Paging Nick Johnson
Turns out the Sox might have a need for that 1B bat after all.
Check out our selection of Yankees Memorabilia and Yankees Jerseys, all with certificates of authenticity and guaranteed authentic.
YFSF is in the NYC Blogads Network. Reach readers of 21 New York indie blogs with one click.
Turns out the Sox might have a need for that 1B bat after all.
Courtesy the fine bloggers at Fangraphs, we have this little graph:
That's the distance of each David Ortz fly ball this season, based on GameDay data points entering yesterday's game (where Ortiz launched a 412-foot blast to dead center field). The straight line is Ortiz's 2008 average, and the wavy line is a rolling 2009 average. It shows that not only are Ortiz's home runs flying farther, so are the balls that aren't getting over the fence.
In fact, Ortiz is averaging 300 feet per fly ball this month -- an average right in line with the 291-foot average he posted in his last true Ortizian season, 2007.
As Dave Allen, who authored this study, notes:
This is a small sample, but things look qualitatively different for Ortiz since the end of May, an encouraging sign for him and the Red Sox.
Clearly, David Ortiz is back on steroids. It's the only logical answer, right?
The answer surely can't be what Dave Cameron, in a post entitled "Let's Stop Burying the Living," describes:
We haven’t figured out what numbers show that a player is truly washed up. We haven’t figured out what it looks like when that happens. We haven’t figured out how to combine scouting and statistical analysis to give us a warning before a player heads off the cliff. All we’ve figured out is how to guess wrong a lot. Young player struggle, old players struggle, middle age players struggle, and we don’t have any good way of figuring out why in most cases. Just because a player experiences a drop in performance, and is old, does not mean that age related decline is the reason for the performance. More often than not, it’s just bad luck.
Let’s stop pretending that we can identify players who have “just lost it” overnight. Too often, they find it again the next morning.
Daisuke Matsuzaka is on the disabled list, a victim -- to hear the Sox tell it -- of the World Baseball Classic and the inadequate timing that provided for him to get ready for the season.
May we agree on one thing?
Daisuke Matsuzaka was not worth $102 million.There's a lot of financial craziness out there in modern professional sport, but we have not yet reached the point where a third or fourth (and in this case, fifth) starter is worth a total investment of $102 million for six years.
There's really not going to be any kind of debate about this, is there?
Well, for one thing, Bob, Matsuzaka isn't dead, so using the past tense on a pitcher with two three years left on his contract (plus the remainder of this season) seems a little unusual.
No one is going to miss a starter with an ERA of 8.23 and a WHIP (walks and hits per innings pitched) of 2.20. No one is going to miss someone against whom opponents are batting .378 with an OPS (on-base percentage plus slugging percentage) of 1.091. No one is going to miss someone who routinely gives up four- or five-run leads.
What we’ve seen at his best is a guy who throws in the low 90s and who has decent auxiliary stuff. We have seen that, in common with pitchers in his basic category, he needs to hit spots to be effective. He has got to locate that fastball on the corners. If he can do that, everything else has a chance to work.
In other words, he’s like a hundred other guys.
Understand that over half the $102 million John Henry paid to obtain Dice-K’s services was a posting fee to his old club. So the just under $9 million he gets in actual salary might be something approximating market value for a pitcher of Dice-K’s caliber.
But that’s not the way he was billed.
After this morning's post on Nick Green's home run, somewhat in response to a complaint from a YF in an earlier thread about how cheap it was (and how sports media should be berating Fenway Park for allowing so many such home runs), I emailed Greg Rybarczyk, who runs Hit Tracker, the home run tracking site that will waste two hours of your time before you even realize it.
Inspired by Brad's question in that post, I asked Greg basically whether there was a way to see which park's notoriously easy home run spots tended to be utilized more often.
A little debate is developing about the relative “cheapness” of the home runs allowed by the respective ballparks, especially in light of Yankee Stadium’s new title as Coors Field East and yesterday’s walkoff cheap shot by Nick Green.
I’ve read your emails with Yankee bloggers in the past about how the straightening of Yankee Stadiums’ right field wall has effectively shortened the dimensions at that park, and some of us were wondering if that change makes right field at Yankee Stadium an easier place to hit a home run that would otherwise be an out (or non-HR hit) in every other park than down the lines at Fenway. Is there some way for us to figure this out on your site, or do you have a spare moment to run some numbers?
