Rocket Highway

Greetings, readers! I’ve been out of the blogging game lately because I previously only ever posted from work, but then they started cracking down and filtering a bunch of shit, plus the work volume increased. I never really posted from home because, hey, if you sat around staring at a screen for 8 hours a day, you don’t really want to add another hour on to the pile. But, I want to post again. I come in to work earlier than before because nobody else is here and I can leave while the sun is still shining brightly which makes everything much less depressing, honestly. So, here’s something I’ve been thinking about lately.

The New England Patriots are smarter than everyone else
Cyrus is NOT going to like this, but it’s really the only conclusion I can draw. Look, I hate the Patriots as much as any other decent person, but I have to call it like I see it. Allow me to explain. If you’ve been paying attention to the awesome flurry of activity after the owners decided to end the lockout, you’ve noted that every team is trying to condense what is usually 5 months of free agency and trading activity into basically a week. It’s awesome because it’s the closest the boring ass NFL will come to MLB in terms of free agency and trades.

The Patriots have alarmed the stodgy middle aged men of the NFL media and fanbase by trading for Albert Haynesworth and Chad Ochocinco/Johnson. These guys are PROVEN PRIMA DONNA PROBLEM BOYS!!!!!!! they whine! They KILL TEAM LOCKER ROOM BUTT SLAP FESTIVALS!!!!! they bleat! They make it a LOT HARDER TO TURN THE MEDIA NARRATIVE INTO THE MOVIE MAJOR LEAGUE WHICH HAS BEEN THE OBVIOUS GOAL OF SPORTS MEDIA EVER SINCE IT CAME OUT!!!!! Haynesworth and Ochocinco played for shitty franchises that treated them like shit. The NFL media expects them to “man up” and “bend over and get fucked” by their owners because they’re their bosses, like every other American citizen does every goddamn day. I understand how the rage over that can boil over, I really do, but I’m glad when people can leverage their skillset against getting fucked like all of us other victims of American capitalism, not jealous. Anyway, the owner-worshiping media gave them a raw deal, even if they were not completely blameless in their situations. Haynesworth definitely is kind of a shithead. But he’s a talented one who became undervalued because of the fact that he is a shithead.

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Since I don’t want people getting the idea that this is just going to be a depressing political blog, I decided it was time to write about something I love way more than politics and world events.

Baseball is often criticized by dumb sports fans who are only interested if there are well-buried but ever-present homoerotic undertones(see: american football, which I also love, but let’s be serious) for things ranging from its slow pace to its mammoth season, and it’s even criticized by the exceptionally dumb for the fact that they don’t play in the rain.

The long season allows for lots of weird things to happen. You could call them flukes, but that doesn’t really take away from the fact that they’re really cool. Last night provided just one little example of why baseball really is the greatest game.

Francisco Liriano, a starting pitcher for the Minnesota Twins, was supposed to have a good year, but he went into last night’s game with a 9.13 ERA. That kind of exemplifies the troubles of the 10-18 Twins, who were all supposed to have a pretty good year too. There’s still plenty of time to see that turned around, but for now, they’re playing pretty bad baseball. So what happened last night? Liriano threw a no-hitter, which also happened to be the first complete game of his career. (He hasn’t pitched more than 6.1 innings in a game so far this season) It wasn’t pretty. He walked six, struck out two(the lowest total in a no-hitter ever), and got the benefit of 3 double plays. He only had a 54% strike rate. No-hitters are kind of a statistical anomaly, and they always require at least a little bit of luck to occur in the first place. Liriano’s shaky effort, though, will have to go down as one of the luckiest pitching performances of all time. Not to take anything away from it, because it was one night where everything actually went right for Liriano and his Twins. It’s kind of what makes it awesome.

Some of the greatest pitchers of all time never pitched even one no-hitter, while a bunch of nobodies’ names are remembered only because they happened to have that one game where everything went right for them. But the sheer number of games, at-bats, appearances, etc. contribute to these sorts of things popping up more often, and we truly appreciate their rarity because we know damn well how rare they are even WITH all the games that are played. That pretty much captures the essence of why I love baseball. Idiots accuse those of us who approach the game with objective, statistical mindset of treating players and the game itself as nothing more than collection of absurd number robots, churning away towards predetermined outcomes. This is of course ridiculous to anyone with a first grade education. If anything, the statistical approach heightens our appreciation of these moments. We love when the human beings playing the game buck the undeniable trends and tendencies, even if just for one game. We know the probabilities. If you’ll pardon the cliche, it’s why they play the games in the first place.

