Question: Under what circumstances would you ever use the names Babe Ruth and Jose Hernandez in the same sentence?
Answer: BABIP.
For a statistical novice like myself, Batting Average on Balls in Play is one of the most confusing stats around.
Measuring the stat isn't the confusing part. For every ball a batter puts in fair play that doesn't go over the fence and isn't a sacrifice bunt, how often does he get a hit? Historically, league average has hovered around .300. Teams' increased emphasis on defense in recent years has knocked that figure slightly lower; it's .291 this season.
Interpreting the stat, especially from a batter's perspective (and in this post, I'm not considering the pitching side of things, which is influenced by team defense and other factors), is where things get rocky.
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Wednesday, May 2: vs. Baltimore
If it seems like I'm always writing how I'm worried about how badly X player (Phil Hughes) or Y player (probably also Phil Hughes, but sometimes Freddy Garcia) is performing, it's because this is a private space to record my secret thoughts, and it's healthy for me to have a safe place to share. You can't really approach a guy in the clubhouse and say, "Wow, you really freaking stink right now. Please stop stinking. You're making me uneasy with your failure." That's just not positive, and positivity is probably the most important element of being an effective Captain, even if it's insincere. So to get out the negativity, you write the truth in your diary, or you roll up the windows on the Rolls on the drive home and scream until your eyes throb, or maybe you take a black crayon and do like crude little sketches of the people who are interfering with your peace, then you take the red crayon and you scratch them out real violently. It's not voodoo, it's therapy, please don't dismiss a healthy process endorsed by a licensed therapist as black magic, that's close-minded. I guess this is where I should mention Ivan Nova's 15-game winning streak ended. Against Baltimore. You hate to dismiss Baltimore just because it is Baltimore, but at the end of the day, it is Baltimore.
My favorite comedy podcast, Uhh Yeah Dude, sometimes features a game called "Weed, Horse, Mind's Eye." One co-host lists three names. One is a kind of marijuana, one is the name of a race horse, and one is a figment of his imagination. Another co-host has to guess which is which.
This game, inspired by that podcast, is called "Baseball Nickname, Serial Killer, or Fakery." It works the same way. There will be sets of three, each with one of the three categories. The link to each will give you the answer. Don't click if it if you don't want to know. Good luck:
When Mariano Rivera tore his ACL shagging flies last night in Kansas City, you knew two things would happen: Yankee fans would freak out, and we'd pry my buddy JackO (a die-hard Yankee fan) away from the ledge for an emergency B.S. Report podcast. We also grabbed Grantland's Jonah Keri to discuss the implications of Rivera's injury on the AL pennant race and give us a snapshot of both leagues heading into the first weekend of May.
The baseball season is a long and lonely road. To preserve his sanity, Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter keeps a diary. These are excerpts from The Captain's private journal.
Jamie Moyer, 49 years young, just became the oldest dude in the history of old dudes to get a win in Major League Baseball. He threw 87 pitches in seven innings, allowing six hits and two runs (none of them earned) in a 5-3 Rockies win over San Diego. You can watch the highlights here, which are remarkable for the fact that they include a lot of double-play balls and other grounders, but only one strikeout. In fact, Moyer managed to break the 80-miles-per-hour barrier exactly zero times over the course of his historic start. That means his fastest fastball had less velocity than almost every other pitcher's slowest changeup.
Moyer has never been a strikeout pitcher (his highest single-season K/9 rate came in 1987 with the Cubs, a year in which Nolan Ryan led the league), and now … well, now he's the oldest guy to ever win a major league baseball game. So we shouldn't expect a lot of punch-outs. We also shouldn't expect him to leave an inning without giving up roughly 15 runs, but somehow he has the craftiness and guile to leave major league hitters waving at air. It's counterintuitive and absurd, but he's been old for a long time now, and it's still happening.
Why do you think it took Bert “No Nickname” Blyleven so many years to get into the Hall of Fame while Andre “The Hawk” Dawson waltzed in? Because Dawson had a cool nickname.
Nicknames are a lost art. You’d think that in an age of myriad user names and social media handles, our nicknames would’ve evolved, too. Instead, we get monikers a baby could come up with: “A-Rod,” “Tulo,” “Han-Ram,” “CarGo,” and so on. I'd rather root for professional bowlers.
