I’m trying to be good.

I’m trying not to leave the negative posts up too long.

Anyway, another big start for Phil Hughes, and another cold rainy evening. Not only that but with Melky, Posada, and A-Rod out of the lineup, Phil better try to be good too.

People are Stupid.

Never forget that. I just read a comment at another blog that I won’t name but it rhymes with “Buzz Hotching” and the comment was something along the lines of,

“Posada said the other day that he won’t play first base. That was selfish, and as a result I’ve lost all respect for Posada.”

My reaction that comment is this: Are you fucking out of your fucking fucking mind?

First, what Posada said was, “I’m not playing first base, I’m a catcher, we have seven firstbasemen.”

I think his point there was, you could make an argument that everybody on this fucking team would be better off at firstbase. Seriously, Matsui, Damon, Posada, Jeter, Giambi, Duncan, Ensberg, Betemit all of those dudes could/can/should play first base. It’s the Yankee blog solution for every player with diminished defensive skills. Let’s stick him at first base! Of course then, they couldn’t complain that Giambi is a butcher out there, but I’m sure they’d find something else to complain about.

Anyways.

On to the “Posada is selfish” bullshit. Posada if you remember, was almost in tears when he made that comment. He was upset to the point of TEARS. Probably because he just signed a $52 million contract to play baseball and now he can’t and he doesn’t know why. So ease the fuck off the guy. I just lost all the respect for you, anonymous Yankee blog reader.

Gah!

A Hot Mess.

After the roadtrip from hell, the Yanks have underperformed their log5 projections by about 1.4 wins, according to SG at RLYW. First off, I should point out, that I have no idea what that means. I think it means they are slightly less good than a computer deep inside Mount Rushmore thought they would be, and that’s ok. Given the fact that they’ve had numerous injuries to key offensive weapons, and borderline abysmal starts by Hughes and Kennedy, I’m actually shocked that they’re only and game and a half behind their projection.

A successful season will hinge on the answer to the following questions:
-Will guys get healthy and stay healthy?
-Will Cano play closer to his projections moving forward?
-Will Giambi’s recent uptick continue?
-Will Jeter add at least a little bit of SLG to his game?
-Will Mussina continue his usefulness?
-Will Farnsworth?
-Will Hughes and Kennedy start pitching meaningfully better?

I think that’s the season right there.

Yankees Should Definitely Cut Giambi and Eat His Contract

Right?

But they should also cut Jeter, Abreu, Cano and Posada, cause he’s out OPSing all of them.

A wet little tease.

I was lucky to get a pair of tickets to the Yanks - Sox game last night. As I headed down to the southside with my friend Amy, I was honestly as excited about this game as any I had been to in a long time. It was going to be my first time seeing Phil Hughes and potentially Joba in person.

I wanted Hughes to do well so badly, and for two innings, he did. And then, the rains came, and when they finally took the tarp off the field, Ross Ohlendorf was on the mound. So I got to see 2 encouraging innings from Hughes, and then nothing.

Well not exactly, other things I got to see was the bullpen getting roughed up, some nice baserunning by Giambi, and Joba getting touched up by the Sox.

All in all, a disappointing evening, but what’s that saying? “Even bad sex is pretty good.” I think the same holds true for a trip to the ballpark.

Swing and a Miss

This article is about the Yankees pitching problems and it’s pretty boring. But it says this:

Mussina has generated swinging strikes 11 times this year on 319 pitches. That’s five percent of strikes. At his peak, his rate was over three times that and it was 13 percent as recently as 2006. Last year, it was nine percent.

Well, so what? I mean is there anything great about swinging strike percentage? I guess it’s sexy or something but Wang is at 4% and Kennedy is at 8%, and Pettitte is at like 9%. Does swinging strike percentage correlate to anything in particular, or is this just some sort of cherry picking expedition gone awry?

A patient man is never lost.

I have a terrible sense of direction. I’ve lived in Chicago for 6 years, and I very often have only a vague sense of where I am when I venture out of my neighborhood.

This past weekend, my fiance and I were walking our dog, and we took a long meandering route through some of the old neighborhoods on the north side.

A few moments after we crossed a large thoroughfare, I asked my fiance sheepishly, “um, what street was that?” She looked at me patiently, yet incredulously, “Irving Park, honey.” Ten minutes later as we walked down a sunny tree lined street, I spied another major street ahead, “Is that Irving Park again,” I asked.

“Western,” she sighed. “If I ever want to get rid of you, I’ll just drive you three blocks from the house and drop you off,” she joked. We then did an improv skit of me shivering on a corner looking lost and forlorn.

That sense of fear and at-a-lossness, is how I think many of us Yankee fans feel right now.

Don’t believe me, check the blogs. Replacement Level wants to know if Giambi is cooked.

NoMaas, is worried about Posada, and looking forward to the WNBA.

I don’t even want to know what’s going on over at WasWatching.