Carl Crawford just hit a 2 run homer, his first of the year, to put the Sox up 6-0. Also, the pitchers are all Excellence Robots right now. Sorry for two largely useless posts in one day, but allow me to argue in my defense: go suck a fuck

thanks for believing in me ozzie

Teal + Purple = Turtle? No, it equals cool and fun times

The New Orleans Hornets Are Gay Ass Pieces Of Shit

If you follow baseball, you’re certainly aware of the epic fucking faceplant the Boston Red Sox have experienced coming right out of the gates in this 2011 season. You also know that they were picked by a boatload of sportswriter dickheads to win the world series. That alone should tell the savvy sports fan that there is no way in hell the Red Sox are going all the way. What do the smart baseball writers think with all of their scary NUMBERS?(Which are much like ghosts in that you can’t touch them unless there is a giant novelty statue of a number and even then you still can’t beat it into submission with your powerful number-hating fists. *Around the Horn guy furiously awards points for successfully arguing that numbers are scary and should be feared.  Through phantasmally-based analogies*)

In fact, many of the necromancers and warlocks who cast their numerological magicks also projected the Red Sox to win at least 95 games this season.  The team has actually won three in a row as of today’s writing, so things seem to be picking up. Still, the fact remains:  The team’s first 10 or so games were unbelievably awful. I could cite a lot of things, but in the interest of brevity, I’ll just say that in the first 10 games of the season they scored 38 runs and allowed 69. I didn’t bold that number because it’s a funny number. (Although it is one of the triumvirate of funny and cool numbers along with 420 and 666.) I bolded it because that’s a hilarious number of runs to allow through 10 games. That’s 6.9 runs per game. The offense hasn’t been good, but it hasn’t been the worst. Through 9 games, the Tampa Bay Rays scored only 20 runs. In their 10th game of the season, which coincidentally happened to be their first against the Red Sox, the lowly Rays blasted Daisuke “bad pitcher” Matsuzaka and his motley crew of Bullpen Boyz for 16 runs. Funny how that works out. By working out, I mean nearly doubling your nine game run total in a single game. By funny, I mean pathetic. The worst culprit has been the pitching, but today, we focus on the Red Sox biggest offseason acquisition, left fielder Carl Crawford. Nobody exemplifies the cold start to the Red Sox offense more than him, with his robust OPS+ of -5. Not five, negative five.  It’s a bit unfair, but numbers like that on THE big offseason signing are going to draw some scrutiny. So, let’s see if we can figure out what this asshole’s deal is.

You! Yes, you. Fuck you.

I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t feel like Carl Crawford was the sort of gigantic investment the Red Sox needed to make. His advantages: Speed. He’s one of the best defensive outfielders in baseball and probably the best baserunner in baseball due to this fact. He hits very well too, with an OPS+ that usually totals right around 117.  That is pretty good, but not like amazingly excellent. However, in 2010 it totaled 134. To be fair, being able to hit consistently at a 117 OPS+, coupled with elite defense and baserunning, is a huge plus. He’ll never hit like Manny Ramirez, but he probably won’t be a moronic sideshow defensive liability either. He’s been playing for awhile but is only 29, still in the midst of his prime years with many to remain.  The negatives: He’ll be playing most of his games in Fenway Park, which is well known for its tiny left field, so his defensive speed is somewhat negated. Also, as Carl Crawford gets into the last 2 years of his 7 year deal, he’ll be 35 and 36. It’s hard to imagine his speed won’t start to decline in the later years of his contract, and since speed is such a cornerstone of his value, his overall decline could be drastic. His plate discipline isn’t REALLY a negative, since he’s okay at getting on base. He has a career average OBP of .333 which is, well, okay. His OBP tends to be more in the .340s in his more recent years, which is a sign that he’s still getting better in that aspect. He could certainly adjust for losing speed if he continues to grow in his plate discipline, and Juan Pierre is still an elite speed man and baserunner at 33.  So those worries are not based on very concrete analyses. Let’s turn away from that though, and look at right now.

