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 |
Tuesday, March 09, 2010Remembering Willie DavisBaseball lost an original on Tuesday. Former Dodger standout Willie Davis, who also played for the Expos, Rangers, Cardinals, Padres and Angels, was found dead at his Burbank home. He was 69. Some of Davis’ eccentricities were good. Some were unpleasant. Yet, he was always memorable. And he was a pretty good ballplayer who combined dynamic speed with occasional power and an unusual level of aggressiveness both at the plate and in center field. Davis didn’t like to walk much; he liked to swing the bat and take off running. I was especially saddened to hear about Davis’ passing because he appeared to be winning the toughest of the battles with his demons. About 15 years ago, a drug-addicted Davis became involved in a disturbing incident when he threatened his parents with a samurai sword, leading to his arrest and a period of public humiliation. Having hit rock bottom, Davis proceeded to make a slow but steady climb toward respectability. The Dodgers hired him to work in their speakers bureau. He delivered motivational speeches to youngsters, urging them not to repeat the same mistakes he had endured with drugs and alcohol. In many ways, he reminded me of Dock Ellis, another abuser of drugs who had found redemption during his final years. Essentially good men at heart, they demonstrated that people can change for the better, even later in life. During his playing days, Willie Davis did it all. He appeared as himself on an episode of “Mr. Ed” and played a manager on “The Flying Nun.“ He became a practitioner of yoga at a time when people in baseball frowned upon such activities. A devout Buddhist, he regularly chanted prior to games. (That always brought an interesting reaction from teammates.) After his divorce, he shared a room with a Doberman pinscher. He once brawled with Billy Martin, his manager in Texas. And then Davis brought all of his weirdness and wonder to Japan, where he finished out his days as a player while embracing the Asian culture. Davis used to call himself “Three Dog,” a reference to his uniform No. 3 and his proclivity for hitting triples. For fans old enough to have seen him play, watching Davis run out a triple was one of the game’s great pleasures of the 1960s and seventies. He was one of the fastest players I’ve ever seen, perhaps just a tick slower than the likes of Willie Wilson, Mickey Rivers, and Joey Gathright. I plan to write more extensively about Davis in the next “Cooperstown Confidential,” but his passing merited some immediate remembrance. Like many Dodger fans, I’m saddened to have to bid such an early farewell to the colorful man known as Three Dog. A note on minor league ground ball ratesWhile I continue to pour through mounds of Gameday data from Minor League games, I thought I'd stop and share some numbers. I haven't found a "story" that's compelling enough to write about yet. Nor have I finished running through the numbers. In a nutshell, I compared "year 1" and "year 2" performances for all pitchers who faced at least 200 batters in one league in 2007 or 2008 to the same pitcher in another league in 2008 or 2009. For example, Joe Schmoe if pitched in the Southern League in 2007 and the International League in 2008, he goes into the pool. There's all sorts of problems with this approach, namely I'm not filtering pitchers who may have had substantial experience at a higher level during "year 1", but it does give some idea of how guys progress. A pitcher with a 50% ground ball rate in the Southern League (Double-A) would project to a 45% rate in the following season in the Pacific Coast League (Triple-A). A 40% rate projects to 37% and a 60% rate to 53% (y2 = y1*.7702 + .0656; r2=.4693). This ignores any information other statistics may provide in projecting ground ball rates. It does, however, let me split players into some cohorts (out- or under-performed) to carve out some case studies and start digging up those key individual differences that muddy the statistical waters. In this particular group, outliers included Max Scherzer, Esmerling Vasquez and Greg Miller, for whatever that's worth. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||