Pull It, No Justice for Cain, and Blurbs

A brief post this morning on who’s pulling the ball the most on the Giants.

Thanks go out to the new baseball statics website, StatCorner. StatCorner has some really interesting stats including batted ball information for pitchers and hitters, daily updated wOBA scores, and much more. I’ve added them to the ‘Essentials’ link section, should be a great resource.

In their aforementioned batted ball section for hitters, we can see who’s pulling the ball the most. Pull% is defined as:

Pull% (Hitters: 58%)
The percentage of batted balls that are pulled, defined by hitting to the same side of a line extending toward center field from home plate that the hitter bats from. E.g. balls hit to the right of said line by left-handed batters and vice versa are considered pulled.

The league average hitter pulls the ball 58% of the time. To the numbers!

I definitely expected to see Bowker on the top of our list for pull hitters. At times this year, it looked like he was overly pull conscious. A typical Bowker at-bat included several foulballs rocketed into first base foul territory. Rowand is the next hitter most likely to pull the ball. Rowand is striking out more this season than in past seasons — his K% of 22.7% is about 3% higher than his career average — and could it be that he’s trying to hit for power and as a result trying to pull the ball more? I was surprised to see Vizquel pull the ball at a league average rate, I thought he would be more slappy.

Aurilia, Molina, and Winn are all around league average. Winn seems to use the entire field and has what I’d call a “slappy approach” just trying to poke the ball into holes sometimes. He rarely seems to swing for power*. Lewis and Burriss hold down the bottom section of our list. Lewis’ approach seems to be include hitting the ball to the opposite field. The data backs this up, he’s nearly 10 percent under league average for pulling the ball.

*After writing that, Winn lead off last nights game with a HR to left field.

—

Tough game for Matt Cain last night against the Fish. He throws 7.2 innings of 2-run ball, leaving with a 3-run lead that evaporates in the 9th inning when Brian Wilson can’t close the game out. The Giants ended up winning the game in the bottom of the 9th on a Molina sac-fly, but Cain’s rare chance to get a win was lost.

If you’ve been keeping track, Cain has been on a roll since the 2nd half started. His numbers:

(3-2) 2.15 ERA, 50.1 IP, 41 H, 14 R, 12 ER, 1 HR, 19 BB, 36 SO

In 7 games, Cain has an ERA of 2.15 and he still lost twice? I pray for the day when we have an actual offense.

—

Other Newsy Blurbs

~ The Astros have claimed Jose Castillo off waivers. Have I mentioned lately that I love Ed Wade?

“When you look at it, he’s 27 and he could do more than just serving a reserve role for us at the end of the season,” Wade said. “He’s got a chance to help us going forward as well, so it made sense.”

Claiming Castillo isn’t necessarily a terrible move but I always enjoyed reading the lip service that GMs have to give new players. He’s only 27!

~ Matt Palmer goes for Round Two tonight against the Marlins. His first MLB start wasn’t so hot. The Giants helped Palmer by [fixing a mechanical flaw/adding a new pitched/helping him learn a new pitching grip].

Palmer said the Giants coaches had pointed out a couple of mechanical flaws with his debut performance. No. 1 on the list of fixes was straightening up his posture; Palmer had been dipping his left shoulder too low as he came to the plate, throwing off his equilibrium and putting his control out of whack.

Palmer seems like an OK dude and I hope he pitches better tonight. My biggest reason for a good start from Palmer is that it won’t tempt the Giants to push Sanchez back into the rotation. Sanchez had good results on his MRI, but he should be handled gently from here on out.

~ Baseball Intellect has a very good article on new Giant, Buster Posey. The article breaks down his swing and gives us some ideas of what to expect from Gerald in the future.