A simple question today, should the Giants sign Will Ohman to a 1-year $2M-ish deal to replace the struggling Jack Taschner? After avoiding arbitration with Taschner — he was signed to a 1-year 830K deal — the Giants can’t be pleased with how the Special Agent has performed thus far in Spring Traninig. Taschner’s 12 free passes in 8.2 innings… Read more →
All PFX data is from 2008. Unlike in the Randy Johnson FX post, I cleaned up some of the pitch-types for Zito this time around. The first plot is the familiar movement plot that you’ll often see with PFX data. The second plot is movement based on velocity. It’s very crude — I broke everything into 5mph chunks — but… Read more →
A very quick graph today for something I’ve been meaning to do since the offseason when RJ signed. Here’s a PFX movement plot of Randy Johnson’s 2008 season. A few quick words on the graph: The pitch-types included are all from the MLBAM algorithms and their accuracy has been disputed somewhat. Consider this plot a rough version of what Johnson… 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 →
The Giants have signed Randy Johnson to a 1-year, $8M contract. What a nice surprise to find waiting for me and other Giants fans after coming back from the holiday weekend. In 2008, the 44-year-old Johnson (he’ll be 45-years-old in ’09) showed the world that he had plenty of gas left in the tank. Last season Johnson threw a total… Read more →
Quick Update: You may have seen this post sometime last week but I had to take it down after some of my numbers didn’t jive. I’d like to thank McCovey Chronicles for helping me correct some of the finer points of the data and getting it back online. We are going to look at Giants pitching this morning by comparing… Read more →
If you watched the Giants bullpen last year, well, I feel sorry for you. No person should be forced to watch the bullpen atrocities that were Tyler Walker, Jack Taschner, Vinnie Chulk, and Brad Hennessey pitching in relief*. The good news is that Walker, Chulk, and Hennessey are no longer on the team and there’s a good chance that Taschner… Read more →
The Giants kicked off the free agent market this offseason by inking lefty reliever Jeremy Affeldt to a 2-year, $8M contract. The team, in sore need of bullpen help, made the first step among many in an effort to fix their battered bullpen. Affeldt definitely improves the bullpen but for fans that haven’t seen Affeldt pitch, what does he throw?… Read more →
During the press conference yesterday, when Tim Lincecum was asked what he said when he learned of his newly acquired CYA, Lincecum said he dropped a few “Woo-hoos!” and that was that. You’ve got to enjoy this guy. At the presser he was dressed in a army-styled jacket with a beanie. He looked like a 24-year-old but he pitched well… Read more →
Sometimes I think the Giants could be the perfect Greek tragedy. The performance would be full of strikeouts, bad hitting, and a comedy of errors and at the end of the night we would learn a very important life lesson; don’t start defensive liabilities in the outfield. Last night was exceptionally tragic. Lincecum was throwing well enough to win until… Read more →