Transmogrified Tiger

Dad strength

Woodruff has good velocity and his change up looks good, but he’s not fooling anyone. 51 pitches and how many of them really had the hitter off balance, two? three?

Lol strike three to Thames was a horrific call It’s a wonder Thames didn’t just snap the umpire like a slim jim right then and there

Lol at the complete disregard they’re showing for Santana’s arm, I’m half surprised Contreras didn’t try to backpedal to third

I agree that it is silly to read too much into changes in release point and movement over small samples, but velocity stabilizes very quickly. I think it is one of the things that can give us useful information early in the season. I think the main problem last year was that MLB changed the process by which they captured velocity. So it made it impossible to measure it against previous years’ data, which is the only way you can even learn anything about velocity. So any analysis last year was horsefeathers out of the gate. And it led to a lot of guess work and confusion. But even still, looking at the guys who had lost a lot of velocity a couple of starts in... things didn’t work out very well for that group. A lot of guys were either pitching injured or ended up injured. Some others proved completely ineffective and aren’t even in the league anymore. Even looking at our pitchers: Lackey was horrible and retired. Arrieta, Lester, and Hendricks weren’t quite as effective and all missed some time. Hendricks was the only one that saw his velocity recover. Most importantly though is that velocity changes have been shown to correlate with success. Obviously a change in velocity won’t affect all guys the same. But velocity matters. With release point, it’s guesswork if it’s just noisy, why it’s changed, what a change will result in, and why it will matter, if at all. A guy could just be pitching differently but with the same results. A guy pitching slower seems a lot different to me, though. So I agree that release point and movement is too noisy and doesn’t interest me much in small samples. But velocity changes still scare the horsefeathers out of me. I’ve got a whole other rant about stabilization but it’s the weekend and the Cubs play soon so that’ll wait for another day.

i was thinking about sullivan throughout this whole post. he is great in a lot of ways, but he is a major proponent of poking fun of people who read to much into early results but also goes crazy himself with one start of release point, spin, movement, and velocity data. And especially in the case of Sullivan(by far my favorite baseball writer), I get it. Coming up with interesting topics every single day, and in the first week of the season no less, is not easy. It's just a pet peeve of mine that we don't seem to learn from our mistakes. Remember when everyone's velocity was terrible last year and then wait no it was actually the radar system? Or all the other times that velocity went way up/down and it was just a measurement issue or the guy was throwing up the night before and a few days later it was back to normal? I'd just love to see more 'here's a month's worth of material change' on this stuff when for pitchers it seems to always be about 1-2 outings.

A full game sample of a guy consistently realeasing the ball from the same spot has to at least be encouraging, no? I mean, it's neat. It's a fun tweet, which is all that is. My irritation is more with the other one. North is a really smart guy but I think there's still a ton of people trying to latch onto changes in extremely noisy data that make it little more than trivia. More analysis is better than less, but this stuff always seems to be done so breathlessly when it's just not as useful as it's made to believe. I mean, look at the timestamps: [tweet] [/tweet] [tweet] [/tweet] [tweet] [/tweet] He didn't even have verification about a wild swing he saw in the data before publishing! I don't want to come across as yelling at clouds, I'd rather see this stuff than nothing, and some of my favorite writers(Jeff Sullivan in particular) annoy me with this at times. I just think that because this stuff is so poorly understood relative to actual outcomes, people assume that people finding oddities have stumbled onto a devastating insight when more often than not they haven't.

Fire small sample size velocity/release point/movement analysis into the sun

I am happy and enthusiastic in support of Zobrist and Russell's revival, and also not at all interested in either of them getting any additional PAs at the expense of Bryant/Rizzo/Contreras (maybe Schwarber too).

Kris Bryant: 19.7 bWAR The rest of the 2013 first round(incl. Supplemental) combined: 24.4 bWAR

Iowa with the least enthusiastic walkoff I've ever seen [tweet] [/tweet]

With Perez, Aguilar, and Santana, is this the worst right side of the field defense ever?

Well he’s actually the son of the killer from Too Many Cooks, so half right

Only partially related, but he’s a good example to keep in mind that even if Justin Turner comes back this year, he’s likely to be useless to the Dodgers for all of 2018.

At first base Braun took his lead and just never stopped, Lester was looking down/setting his plant foot on the rubber and didn’t even notice until it was too late. Then Braun tried to do the same thing a pitch later and Lester bounced a throw to Bryant to nab him.

Generally agree but this isn’t a typical Lebron Cavs team, their defense is truly awful and they don’t have another all-star like he’s always had. They are or were vulnerable, the Celtics could’ve beat team I feel like at full strength and the rest of the East just sucks too much to take advantage. Agree 100% with you on the Raptors they’re built for the regular season with their depth but that gets largely marginalized in the playoffs Definitely a more vulnerable Cavs team, but since the trade deadline and with them getting healthy they still look real good. They're 7-0 with Love in the lineup since those trades, including 2 wins over Toronto and 2 more over teams in playoff position.

I am an NBA idiot and biased as a nominal Cavs fan, but LeBron was always gonna make it out of the East. Maybe with Kyrie and Heyward the Celtics would do it, definitely not with neither. Toronto's '15 guys averaging 20 minutes a game' depth isn't gonna do much in the crucible of a playoff series.

Tanking is easy they said, you just sit at the top of the draft and get stars, they said [tweet] [/tweet]

eat at arbys is this a variation of "go eat a sandwich by yourself?"

the sopranos gifs are model trains, not a cause of but instead a mere trifling distraction on our path to our imminent demise. eat at arbys

Over a 6 game sample I would have to assume that hard contact/exit velocity is very highly correlated with pull percentage, because balls that you hit the living bejeezus out of are way more likely to be pulled. Pointing out a high pull percentage is basically self evident if you’re hitting the ball hard a lot. Also, since we’re talking about a sample that small, it’s hard to look at the way they made Brinson burn 5000 calories a game chasing the ball over creation and conclude ‘welp, that’s what happens when you’re predictable and you get shifted’. Also also, it is six games’ worth of at bats and 48 hours ago they were averaging about 5 runs per 9 innings.

could not get a more visceral example of the defensive gap between Hamilton and Happ than the last inning

Happ you played that into a triple, not great

there's no way any team has half as many 95 mph EV outs as the Cubs [/self-indulgent whining]

This is my first look at Chatwood, the way he uses his arms in his delivery looks especially hard to repeat consistently.