In an effort to correct contemporary baseball nickname usage, I've come up with some throwback nicknames for a few of baseball’s hottest young stars to help make sure all their MVP awards, All-Star appearances, and other accolades won’t be for naught:
2. Friday: After giving up a leadoff single, Aaron Harang strikes out the next nine batters to set a Dodgers record. The man he beat, Johnny Podres, is one of the few professional athletes to come out of the Adirondack Mountains (hurray for the real upstate New York), and won Game 7 of the World Series in 1955.
The Jonah Keri Podcast returns for a new season, welcoming in Baseball Tonight anchor Steve Berthiaume. We start our trip around the league with a look at the star-studded Tigers. We then tackle the Angels (like 'em), Diamondbacks (love 'em), the likely-to-be-competitive NL Central, and the likely-to-be-chaotic NL East. A rational AL East conversation then devolves into chaos as Berthiaume predicts doom for the Red Sox, while I try to counter with praise for Felix Doubront and Daniel Bard.
Welcome to Diamond Reflections, a video wrap-up of yesterday's action in MLB. In this post, we talk baseball, share a few laughs, and watch some highlights. Our friends at MLB.com don't allow embedding on recaps and highlights, so for now there are just links to the video. That will have to suffice until things get a little less hoard-y.
Welcome to Diamond Reflections, a video wrap-up of yesterday's MLB action. In this post, we talk baseball, share a few laughs, and watch some highlights. Our friends at MLB.com don't allow embedding on recaps and highlights, so for now there are just links to the video. That will have to suffice until things get a little less hoard-y.
We've spent the extra money and bought some sections.
At long last, the daytime, American, non-Miami version of Opening Day is here. For some teams. If you're keeping track at home, here's how the gradual unveiling of the 2012 season has gone:
Phase 1 — Last Wednesday and Thursday, Seattle and Oakland split a pair of games at the Tokyo Dome in Japan. Apparently these were top secret, because nobody knew about them.
Phase 2 — Wednesday night, St. Louis opened up Marlins Park with a 4-1 win.
Phase 3 — A few more teams, 13 in all, play their first game today, starting with Boston and Detroit at 1 p.m. ET.
Phase 4 — Everyone else plays tomorrow.
I guess the Opening Day brand isn't too important to MLB, which is kind of insane when you think about the fact that over a 162-game season, there aren't many branding opportunities. You've got the playoff chase, the postseason and World Series, the All-Star Game, and Opening Day. Maybe bat day in Oakland. Maybe. Wouldn't it make sense to have a festive, all-encompassing, heavily branded curtain-raiser? In baseball's American prime, Opening Day was akin to a national holiday. Today, it sneaks up on you, and the season starts with a whimper. For a sport with diminishing popularity, that's not good news.
With that in mind, here are five possibly ridiculous, possibly stupid, possibly visionary ideas on how to restore Opening Day to its high status.
Batter up, degenerate gamblers! Baseball is back. I feel like I’m in the minority, but I still enjoy the pureness of a baseball game. It is as uplifting as watching a Kardashian getting flour-bombed by a nutcase animal activist. Except for Khloe. She’ll always be special to me.
Anyway, unbeknownst to many fans, the season has already started. Yes, they’re counting that nonsense untelevised two-game series in Tokyo. (Question: If two wretched baseball teams play a game overseas and no one is there to see it, did it really happen?)
Moving on … it’s time to play my version of Moneyball. The kind where you spend dozens of hours researching the strengths and weaknesses of Major League Baseball’s 30 clubs, and dump a ton of cash on a few sure-fire, season-long propositions in the hopes that come October you’re doing a curtain call on your theoretical bookie’s front lawn. Here’s what I came up with.
Science still hasn't developed a way to stab someone over e-mail, so last Sunday, Bill Simmons did the next best thing: "I'd like to get the band back together," he wrote, and I felt an immediate, sharp pain in my gut.
"The band" was me and his friend JackO. We're both Yankees fans, and Simmons wanted us to send some e-mails back and forth previewing the season. The last time we did this was during Game 5 of the ALDS, when the Yankees' season ended in a loss to Detroit. The result should have given Simmons all the schadenfreude he needed for the next decade or so, but now he wants us to do it again. The jinx potential is very high here, but now the stakes are an entire season rather than a single game. I couldn't say no, but my sentiments basically lined up with JackO, who had the best possible response: "I'm available, but if something bad happens to a key Yankee, then I'm taking you trampolining, Simmons."
