2016 regular-season game chatter

nooo

goddamn it brownie

Dave Cameron was slamming Texas at the seminar today

"they might be an above avg team now"

really nothing can make me hate ballplayers more than coverage of their NFL fantasy drafts

thanks Olney

bartolo colon has drawn his first career walk at age 43

The rare home-run hitter who doesn't walk a lot.

toothy matchup in SF today:

Nova-Cain

nice

along those lines ive been waiting patiently for the interdivisional command matchup of yu-fister

cc has allowed 7 runs and fanned 12

@baseball_ref
It's happened 8 times since 1913:
Sabathia
Hamels
Schilling (2x)
Johnson
Ryan (2x)
Ruffing

Red Ruffing repping the real retro runyielders

HOU-BAL is a load of lulz so far, 11 runs scored in 1 1/2 innings. And Gattis just blew up Altuve's left shoulder.

what happened to altuve? he ok?

Yeah, it was slightly alarming at first. After McHugh's warmup throws in the 2nd, Gattis threw down to 2nd base and Altuve just completely missed the ball and it hit him on the front of the shoulder joint. It obviously hurt like hell but he's still in the game.

O's hit four homers in the 2nd inning before McHugh got anybody out.

dear god james shields

Weird Baseball in Denver, KC

sorry, wdn't be weird in Colorado for another half-hour, and the Cubs just took a lead

Graveman with the Maddux last night, 98 pitches vs the White Sox.

yr current major-league FIP leaders

1. Syndergaard (NYM) 2.24
2. Fernandez (MIA) 2.27
3. Strasburg (WSN) 2.98
4. deGrom (NYM) 3.05
5. Cueto (SFG) 3.06
6. Kluber (CLE) 3.08
7. Bumgarner (SFG) 3.20
8. Duffy (KCR) 3.21
9. Tanaka (NYY) 3.28
10. Arrieta (CHC) 3.33

there's probably a dozen articles about this already, but it's fun to do the crappy number crunching and worst-chart-making-ever-ing yourself:

http://i.imgur.com/1QkdJKt.png

http://i.imgur.com/7WMVeJE.png

highest ISO (0.163) since 2001 (also 0.163), and lowest PA/HR since at least 1998 (most recent new expansion era teams)

prompted by reading this relevant tidbit from fangraphs:

"Last season, 64 players hit at least 20 home runs. It was 57 the year before. This year, there are already 68 players with 20 home runs and, with six weeks of the season remaining, there are another 40 players with at least 15 home runs who have at least a shot."

I saw lots of charts and graphs at Saberseminar

perhaps i will look for the journal artcle where they blinded the batter for different segments of the flight of the pitch

first google result for "is the ball juiced 2016", but even as far back as May 1 this year there's this:

At the risk of sounding like someone who believes in chemtrails and listens to Infowars religiously, I have a confession to make: More and more I’m convinced that juiced balls are causing a home run spike throughout baseball.

I am far from the only one. It’s hitters and pitchers and coaches and executives and even rational, cogent analysts who cannot find a reasonable explanation for the spike in home runs dating back to last August. The HR/FB rate – the percentage of fly balls that end up over the fence – spiked over the season’s final two months, and it has continued this April.

With 11.8 percent of fly balls leaving the yard in the season’s first month, it marked the highest April rate since the league started tracking the data in 2002. The number mirrored those of August (12.2 percent) and September (12.3 percent), which Hardball Times analyst Jon Roegele noticed after not even a month. Roegele studied it and came to an impasse.

“I couldn't find anything to describe that amount of HR/offensive change, as far as weather, strike zone, where pitchers were pitching, etc.,” he wrote in an email this week. “I suspected that they changed something with the balls after the All-Star break last year as nothing else in the data could explain it.”

http://sports.yahoo.com/news/10-degrees--is-a-juiced-ball-causing-mlb-s-large-home-run-spike-025820397-mlb.html

538 has several articles where they're basically just openly assuming the ball's juiced

wouldn't be surprising, manfred came in and made a change

but you'd think it'd be easy to just like... open up a ball and look ?

the physics guy, Alan Nathan, did a juiced-ball prez at Saberseminar! He did cut open balls. answer: "we don't know"

wouldve gotten quite the side-eye from me in april if you told me both rick porcello and ja happ would have 17 wins while chris archer would have 17 losses @ this pt

& i know "wins" who cares, don't @ me

if you told me james shields would have an ERA of 17.36 and allow 4 more home runs than strikeouts in his first 4 starts of august i would've said "ok"

https://twitter.com/abaseballmind/status/768068609176440832

not sure where else to put this

^amazin'

@jay_jaffe

most HR thru first 21 career games:
10 (George Scott 1966, Trevor Story 2016)
9 (Mandy Brooks 1925, Alvin Davis 1984, Gary Sanchez '15-16)

http://www.cbssports.com/mlb/news/watch-jarrod-dyson-becomes-the-first-player-to-rob-a-home-run-in-marlins-park/

@ESPNStatsInfo
The Giants are on pace to be the first team ever with the best record before the All-Star break and the worst record after it (@EliasSports)

lol wow

Gary Sanchez the fastest to 11 hrs in mlb history o_o

ah yes the famous 11-home-run mark by which players are always measured

its how i judge all athletes, even non baseball players

no way he gets to 22 this year

frickin jeff gyrko has had 15 hrs since all star break

west by god virginia ftw

ah yes the famous 11-home-run mark by which players are always measured

idk it's kinda cool to do something 18,000+ players over the course of a century have never done, however obscure

Mike Everitt is having fun tonight.

Dustin Pedroia has 11 hits in his last 11 at-bats. Twelve is the major league record. Pedroia will bat in the bottom of the eighth, if not sooner.

(something else for NA to be bored by)

i only think a hitter should get in the HOF if they have 45.45 11 homers or 272.72 11 hits

I'm mostly just being a dick admittedly but the choice of 11 as the mile marker seems like an arbitrary way to put him past what Trevor Story did just a few months ago.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CrH_P2sUAAAm5M5.jpg:large

@JimBowden_ESPN
Early consensus from scouts evaluating Tebow's baseball tools at work out: 55 Run 40 Arm 40 FLD 35 Hit 55 Power

Rangers Rangers Rangers

@Buster_ESPN
The verbal jousting between Adrian Beltre and Felix Hernandez in between pitches is hilarious.