Major League Baseball (Part 1)

Ah, I was wondering what even would’ve led to this. I didn’t think of that play the night before.

Did either player say anything after the game about how it started?

Not sure, haven’t seen any postgame commentary yet.

Salvador Perez had to leave the game after a HBP, the DH took his catcher spot so we got a PITCHER HITTING–Grienke is in the 3rd spot in the lineup

well he might get pulled by then

Greinke can hit too

league caught up to those kids for the reds

Votto still has power but his average has gone to shit

and they badly needed a starting pitcher and got some bum from the A’s instead of somebody worthwhile

it was right there reds, you don’t know how long your window is in sports

love the story where I believe it was alex gordon who was struggling and greinke was like hey man there’s something I want you to see and gordon was excited because greinke is super smart

and all greinke did was show one of HIS homeruns and said “do that”

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in that video, there’s Greinke vs Kershaw and it’s 4 to 3 in the 2nd inning with Greinke going off Kershaw. baseball

That was well-placed pitch too by Kershaw. Wasn’t like he was throwing a meatball down the middle for him. Down and in and Greinke turned on it for a home run.

Mariners sweeps Angels who now lost 6 straight and under 500 since “going all-in”

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Their window is cut payroll to the absolute minimum level and the owners pocket the rest.

Keuchel is back. Some line today

Absolutely embarrasing weekend of baseball by the Giants. They ought to be ashamed

Feels like every national game served to me for the past week has been Dodgers / Padres.

Sometimes I see baseball metrics that seem completely impossible and here’s one of them. Fangraphs shows a Def value of 13.1 for Albert Pujols in 2007 with all defensive innings played at 1B. Pujols was a great defensive 1B by all accounts, but recall that league average 1B is starting with a positional adjustment of -12.5 (162 game rate). His actual baseline was -11.4 adjusted for 1,324.2 innings played, which equates to 24.5 fielding runs above average. He’s also credited with a staggering 31 defensive runs saved.

To put that into perspective, the difference between 2007 Albert Pujols and a league average defensive 1B is roughly equivalent to the difference between a DH (-17.5), who provides zero defensive value, and a league average shortstop (+7.5) for 162 games by fWAR math. Converted to wins it’s about 2.4 WAR in 2007. Exercise left to the reader to determine if that sounds remotely plausible.

Another peculiarity is that there’s no other qualified season in which Pujols posted a positive defensive value at 1B. There are two years where he was sort of close (also outliers) that suspiciously bookend this one allegedly incredible season, but outside of that the numbers are more in line with what we’d expect to see from a 1B (disregarding 2001-2003 at 3B / OF). In his prime years with the Cardinals at 1B, the Fangraphs defensive values look like this:

Year Def
2004 -8.1
2005 -9.9
2006 -0.1
2007 13.1
2008 -1.0
2009 -8.8
2010 -10.0
2011 -11.6

He joined the Angels in 2012 which isn’t immediately comparable due to the DH reps, but digging deeper it doesn’t appear that he was significantly better than average and the numbers are in line with what we’d expect to see for an aging 1B. Those three consecutive high seasons indicate some kind of data / coding / process problem to be sorted out, not a value to publish credulously and include as a key component in larger metrics. That’s the thing that irritates me the most about “sabermetrics.” It’s mostly just a bunch of ham-fisted, back-of-envelope spaghetti math from c.2000.

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Well the DH has changed this a bit, but with the pitcher hitting in the NL, the worst defender got put at first for every team in the league. Does seem silly to have defensive metrics purely against peers when the SS would’ve lit it up defensively at first base but at the same time I got nothing better.

You forgot the main goal of sabermetrics though, it was the way to get nerds paid by teams instead of getting ignored entirely. Just convince them this all means some shit and collect the money. Doesn’t matter if it actually does or not.

https://twitter.com/YankeeWRLD/status/1688646037777395713

Yasmani Grandal apparently wanted to leave a day early before the All-Star break and it ended up leading to Grandal slapping Tim Anderson across the face

grandal was like well I’m not in the lineup I’ll just go a day early and they were like ehhh go ask coach gotta clear it with him meanwhile Tim Anderson was nearby heard this and said fu f that if you wanna leave i’ll pay for it myself and grandal went over and slapped tim in the face. Anyway in that game, Tim went 0 for 5, Grandal pinch hit

Man people love smacking Tim Anderson!

But I don’t really understand the story, was Anderson saying like “fuck you, nobody wants you here anyway, you want out of here so bad you should leave right now and I’ll pay for it?” What earned him the slapping here?

White Sox are a dumpster fire.

Ignorant

I’m guessing Grandal was making a request that is fairly normal, probably not making a big deal of it and then Anderson decided to be a dick about it. I’m also guessing that he’s a dick about a lot of stuff and Grandal had enough of it, so he slapped him.

(of course, it’s possible that Grandal was being a dick, I don’t know)

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