Re Kathleen's corner: The Angels - Braves brawl wasn't much. Some wild swings thrown by Soler and ineffective jabs by Lopez while still wearing his glove, but nothing really landed from either. Then everyone grabbed everyone else. There is a funny picture going around with Walt Weiss dropping his head and running into Soler's midsection trying to separate him from the scrum. Soler is a massive guy with muscles on his eyelashes. Weiss is rather less so and is on the far side of 60.
As a Braves fan ... Lopez absolutely was throwing at Soler. An earlier homer then a HBP then one that was very up and pretty in ... yeah, I can see why the latter is annoyed.
And of course Soler is responsible for one of the most joyous events in recent Braves history. His homer in Houston in the final game of the 2021 World Series hasn't as far as I can tell landed yet. The Artemis II astronauts may see it soon.
I was wondering if I might see you at the Springsteen show last night. I didn’t, but my daughter did give Bruce a bracelet during Out in the Street, which he then wore for the rest of the show, which almost made up for not having a Posnanski encounter 😉
Roman Anthony, per 162 games in his brief MLB career, is right at 198 Ks. Wow!
I think of Freddie Freeman as a high average hitter with plenty of Ks. He was over .300 when he had 171 in '16. And is basically a .300 hitter for his career (just a smidge under after his slow start this season) while regularly K-ing 130 times a season. But of course my "plenty of Ks" is based on a childhood when Reggie Jackson's usual 150 would be a league leading figure. Freeman's number is in a *very* different era.
My biggest takeaway is how few successful challenges there have been: about one per team per game (351 in 334 team-games). Obviously not every bad call gets challenged, but if we accept that egregious ones tend to get challenged even early/low leverage, what it looks like to me is that there are/were a lot fewer bad ball/strike calls than the average fan believes.
Which isn't really news if you've been following Umpire Scorecard the last few years, but interesting confirmation.
What a great line about the perfect pitch, "It’s “only” 93 mph, but it’s moving like the Jeffersons, and it looks too high and too far inside to hit." Moving like The Jeffersons. I will be thinking about the deluxe apartment in the sky!
The batting charts show exactly what I predicted in yesterday's comments: challenges on pitches high or low are more likely to succeed because umpires are more accurate horizontally than vertically since they have the plate to use as a visual reference for the sides of the zone, but have to guess at what ABS sees as the top and bottom.
What's interesting about that is that, when they were first working on this stuff, ~10 years ago, umps were better at high/low, probably because the computer definition wasn't really matched to the players: the umpire knew where the knees really were, and the computer didn't. But now the knees aren't actually the zone's definition.
Also, regarding those low pitches that were overturned: part of the problem with ABS is that it treats a 3D space as if it were a 2D square. I wonder how many of those pitches “crossed the plate” as strikes but maybe dipped low before they crossed the ABS plane.
The strike zone is no longer a 3D space. Balls moving that fast don't drop all that much in the course of traveling from the front of the plate to the location of the 2D zone, but in close cases it could matter.
That first sentence is a kind of the Trojan Horse of this whole thing. In order to make things easier for the computers, they redefined the 150-yo strike zone. OK!
Not sure I agree with the start of your second sentence: when they show straight-on batter views, the drop from front knee to back knee is obvious even on non-curves. We're talking about 0.1" margins for ABS, and the ball is clearly dropping more than that in 8.5" between the front & back of the plate and the 2D zone
Are batters better at overturning calls on their side of the plate or the other side? And high or low? In other words, does proximity their eyes matter? Are catchers equally good all around the box?
Re Kathleen's corner: The Angels - Braves brawl wasn't much. Some wild swings thrown by Soler and ineffective jabs by Lopez while still wearing his glove, but nothing really landed from either. Then everyone grabbed everyone else. There is a funny picture going around with Walt Weiss dropping his head and running into Soler's midsection trying to separate him from the scrum. Soler is a massive guy with muscles on his eyelashes. Weiss is rather less so and is on the far side of 60.
As a Braves fan ... Lopez absolutely was throwing at Soler. An earlier homer then a HBP then one that was very up and pretty in ... yeah, I can see why the latter is annoyed.
And of course Soler is responsible for one of the most joyous events in recent Braves history. His homer in Houston in the final game of the 2021 World Series hasn't as far as I can tell landed yet. The Artemis II astronauts may see it soon.
I was wondering if I might see you at the Springsteen show last night. I didn’t, but my daughter did give Bruce a bracelet during Out in the Street, which he then wore for the rest of the show, which almost made up for not having a Posnanski encounter 😉
I was at the Springsteen show last night at the Forum. 76 years old and the Boss has still got it!
Roman Anthony, per 162 games in his brief MLB career, is right at 198 Ks. Wow!
I think of Freddie Freeman as a high average hitter with plenty of Ks. He was over .300 when he had 171 in '16. And is basically a .300 hitter for his career (just a smidge under after his slow start this season) while regularly K-ing 130 times a season. But of course my "plenty of Ks" is based on a childhood when Reggie Jackson's usual 150 would be a league leading figure. Freeman's number is in a *very* different era.
My biggest takeaway is how few successful challenges there have been: about one per team per game (351 in 334 team-games). Obviously not every bad call gets challenged, but if we accept that egregious ones tend to get challenged even early/low leverage, what it looks like to me is that there are/were a lot fewer bad ball/strike calls than the average fan believes.
Which isn't really news if you've been following Umpire Scorecard the last few years, but interesting confirmation.
I'm hoping we'll soon have enough data on the challenges to see:
Which *teams* are the most / least successful at challenges?
What counts have the most / least challenges?
What innings have the most / least challenges?
What a great line about the perfect pitch, "It’s “only” 93 mph, but it’s moving like the Jeffersons, and it looks too high and too far inside to hit." Moving like The Jeffersons. I will be thinking about the deluxe apartment in the sky!
The batting charts show exactly what I predicted in yesterday's comments: challenges on pitches high or low are more likely to succeed because umpires are more accurate horizontally than vertically since they have the plate to use as a visual reference for the sides of the zone, but have to guess at what ABS sees as the top and bottom.
What's interesting about that is that, when they were first working on this stuff, ~10 years ago, umps were better at high/low, probably because the computer definition wasn't really matched to the players: the umpire knew where the knees really were, and the computer didn't. But now the knees aren't actually the zone's definition.
Also, regarding those low pitches that were overturned: part of the problem with ABS is that it treats a 3D space as if it were a 2D square. I wonder how many of those pitches “crossed the plate” as strikes but maybe dipped low before they crossed the ABS plane.
The strike zone is no longer a 3D space. Balls moving that fast don't drop all that much in the course of traveling from the front of the plate to the location of the 2D zone, but in close cases it could matter.
That first sentence is a kind of the Trojan Horse of this whole thing. In order to make things easier for the computers, they redefined the 150-yo strike zone. OK!
Not sure I agree with the start of your second sentence: when they show straight-on batter views, the drop from front knee to back knee is obvious even on non-curves. We're talking about 0.1" margins for ABS, and the ball is clearly dropping more than that in 8.5" between the front & back of the plate and the 2D zone
Are batters better at overturning calls on their side of the plate or the other side? And high or low? In other words, does proximity their eyes matter? Are catchers equally good all around the box?
Any analysis starts with identifying where umpires make more errors. You can't overturn a correct call.