SB Nation User Blog: haymister

It's all down hill from here...

haymister — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 06:47:35 -0000

It's all down hill from here...

In a subscriber only article, BP points out that the Indians have the greatest discrepancy between there difficulty of schedule up until June 9th and from June 10th to the end of the season.

The winning % of teams faced so far: Indians .515
The winning % the rest of the way: .483

The White Sox are at the other end of the spectrum:

The winning % of teams faced so far: Indians .482
The winning % the rest of the way: .517

Jack Kerouac as fantasy baseball hobbyist

haymister — Sat, 16 May 2009 18:19:52 -0000

Jack Kerouac as fantasy baseball hobbyist

New book about Jack Kerouac: "Kerouac at Bat: Fantasy Sports and the King of the Beats."

Memory of Nick Adenhart Helps Juan Lara Carry On

haymister — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 23:34:54 -0000

Memory of Nick Adenhart Helps Juan Lara Carry On

Review of MLB At Bat for iPhone

haymister — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 23:14:30 -0000

With the launch of the iphone App Store and the ability for 3rd party developers to write software for Apple's iPhone, MLB has introduced a $4.95 application designed particularly for the iPhone.

Features:

The main screen has the top 2/3 dedicated to todays scoreboard. The bottom 1/3 shows the game of your choice.

Scoreboard

The scoreboard area shows:

each game
the score
the inning
and has a video icon to a link to a separate page of the application that has highlight clips for the selected game

Selecting the game changes the detail section below to the selected game. Swiping to the right switches to the previous days games with video highlight links. Swiping to the left shows the next days games.

Game Details

The game detail shows:

The line score
A graphic representation of the field with any baserunners shown in by making the bases red.
Current count.
Current pitcher with record and ERA.
Current batter with the current games hits and at bats and season batting average.
A clickable image of a globe which opens mobile safari and the current play-by-play view of the game

Scores update every minute.

Video Highlights

The video highlight screen shows:

a thumbnail of the video
short description
the length
the time
a status indicator about whether you have viewed the video or not

Clicking on the video rotates the image and shows a high quality clips with the widescreen.

Pros and Cons

Pros:

You can watch high quality video highlights away from the computer. Fast on wi-fi, don't know about 3g but imagine it will be pretty fine.

Cons:

Videos are difficult to dive in to and watch a few in a row. Considering they don't autoplay in sequence, you have to keep flipping the phone to widescreen and back if you want to click through videos
It has less than the mlb mobile site in every area other than the ability to watch the clips.

Conclusion
I spent my $4.95 and perhaps it was worth it, but I don't really so using the app unless they improve it. You can't tell a pitcher's pitch count, you can't see who is in the lineup, you can't read a preview of tomorrow's game or a summary of yesterday's game. It's just a dressed up way to watch video clips when you're not at a full computer. Perhaps they'll add more functionality, but for now it's nothing to get too excited about.

BP's Nate Silver goes political

haymister — Fri, 30 May 2008 15:01:33 -0000

BP's Nate Silver goes political

After a few months of posting anonymously on DailyKos and at his own web site about the polls and data behind the primary and the presidential race, the writer known as "poblano" reveals his true identity: "My real name is Nate Silver and my principal occupation has been as a writer, analyst and partner at a sports media company called Baseball Prospectus. What we do over there and what I'm doing over here are really quite similar. Both baseball and politics are data-driven industries."

Baseball Prospectus writeup on Lee

haymister — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 18:01:41 -0000

Baseball Prospectus writeup on Lee

"I’d venture to say that half the pitchers in the majors today would struggle to put up those numbers if they got four starts in the [low Class A] Midwest League ... Lee's stretch of pitching is unmatched in at least 50 years, and quite possibly ever ..."

Fantasy baseball fiction

haymister — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 20:13:00 -0000

The premise of this little piece is that the author's father...

...AS OWNER OF HIS
FANTASY BASEBALL
TEAM, HAS A MEETING
WITH HIS PLAYERS
TO EXPLORE THEIR
CONCERNS ABOUT
FRONT-OFFICE
MANAGEMENT.

DAD: I just want to say, first off, that you all suck so bad.

ANDY PETTITTE: I never wanted to be on this team in the first place.

DAD: Well, I didn't want you on my team, either, asshole. But I was drunk at the draft, and I thought you were that other tall, brown-haired Yankee pitcher, the one who does crosswords. That's who I wanted, you Yankee shit.

cont...

Writeup on the Cobra at Baseball Analysts

haymister — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 14:45:02 -0000

Al Doyle at Baseball Analysts writes What Good is an 83-MPH Fastball, a piece on Byrd and how pitchers like him maybe deserve more opportunities. Doyle went to the May 25 game at Comerica and spends a few lines detailing the particulars of Byrd's performance and poses the following:

So how do Byrd and his fellow finesse types survive in a time when radar guns and numbers like 98 have a slavish, cult-like following? The desperate need for even semi-competent pitching and depth in the rotation means teams have to tame their one-track quest for power arms and settle for other options.

Adam Miller...closer?

haymister — Tue, 22 May 2007 15:04:04 -0000

Nate Silver answered the following question yesterdays chat:

ericturner29 (Chicago): Who would you have close for the Tribe?

Nate Silver: Adam Miller. Maybe.

Discuss. Idle chatter (yawn)? Great idea, never happen? Stupidest thing you've heard since Steve Phillips said (insert anything he's ever said0? Papelbon redux?

Quality Starts

haymister — Mon, 07 May 2007 15:51:49 -0000

Some of us have been scratching our heads wondering why the Tribe's record is as good as it is. How come this year, the Indians are outperforming their Pythagorean record when they've underperformed it in the past?

Is it grit?
Is it luck?

Or perhaps it is Quality Starts....

....have our quality starts have made our opposing team be what the the Indians have been the last couple of years...a team vulnerable to close losses because they've had to dip into their bullpen earlier and more frequently in order to stay in the game.

I won't speak to how much luck or grit is involved in these numbers, but I think they are interesting:

Cle 19 QS
Opp 7 QS

Breakdown in wins:

Cle QS, opponent no QS: 11 W 3 L
Cle QS, opponent QS: 3 W 2 L

Cle no QS, opponent QS: 0 W 2 L
Cle no QS, Opponent no QS: 4 W 3 L

A 1992 article over at Diamond Mind points out that:

The ERA of starting pitchers when they have a quality start is over five runs per game better than in games in which they do not have a quality start (1.91 vs 7.50 overall).
The winning percentage of the starting pitchers when they have a quality start is more than twice what it is when they don't have one (.674 vs .311 overall).
The innings pitched per start is also substantially different in quality start and non-quality start games (7.45 vs 4.80).

I think there is a some argument that we are "making (some of) our own luck" by:

having more quality starts than the opposiiton.

patiently driving the oppositions quality starters out of the game before they have a chance to get through 6 innings.

Here are a list of starts where we forced there bullpen in before the pitcher made the requisite 6 innings for a QS:

Player IP R Pit-Str

J Vazquez 5.1 2 112-68
J Danks 5.1 2 96-60
J Contreras 5 2 101-56
D Rasner 4.1 1 81-47
C Silva 5 3 103-67
S Trachsel, 5.2 2 109-54

And though this line is a bit difference, the Indians still wore this guy out as much as you can hope for:

J Santana 7 4 109-74

Just some food for that. I couldn't easily dig up how many QS the Tribe had last year, so I'm curious is to what the percentage of QS's was last year versus this year....and how many QS's opposing pitchers had against us. Perhaps it was the same...and all this is just hooey...