Hooray, baseball is back. Well, sorta back. Here’s my annual don’t-worry-too-much-about-Spring-Training post. Yesterday Giants pitchers and catchers (and a few position players, too) found their way down to Arizona for the start of Spring Training. Today is first the official day when pitchers and catchers start working out. On February 23rd the rest of the roster should start trickling in… Read more →
It’s time for my annual Giants WAR projection post. You can find the link to the 2009 projection, here. It explains a few things in general and it’s not a bad place to start if you’ve never seen a WAR projection. But, the basics are that: a team totally devised of ‘replacement level talent’ — ie: freely or cheaply acquired… Read more →
How many times this past season did Aaron Rowand swing at a slider and miss completely? Thanks to the magic (and nerdery) of PitchF/X we can answer that question. In 2009, Rowand swung at, and missed, the slider 63 separate times. Seems more than that, doesn’t it? For most of the season, the slider seemed to give Rowand a good… Read more →
Tim Lincecum pitched another extraordinary game last night against the Phillies. Against a packed lineup that seems to have a solid hitter at each position in the batting order, Lincecum tossed 8 innings of shutout baseball. He struck out 8 hitters, walked 1, and wiggled out of a few jams in the mid-innings of the game. Joe Blaton also pitched… Read more →
It’s Friday. The Giants are playing tonight. I’m fully caffeinated. The weekend is almost here. Here’s some random Giants-related thoughts: Did you know that Pablo Sandoval has the 16th highest wOBA in the National League right now? His wOBA of .386 ranks him ahead of such players like Ryan Zimmerman, Matt Kemp, Carlos Lee, and Lance Berkman. I’m not sure… Read more →
Prepare for a bold statement: The Giants’ offense isn’t very good. I hope you were sitting down but it’s true, the Giants offense has done more sputtering this season than anything else. A graph and then a bunch of words. This basic graph shows how many runs the Giants have scored thus far in their first 25 games. On the… 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 →
I’ve been playing around lately with some graphs depicting what a player contributes — offense, defense, and both combined with a positional adjustment — versus the theoretical replacement level. It’s a pretty quick way to see the peaks and valley’s of a players last few years. Aaron Rowand might want to forget his first season with the San Francisco Giants… Read more →
I’ve been playing around with EditGrid this morning and I made a few graphs relating to the 2009 Giants WAR projections. There really isn’t any new information presented in these graphs, but they might help some to see just where the wins are actually coming from. I like this pie chart because it shows — in my opinion — how… Read more →
Today, I’ll be starting my 2009 Wins Above Replacement projection for the Giants. I’ve done some WAR-related stuff on this website before, but if you’re new to the idea, check out this link. It’s a good place to get started. Also, FanGraphs just posted a two-part article on Win Values. It’s also a very good read and I suggest that… Read more →