In life, some people like oranges. And some people enjoy the taste of apples. Everyone has their preference of things — food, clothing, cars, sports teams, whatever. Everyone has preferences. This, oddly enough, extends to pitchers hitting. Some are for it and some against it. Me, personally, I’m for it. I’m not here to tell you which preference is right…. Read more →
Watching Hunter Pence go down swinging on one knee, hacking at a slider in the dirt, in a crucial at-bat in the 7th inning of yesterday’s Game Three against Mitchell Boggs was a painful sight. Pence, acquired at the trading deadline to bolster the outfield depth and add offensive firepower to the lineup, has struggled with the Giants and is… Read more →
Here’s an interesting fact: Since 1960, the Giants have only had two seasons in which a player collected 200 hits or more. Which Giant hitters accomplished that feat? If you guessed Bobby Bond’s 1970 season (200 hits) and Rich Aurilia’s 2001 season (206 hits) then you would be correct. Since 1960, the Red Sox lead all teams with 18 individual… Read more →
Short answer: Yes. Almost always. I’m not breaking any ground when I make the statement that “players that have 200 (or more) hits in a season are (generally) good hitters”. It really seems like one of those statements that doesn’t need to be made, or proclaimed from the mountain tops. However, there is a reasoning for my madness. Recently, on… Read more →
The statement: phbbbbbttttghhhhttt Baseball is a game where anything can happen. The games — on a one by one basis — are little tiny pockets of chaos, but generally, over the long haul of the regular season, things balance out. The Giants losing a season series to the Astros isn’t impossible. After all, the thing is, it happened, but when… Read more →
Our favorite writer and projection machine Dan Szymborski has an ESPN insider article that a lot of Giants fans probably won’t like. The whole article is available to insiders, but the gist is that the Giants have some obstacles to repeating, mainly lack of starting pitching depth, injury risk, and regression from key offensive players. There’s more, but I think… Read more →
I’m a big fan of Dave Allen and his work with PitchF/X. Dave has put out some really cool — and informative — graphs by using PFX data. His post today on FanGraphs and Jason Heyward’s struggles against breaking pitches down in the zone got me thinking — how is Aaron Rowand looking so far this year? Stealing, er, borrowing… Read more →
A quick graph post tonight before I turn in. I’m trying to come up with a graph that shows the ups and downs of a player’s progress over the course of a season. I know that the praiseworthy FanGraphs has been doing similar graphs for awhile, but I wanted to try my hand at my own style and it’s good… 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 →