This season, Crawford has played awful offensively. I’ve only been able to watch 3 or 4 games so far, and his defense seems pretty solid. I’ll admit I don’t really keep up with the latest sabermetrics work in defense metrics, partly because I have a hard time believing defense can be measured that accurately with statistical analysis, and the people trying to do so admit as much. He’s not doing a great job with basestealing, either. He’s stolen 2 and been caught once. Given that you need to steal successfully at about a 75% clip to help your team, he’s hurting in that department.  That’s a very small sample size though and not something to REALLY worry about. What needs scrutiny are his batting statistics, and we want to know why those are so fucked up.

Now, as for his regular batting line: (Avg/OBP/Slg/OPS)  .133/.175/.167/.341. Wow, that’s pretty bad. He’s also struck out 10 times in 60 ABs,(17% of the time) which is actually pretty consistent with his career strikeout rate of 15%.  He’s walked only twice in 63 PA(Plate appearances) which is a 3% walk rate. That is, again, 2% lower than his career walk rate of roughly 5%. These numbers are  lower than what Hot Carl is used to, but not by a whole lot, and not nearly enough to explain the awful numbers he’s putting up on his batting split. Things are going wrong on the balls he’s putting in play.

This brings me to my next point: BAbip. It stands for batting average on balls batted in play, which includes any ball put into the field of play. Homeruns do not count, unless it’s an inside-the-park. BAbip is a useful stat for determining if the sky is falling on a given player’s head and he’ll be a shitty bum loser forever, or if he’s just getting unlucky and is coming up on a resurgence, or if he’s playing way above his head and will fall back to earth sometime soon.

Didn't think you'd be reading about equations did you, shithead? Hahaha

Let me explain: According to the wikipedia article, BAbip averages around .300 for pitchers. For individual batters, it’s more around .270-.300. That means when a player puts a ball in play, he’ll have an average of .270-.300 on those at bats alone. There are three types of balls batted in play, and those are ground balls, flyballs,(you’re a flyballs) and line drives. Players will have the lowest average on flyballs(flyballs that don’t get caught are usually just homeruns, and not part of the BAbip equation), followed by ground balls, with line drives being the highest average. Players will almost always have an average of .700 or better on line drives.  Some players can consistently maintain a higher-than-.270-.300 BAbip if they hit a lot of line drives, and if speed can help them beat out more infield singles than others could. Derek Jeter is the most famous example, sporting a career .355 BAbip. More importantly, Carl Crawford is that sort of hitter, with a .329 career BAbip. Derek Jeter, over his career, hit line drives in 18% of his at bats. Carl Crawford has hit line drives in 16% of his at bats, and his average on those line drives is .735. Carl Crawford is also more adept than most at beating out ground balls, and he has a BAbip of .284 on ground balls. Jeter could be described as a player of decent speed over the course of his career, and his BAbip on ground balls is .261. Those 23 points of difference in average demonstrate the effect of Crawford’s speed in getting to first on infield singles.

Get this shirt if you want to get beat up at a baseball game

So with all this talk about Crawford’s career BAbip on ground balls and his line drive percentages and averages, what are his numbers in these fields this season? As you might not be shocked to read, his BAbip this season is an incredibly low .160. Fenway could somehow be part of the problem, since his BAbip in Fenway is .121 and .235 away. Both numbers are way below his career average, but his home numbers are significantly lower. Like I said, I haven’t gotten a chance to watch more than 4 games yet this season, but he could be having trouble adjusting to the hitter-friendly-but-really-fucking-weird environs of Fenway.  He IS hitting line drives at a below average (for Crawford) rate of 10%, but his average on the ones he does hit is .333. That’s a far cry from .735. He’s also only batting .125 on ground balls. He’s hitting better on even flyballs at .158.

So, what IS wrong with Carl “On Duty” Crawford? The verdict seems to be mostly he’s been really goddamn unlucky, but also that he’s not hitting as many line drives or beating out as many ground balls, so it’s part just a regular ’ol slump. But more really goddamn unlucky. His speed is the same as always, and the sample size is too small to condemn his variation in line drive rates. Even if his line drives don’t come up(they probably will), his average on them absolutely will. Carl Crawford has the dubious honor of having a slump to start the year, and he’s been really unlucky in his BAbip on top of that. It’s made for a shitty debut in a Red Sox uniform, but you can expect to see extremely dramatic improvements in the near future.

Thanks to Baseball Reference for all the statz.