 8 4 1 7/3 kca 5 9 3 2 0 7/8 det 7 6 2 0 1 7/14 sln 0 0 0 1 0 7/18 kca 4 11 2 3 0 7/24 kca 3 10 1 1 0 7/29 bal 6 3 4 3 0 8/3 tba 1 8 4 0 2 8/8 kca 6 8 5 3 0 8/14 det 6 4 5 3 0 8/19 cha 7 5 4 3 0 8/25 kca 7 4 1 1 0 8/30 sea 9 9 2 3 0 9/5 kca 9 4 8 1 1 9/11 cle 6 9 2 1 0 9/17 det 1 3 5 0 0 9/22 kca 8 3 2 2 0 9/27 kca 6 8 5 0 0 10/3 min 7 7 3 0 1 Who should be the Yankees DH?In a piece at River Ave. Blues yesterday, Mike Axisa wrote at length about the Yankees DH situation. There's a faction of the fan base that would like to see the team promote from within, and make Cuban defector Juan Miranda the regular DH next season, while giving frequent half-days off to the old-ish lineup by allowing them to DH on occasion. Without thinking about it too much, I agreed with this line of thinking. Keeping Hideki Matsui around in 2010 would A) cost much more than promoting Miranda would, and B) make it more difficult to let some regulars DH on occasion, since Matsui can't play the field. So I figured just let Miranda start around 100-120 games at DH, and give guys like Posada, A-Rod, and Damon the remaining time at DH to keep them fresh. Well in that article at RAB, Mike headed down that road by saying this: There are always more DH types available than DH spots open, so the Yanks certainly have options. However, the team is said to be looking to scale back the payroll a bit, and if they can’t retain Matsui on favorable terms, the team might be better off filling the DH spot from within rather than dropping seven figures on a guy in the decline phase of his career. I’m not talking about that silly rotating DH thing when I say filling the spot from within, I’m talking about Juan Miranda. The article continues extolling the virtues of Miranda, saying how he destroyed lefties this year after struggling against them in the past, and how he has hit MLB pitching well in his extremely limited sample size. Essentially what you would expect to hear from a prospect fanatic like Mike. But then it takes an unexpected twist: Click for more... | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||