The 2009 first-year player draft kicks off today at 6 PM EST. The Giants have the #6 overall pick this year after picking at #5 in 2008. After a few years of uninspiring drafts, the Giants have been on a roll as of late. Recent drafts have netted the team Tim Lincecum, Madison Bumgarner, Tim Alderson, Buster Posey and many… Read more →
In a rain-soaked affair, Randy Johnson defeated the Nationals last night to secure his 300th win. The Giants managed to score 5 runs for Johnson — the majority of them came in the 9th after he left the game — and thanks to some tight-rope bullpen work from Brian Wilson, the night ended in victory. Johnson’s final line of the… Read more →
In baseball statistics, you’ll often hear the phrase: “small sample size” thrown around early in the season. Most teams in baseball have played about 15 games so far — give or take a game. 15 played games results in 9.2% of your total baseball season. At this point, if you’re a full-time position player you’ve probably accrued about 50-ish PA’s… Read more →
There’s been some chatter about Tim Lincecum’s fastball velocity in his first two starts. By most data points, it’s down by about a 1 mph or so. Here’s a plot of Lincecum’s first two starts by only the velocity on his fastball. The difference between the two starts isn’t large. He was throwing slightly harder in the 2nd start against… Read more →
Good morning on a Monday. I hope everyone had a nice weekend and is strapping in for another work week. Something I had forgotten about Spring Training — it’s really long. The games have been going on for a couple of weeks now and yet, we’re still about 20+ days away from Opening Day. Trust me, I’m happy that baseball… Read more →
For the last 6 months or so, FanGraphs has really be on a roll by providing new features on it’s site. Today, David Appleman, announced that FanGraphs has updated it’s leaderboards section of the site. You can now search the leaderboards by career instead of just yearly chunks. This new career leaderboard function applies to things like batted ball data,… Read more →
I’m in between a couple of STAT-y posts, so I’m going to go the easy route today and just share some Giants related news. Hot out of the oven! ~ A couple of pieces of information on SFGiants.com. First, the Giants have trimmed their ST roster by five players. Pat Misch, Ronnie Ray, Todd Jennings, Ramon Ortiz, and Josh Phelps… Read more →
This might be one of the coolest things I’ve seen in baseball analysis in awhile. Chone Smith — developer of the CHONE projection system and BaseballProjection.com — has put together Wins Above Replacement Data for every player — position players for now, pitchers to be added soon — going back to 1954. This is seriously cool. Want to know how… Read more →
Big thanks to Eric Simon of Mets Blog Amazin’ Avenue for both the inspiration and some spreadsheet help along the way. (Click to large-ify) This stacked colum graph depicts the WAR values for the starting rotations that we looked at last week. I’ve set the replacement-level for starting pitchers to 5.50 runs. All projections are from CHONE with a best-guess… Read more →
/shameless plug alert This morning for Beyond the Boxscore I wrote an article detailing the results of the 2000 NL MVP race along with some observations on the Kent vs. Bonds debate that usually pops up among Giants fans. I ranked the Top-5 Finishers by total runs, here’s the results in graph format: (Click to enlarge) You can read the… Read more →