Greg was kind enough to reply with a pair of extremely enlightening diagrams, which follow the jump.
There's been some talk -- seemingly among disgruntled Yankee fans rightly annoyed by the media carping about the unexpected home run proclivities of their own ballpark -- about how "cheap" Nick Green's home run to win yesterday's game against the Braves was.
And, no doubt, it was cheap. Our eyes tell us this because it snaked around the Fenway Park right-field foul pole. Greg Rybarczyk's excellent HitTracker site also tells us this because it traveled just 317 feet, the second-shortest homer in baseball this season (for which there is data; about 10 homers do not).
This raises a fun question: What is the cheapest home run hit so far this year, and how do we define "cheap"?
The last time Nicholas Anthony Green made the Major Leagues, he went 0 for 7 with three strikeouts in six September games for the Seattle Mariners.
With John Smoltz the new man in, the odd man out is Daisuke Matsuzaka.
Three items are coming together to produce an embarrassment of pitching riches for the Boston Red Sox. It's the kind of choice any general manager would love to have:
David Ortiz is not alone.
Through several days of discussion about Big Papi's awful season (short may it last), the statement has been made several times, including by me, that he has fallen apart in an unprecedented manner. It's true in a sense: No big-time slugger has collapsed to this extent in one season, though Jimmie Foxx came awfully close.
But there are at least two examples that we've been overlooking, and they both are intricately related to the Red Sox:
Player A, of course, is Ortiz himself, his numbers inching higher as maybe, just maybe, he's begun putting it back together.
Player B is Mike Lowell, whose inexplicable disappearance in 2005 allowed the Red Sox to acquire Josh Beckett. He still has no explanation for what happened that season. Player C is Tony Clark, who fell even further than either Lowell or Ortiz in 2002, his lone season for the Red Sox.
Granted, Lowell and Clark were both younger than Ortiz is now -- and Clark's post-30 career arc is bizarre, to say the least -- but here is what they produced in the seasons after their descent into the abyss. A reason for some long-term hope, perhaps:
The
Red Sox should have signed Mark Teixeira because it would only have cost them a
couple of million dollars a year extra, especially in light of the fact that they
haven’t dealt with Jason Bay’s free agency yet even though he’s not a free
agent and they might not re-sign him (but they might, also). Also, JD Drew is dead while Johnny Damon is
not, even though I am going to list statistics that show Drew is better, but
all that matters is that Damon is a free agent after this year and Drew is not.
I think that makes sense, but I am not
sure. Oh, Coco Crisp is in Kansas City, too. Forgot to mention him. Theo
really missed the boat on that guy, right?! I need to list a bunch of guys the Sox obtained thinking they’d be better
than they were – let’s see. Lugo. Wily Mo. Matt Young. Lugo. Jack Clark. Lugo. Nick Esask- no, wait, he had
vertigo, he didn’t actually suck. Still, vertigo? Seriously? I mean, that’s weak. I am a “torn ACL” career-ending injury kind of
guy, not a “I can’t go up in that Ferris Wheel” kind of career-ending injury
guy. But back to Teixeira. This column is about
Teixeira and how he would have helped the Sox, especially because Ortiz is
struggling. Lars Anderson Lars Anderson
Lars Anderson I read SoSH Minor League forums. Oh, wait, you know what? I
forgot, Ortiz wouldn’t have been replaced by Teixeira, Lowell would have, my
bad, but I have to admit Lowell is really doing well. Also,the Sox do have a lot of good prospects,
and they spend money, and that’s great and all but really it’s a lot less
relevant because they have guys on their roster who are dead. Like JD Drew. I wonder if they will find him in the Atlantic Ocean with those other
Brazilian and French people. (Just
kidding, it’s a metaphor, JD Drew isn’t dead!
He’s alive! Lugo? Not so sure, he
might really be dead!). Now, let’s get
back to Jason Bay, who might or might not be a free agent. Since we don’t know what’s going to happen in
November, I’ll just assume he will be a free agent, it makes things easier to
imagine. I also need to mention Hanley Ramirez and how
the Sox traded him, in the context of the Teixeira non-deal. Why? It has to do with those two million
dollars and prospects like Hanley, who are great players the Sox squandered for
noth-- wait, they won a World Series with Beckett? When?
Anyhow,
Ortiz is stuck on the Sox, Teixeira is on the Yankees, and Jason Bay is going
to be a free agent at the end of the year. Unless he isn’t.
Recent Comments