MLB 2012

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[quote]DBCooper wrote:
A few random thoughts about The Series:

Bumgarner looked as good as he ever has tonight. He has such a long, lazy arm action with 230 lbs behind it that the arm speed doesn’t match the actual speed of the pitch and the ball gets on the hitter quick. Plus, when he’s right, he’s always around the plate and he pounds the inside part of the plate down and in to righties as well as any lefty in the game today.

Prince Fielder scares the shit out of me. He has some history with the Giants from his Milwaukee days. He lit up one of their backup catchers on a play at the plate where the guy didn’t have the ball and wasn’t looking at Fielder. Then the whole homerun celebration/beanball incident from 2009-2010. And he could have gone through Posey like a Pamplonan bull on that play at the plate tonight. Posey handled it much better than last year against Cousins.

Fister showed me something tonight. The bastard took a fucking missile off the back of his head and he stayed in and matched Bumgarner pitch-for-pitch for 6.

That great bunt by Blanco that loaded the bases in the 7th was a big play, but it might have been detrimental for the Giants. It loaded the bases and kept a force in a play, which Crawford then hit into for a doubleplay that scored one run and left a runner at 3rd with 2 outs.

If Blanco simply bunts and advances the runners, it’s runners on second and third with one out and Crawford probably gets walked to load the bases for a potential inning-ending doubleplay. But Theriot would pinch-hit and Leyland would bring in Dotel, who sucks fucking cock and might have given up a hit to a guy like Theriot, who also sucks cock, isn’t going to strike out and isn’t going to swing at bad pitches. A base hit there plates two runners instead of just the one that Crawford knocked in. I suppose in the end I’d still rather have bases loaded with no outs and a worse matchup than bases loaded with one out and a preferential matchup.

If the Giants win this Series and they win another one after that within the next couple years, they’re a legitimate baseball dynasty, the first since the Yankees of the 1990’s. I think they’d probably have to win more than just three, or play in at least two more and win one of them before they’d be considered one of the better dynasties though.

The weather report for this weekend in Detroit is for really cold temperatures. I’m not sure if there’s any possibility of rain, but if there is and a game is rained out, it would allow the Tigers to come back with Verlander as early as Game 3 if there’s more than a day’s postponement. Probably an unlikely scenario, but as it stands now he could start Game 4 at least on regular rest if there DOES happen to be a delay. I liked the Giants’ chances against Verlander in Game 1, but I wouldn’t expect much from them against him in a second start.

Of course, if the Giants win on Saturday behind Vogelsong, the Tigers would HAVE to respond with Verlander on 3 days’ rest against Matt Cain in Game 4 to stave off elimination. I don’t give a fuck what happened in his last start or who the fuck the Tigers have lined up for Game 4 otherwise, if you have a pitcher like Verlander you throw him with your back up against the wall no matter what. That’s what he’s there for if he can’t get you out to an early lead with a dominant start in Game 1. Now his job is to save the Series for the Tigers and the only way he can do it is to start Game 4 if the Giants win Game 3.

The Giants are taking advantage of every single little break or mistake from the Tigers. Sometimes it might seem lucky, but the teams that get lucky are always the teams that take advantage of the breaks and force mistakes by making things happen. They put the ball in play and don’t strike out a lot, which puts pressure on the defense and the pitcher, and when you throw a lot of strikes and the ball is around the plate a lot like the Giants pitchers have done this postseason, good things happen. In other words, luck isn’t really luck, it’s just the result of forcing the issue, and the better team is the one that forces the issue.[/quote]

No complaints about McCarver in there?

I’ll add one, paraphrasing a bit here, said in the first inning by Tim:
“The Giants strategy is to seperate Cabrera and Fielder. They want Cabrera to end one inning and Fielder to lead off the next.”
Well considering Cabrera hits in the 3-hole and fielder 4th, I think EVERY team that’s faced the tigers would like to go 1-2-3 in the first and have fielder lead off the 2nd. This had me laughing just the way McCarver said it like it was some novel strategy developed by the the Giants braintrust or something.

Also, Fielders slide into home was horrible. A decent slide and hes safe easy.

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I read an interesting article somewhere today that talked about the fallacies behind the calls for instant replay in baseball.

Apparently some study was conducted over the course of the year that ended up closely correlating with a study done by ESPN during the 2010 season. The research showed that umpires miss 1 out of every 5 “close calls”. This excludes balls/strikes, which I personally feel should NEVER be subject to replay simply because adjusting to the ever-changing strike zone from ump to ump is part of the game itself.

Anyways, the studies also both showed that an average of 1.3 calls per game are close enough to merit review. This means that, based on how often they make the wrong call on those 1.3 plays per game, umpires actually get 99.5% of all the calls in a game correct.

So the reality is that there really isn’t any statistical validation for instant replay. Like the guy who wrote this article mentioned (I can’t remember where the fuck I read it; it was linked from some other site and I didn’t recognize it.) the perception that pretty much all fans have is that all the close calls go against their team. The Atlanta/St. Louis play-in game is a perfect example. That infield fly call the ump made was actually the correct call, even though he did signal it too late. And instant replay wouldn’t be applied to a play like that anyways.

I have no clue what the statistics would show is the success rate on balls/strikes, but I don’t think that even really matters that much anyways. Apparently Joe West has been voted both the worst and the best umpire in baseball strike zone-wise in the same year by different experts on multiple occasions. And apparently he also had the most consistent strike zone both those years. And consistency is really the key. I don’t think hitters or pitchers would give a fuck what the strike zone is as long as it is called consistently in that particular game. I don’t think they even really care how much it changes from game to game as long as whatever is established early in a game remains that way for the rest of the game.