As for me, I think back to my navigational skills. See, in reality, I think my sense of direction is fine. Ultimately, I know what direction I need to go in to get where I’m going, and eventually, I know I’ll figure out a route to my destination. I feel the same about the Yankees, it’s gonna take a while, guys need to get healthier, Phil and Ian need to learn how to pitch in the bigs, the offense’s luck is bound to change. I suspect, that by the time the playoffs start, we’ll be hand wringing over the rotation, and who’s gonna start game two.

Right?

Right?

 

Unlucky Wang?

A week ago, Chien-Ming Wang faced the Red Sox, and pitched brilliantly, last night he faced those very same Red Sox, and pitched horribly. So I went looking for what went wrong.

Watching the game last night, it was easy to assume that Wang didn’t have command of his sinker, and as a result was falling behind batters more often than he usually does. Except it isn’t that simple.

Last night Wang faced 24 batters, and in his previous start agains Boston he faced 29 batters. In both starts he had eleven Plate Appearances that were resolved when he was behind in the count.

In the start last week, the Red Sox got on base ONCE in those 11 situations, and last night they got on base 8 times in those situations. So Wang wasn’t really pitching from behind all that more often last night, the problem was he was surrendering walks in those situations, which he usually doesn’t do, and when the balls were put in play yesterday they were going for hits at and extremely high rate.

Game    BABIP
11-Apr  0.074
16-Apr  0.474

A fluky thing for sure, two extremes in back to back games. And it illustrates why Wang has to continue working on his strikeout pitches.

I just wasted a bunch of time.

I did this project this morning, where I looked at every major leaguer’s 2007 stat line and ranked them according to Batting Average, SLG, OBP, OBP-Batting Average (more on that in a minute.) Then I calculated the standard deviations of each data set, then I ranked players who were +1 or +2 standard deviations above the category mean. Then, I calculated the correlation coefficients for 12 different offensive metrics(correlated to runs.)

See, I’m totally not making this up. FreeRunn is the sum of BB, HBP, and IBB. And if you don’t want to lose, don’t get caught stealing a bunch.

Then based on that calculation I weighted OPS so thta SLG got a tick more weight than OBP because SLG tends to correlate to Runs a bit more than OBP. Then I created a weighted OBP that prioritized BA slightly over walks and other non hits (because hits correlate more strongly to runs than walks or HBP or IBB.) Ok, then i re ranked all the offensive players from 2007 using a new weighted OBP and weighted OPS and I found out, after all that, that Alex Rodriguez and David Ortiz are really good hitters.

Just for fun though, the top 6 players based on my weighted OPS metric are:

Ortiz: 1.112 (Regular OPS 1.066)
A-Rod: 1.112 (1.067)
Magglio: 1.089 (1.029)
Chipper: 1.081 (1.029)
The one who got away Pena: 1.027 (1.037)
Matt Holliday: 1.070 (1.012)

The conversion hurts Pena, and helps all the other guys. I should point out that this analysis is all bunk because I didn’t adjust for park, or league.

I should also point out, because I think it’s cool, that Chipper and Magglio were the only two players in baseball who were more than 2 standard deviations above the mean in the following categories, BA, OBP, SLG, OPS.

Finally, I realize that above I promised more on OBP-BA. Here’s the thing, if you had 2 guys with .450 OBP you’d be like, holy crap my payroll is going to be HIGH. But if you wanted to know which one to keep, wouldn’t you want the guy whose OBP was more made up of hits. I would because hits are sometimes doubles or triples, and walks are always base cloggy singles (kidding of course.) But you always only get 1 base on a walk, and dudes never go first to third on a walk. So, love OBP, it’s my thing, but I love OBP that is a result of hits slightly more than OBP that is a ton of walks. Like I’d rather have 2007 Magglio than 2007 Helton even though they had identical OBPs because Maggs had a higher BA, higher SLG…so I was just trying to isolate those guys that have OBP that is more a function of hits than non hits. I realize too that BA is pretty variable year over year, and that’s why OBP is better from a planning standpoint. But Hits correlate more strongly to runs than walks do, at least in 2007 they did.

Contact Rate

WasWatching has an interesting post about contact rate.

Ron Shandler in the USA today had this to say about contact rate:

So, when it comes to batting average, perhaps the skill that we should be tracking is the rate at which a batter makes contact.

Contact rate (at-bats minus strikeouts, divided by at-bats) is a statistic that is far more stable and projectable. League level rates run about 80%. Our .300 hitters often come from those with contact rates greater than 90%. Batters with rates less than 70% typically have trouble keeping their batting average above .250.

First of all, what I think this article is saying is that hitters who make more contact tend to have higher batting averages. Um, great.

But what I think could be interesting is applying contact rates to specific situations, like the post-season. I’ve always sorta thought that hitters with low batting averages yet good OBPs were something of a liability in the post season. More specifically, a lot of hitters, clustered together with low BAs were a problem. Because as long as pitchers didn’t throw them meatballs, they could capitalize on the passivity of the approach.

So maybe in the postseason, you want guys with high OBP AND high BA. And for that matter you want them to have highish slugging too so they are efficiently moving guys around the bases.

So basically, I’ve just talked myself out of thinking there’s anything interesting about contact rate.

Nevermind.