The Giants gave the Dodgers a drubbing on Saturday afternoon, beating them 10-0 behind a what-we’ve-come-to-expect start from Matt Cain. It was a six-inning, four-leaf-clover charmed effort with only three strikeouts. Three strikeouts! What a fraud. Fortunately, his luck will run out in another 1,000 innings or so. Other than that, they looked (and smelled) like hot garbage on Thursday,… Read more →
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… Read more →
I’ve been working on the following graphs on and off for the past week. For the longest time, I’ve wanted to do a franchise scatter plot based on OPS+ and ERA+ for the Giants and today, finally, I’ve got the chance to put them online. The idea is that we can split past Giants teams into four quadrants based on… Read more →
In case you missed it — or you aren’t following our twitter accounts, you jerks — me and Otis took over ESPN’s SweetSpot Blog today. Head on over to the blog to check out the full posts, here’s a few links and quotes from our postings. The top 10 struggling sluggers since 1950 I run down a list of the… Read more →
Okay, guys. That’s enough depth now. Quick reaction: wait, Brian Lawrence is only 34? And he still plays baseball? Lawrence is etched in my brain as the example of a successful low velocity sinker-baller. I also remember him as being one of those guys who didn’t seem very good but also managed to shut down the Giants. That memory, it… Read more →
If there’s one dialog that’s defined the offseason of the Giants, it’s the dialog about luck. The rest of baseball chatters on about how lucky the Giants got, and then Giants fans get hacked off because that implies the team wasn’t good. Frankly, some of the talk hacks me off too. As we’ve already covered, I don’t think Matt Cain… Read more →
To the average fan, Matt Cain must seem like about the least controversial player on the Giants. He mostly keeps quiet to the press, doesn’t get arrested for having pot in his car. If he has any friends that look like participants in the Folsom Street Fair, we don’t see them on national television. But in the world of nerds arguing over… Read more →
First: if you’re a graph nerd like me, and you haven’t been reading The Prince of Slides blog, you need to go check it out now. You’ll notice that it’s been added to the link section on your right under ‘Friends of BCB’. Millsy has been on an absolute tear with his sab-R-metrics series — an introduction/primer to using R with baseball… Read more →
If you opened your browser window this morning and moseyed on over to Rob Neyer’s Sweet Spot Blog, you probably noticed a short blurb on the tail-end of today’s post. Rob Neyer is moving on from ESPN. It goes without saying that I wish Rob the best in whatever he does next. It’s not a stretch to say that, for… Read more →
As promised, here’s the 2nd part to my post on draft value picked up by the Giants in the 1st round. The post on position players can be found, here. The premise remains the same; I’m looking at players drafted by the Giants (they didn’t have to sign) in the 1st round of the MLB Player Draft. This time we’re… Read more →