Good morning blog readers. It’s Saturday! The sun has finally come out, the weather is getting nicer, and baseball is just around the corner.
Let’s celebrate with some links!
* Is Jeff Suppan getting close to locking up the last pitcher’s spot on the roster? Coming off his worst start of the spring, Suppan “rebounded” and threw 4 innings against the Dodgers while allowing 2 runs, and 7 hits. As you know, Spring Training stats are essentially useless. However, I’ll use them to prove a point when they agree with me — Suppan has pitched 14 innings this spring while striking out just four batters. Yikes. For the past two years Suppan has been a mess. Over that time he’s thrown 263 IP with a K/9 of 4.5. His ERA+ over the past two years? 78. At this point, I think I would rather have Vogelsong.
* Rosenthal has a nice little article on Brandon Belt forcing the Giants’ hand. I’m of the feeling that if a player is ready, he’s ready. Service clock be damned! Belt starting the year in Fresno wouldn’t be the worst thing, but from the few bats that I’ve seen him take this spring, the ball just flies off his bat. Even Belt doesn’t start the year in San Francisco, look for the Giants to use Pat Burrell and maybe even Mark DeRosa in LF until he’s ready. Those aren’t terrible ‘Plan B’ options, but Belt has become an exciting prospect in a very short time.
* I hate to utter the phrase ‘Bruce Jenkins’ on my blog, but JoePo has a very nice rebuttal to some classic Jenkins tripe. The entire ‘mother’s basement’ myth is just so hacky these days. Please, find a new piñata to swing on. Grant also has a hilarious response on McCovey Chronicles to Jenkins. Go read it.
* This link is a little stale, but friend of the blog JT Jordan has moved on to McCovey Chronicles to assume the role of ‘stat guy’. JT really does a nice job of explaining the advanced statistics in easy-to-understand terms. We wish him the best of luck!
* Rory Paap, of Paapfly, updates his THT post on World Series winners. Rory based his graph off of this post of mine and he fixes a couple of problems (mainly where I was sticking my league average OPS+ line and some graph formatting errors) and the results are still quite interesting. Rory’s original piece is one of the reason’s why I love the statistical baseball community so much. It’s almost an instant peer review, and in the end, it makes learning that much easier. Thanks to Rory and everyone else that pointed out some of the original problems with my graph.