There’s no way to please everyone all the time. It’s like politics; there are liberal and conservative interpretations of the zone. Hitters prefer a conservative approach and pitchers prefer a liberal approach.

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[quote]therajraj wrote:

Dice-k was a bad signing in hindsight. Carl Crawford, while not the best fit for their team, he had a great career in TB.

Ellsbury makes a fraction of what Lincecum makes but their Both soon to be FAs.

The chances Lincecum bounces back is extremely low. Work horse pitchers who lose velocity in their late 20’s do not tend to return to their prior form. For the rest of his career he will likely be what several people projected him as while he was a prospect: a high end elite type reliever.

On the other hand Ellsbury is a few years younger and is a year removed from a MVP season. Yeah he missed most of 2012 but there’s nothing about his injury that you would expect him not to bounce back almost completely.

TL:DR trading an Elite CF for an elite reliever is a move too dumb even for the Red Sox[/quote]

It’s not a matter of whether Lincecum can regain his previous form, it’s about whether he can make the adjustment his diminished stuff requires. And I don’t know that his stuff has really diminished a whole lot from the last two years when he had excellent seasons. He’s proven he can be very effective even with a 91mph fastball. He’s even shown it this year and this postseason, just in small bursts rather than with consistency.

I expect Lincecum to change his mechanics slightly this winter. His problem is not with health or arm speed, it’s his command of the zone that has hurt him. He misses it too much and too many of the strikes that he does throw ended up in the fat part of the zone this year. That’s a recipe for disaster no matter who you are, and the Giants impressed that point upon Verlander in Game 1.

If I thought Lincecum were injured somehow I would be worried. But that isn’t the case. A mechanical issue isn’t that hard to fix, although it can be hard to do so in the middle of the season.

Also, and you wouldn’t know this since you don’t actually watch him pitch, he hasn’t been knocked around throughout a game very much at all this year. Almost every bad outing he had was the result of one bad inning where he got completely out of sync and couldn’t adjust mid-inning. I think even sabermetrics would show that he didn’t pitch well but that he also ran into some bad “luck” by virtue of his high BABIP. And don’t forget that his strikeout rate hardly dropped at all this year, which shows that his former self isn’t very former at all.

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[quote]therajraj wrote:

Dice-k was a bad signing in hindsight. Carl Crawford, while not the best fit for their team, he had a great career in TB.

Ellsbury makes a fraction of what Lincecum makes but their Both soon to be FAs.

The chances Lincecum bounces back is extremely low. Work horse pitchers who lose velocity in their late 20’s do not tend to return to their prior form. For the rest of his career he will likely be what several people projected him as while he was a prospect: a high end elite type reliever.

On the other hand Ellsbury is a few years younger and is a year removed from a MVP season. Yeah he missed most of 2012 but there’s nothing about his injury that you would expect him not to bounce back almost completely.

TL:DR trading an Elite CF for an elite reliever is a move too dumb even for the Red Sox[/quote]

Also, you seem to insinuate that there is something wrong with being a high-end reliever. What’s wrong with that? Are they as valuable as high-end starters? No, but they have a LOT of value nonetheless. I think the Tigers and the Giants would both agree with me right now.

Now, if that’s what he turns into then of course he wouldn’t represent fair value in a trade for Ellsbury. But I think the reality is that Ellsbury is probably less likely to return to previous form than Lincecum is, regardless of what that previous form actually entails for each player.

Ellsbury has missed most of the season twice in three years and he isn’t old by any means, but players don’t ever get younger. I have no clue what the statistics would show, but I would bet a lot of money that they would show that players who suffer multiple injuries and lose significant playing time early in their career end up having many more injury-plagued seasons as they get older than players who largely avoid injury early in their career. In this respect, I would argue that the odds are stacked against Ellsbury ever playing enough to live up to a large 4-6 year contract.

However, virtually all pitchers lose velocity as their career progresses, regardless of their health, so I don’t think the fact that Lincecum has lost velocity has any sort of linear correlation with his poor season at all. And I KNOW that the statistics will bear me out on that one.

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One last thing Raj, and this may not be feasible at all for you. Do you know how to calculate WAR on your own? If so, could you please enter Lincecum’s postseason statistics into this equation along with his regular season numbers and tell me what his WAR is then? I’d be curious to see how much it goes up in 2010 and 2012 since he’s been a huge factor in their success in both postseasons.

I understand that the addition of his postseason stats won’t be enough to significantly alter the overall WAR, but since the postseason is so much bigger than the regular season, and wins carry so much more value as a result, I don’t see any reason why you can’t simply double the stats that he has in the postseason and then enter them into the equation. Even that is entirely arbitrary but I think it’s at least a good place to start.

Also, I’d be curious to see what his WAR is in his postseason career independent of his regular season stats. If it isn’t really high then you can assume that the equation has no real value.

And you know what, WAR is a horrible stat to use for pitchers anyways. VORP isn’t much better but it does have a reputation amongst statisticians as the better of the two stats for evaluating pitchers. Perhaps you could perform the same for VORP and compare the two. I know you’re smart and capable of it. Me, I’m a complete fucking idiot so don’t expect me to do anything substantial.

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No worries johnman. I have no idea how to take you off ignore though. Heh.