Looks like it’s going down to the wire in the AL Central. The Tigers are down 8-0, and the Twins are up 7-0. Detroit will be hoping that Zack Greinke brings his Cy Young-type stuff to Minnesota this weekend.
Statistics may be older but its use in baseball is relatively young. When James got started he faced resistance. He did not suddenly have everybody falling in line. Baseball is still run by old managers and management. They do not change easily nor that rapidly. Billy Beane was way ahead of the curve.
A 162 game schedule still winds up with surprises. Cleveland and Chicago were supposed to dominate the Central. Detroit was to be last. Did not come out that way.
Detroit got handed their own ass by Chicago and Minnesota is raping KC, although the Royals are starting to fight back.
What I find curious is this; tonight’s starter for the Twins was… Jeff Manship. Okay, it turned out alright because KC’s pitching exploded, but you’re fighting for your life in the last series of the season and you hand the ball to a guy who’s pitched 26 innings in his career, and not very impressively? Just how bad off is Minnesota’s rotation right now?
None of that has anything to do whether or not the use of stats in baseball gives us useful information.
I fully concede that there are plenty of people who offer irrational resistance to statistical analysis. Your posts, and those of ElvisL1ives, constitute Exhibits A and B, and you have some good company among people like Joe Morgan and others within the game of baseball. Some people fail to understand why stats are useful, and continue to insist that stat people are just numbers geeks who don’t like baseball, and continue to pretend that stats people claim that stat tell us everything we need to know; but just because those people don’t get it, doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with statistical analysis, nor that it can’t offer some definitive information.
Once again, you offer a rebuttal to an argument that no-one ever made. I challenge you to show me a single stat person—just one—who says that the use of stats removes all the surprises from baseball. Go and read Baseball Prospectus, or one of the other Sabemetric-heavy sites, and you’ll see constant admissions that stats can’t tell us everything, particularly when it comes to the issue of prediction. I have never seen a single stat person suggest otherwise.
Actually, most of the predictions at BP had the Tigers finishing second or third in their division, not last.
I was clicking back and forth between the KC-MIN game and the CHW-DET game on MLB.com, and when i saw who Minnesota’s starting pitcher was, i had to go and look him up, because i’d never even heard of the guy. Admittedly, i don’t spend much of my time focused on the AL Central, but i thought i would at least know who the starting pitchers would be on a weekend where the whole division is at stake.
Looking at the Twins roster, they do not have a single pitcher who has started 10 or more games with an ERA of under 4.00 this year. Nick Blackburn is the best at 4.08, while Brian Duensing is at 3.69 but with only 9 starts. And that’s the two starting pitchers for the next two days. I guess they figured that, with Lenny DiNardo (who?) taking the mound for the Royals tonight, that KC’s awful hitting combined with DiNardo’s 7.52 ERA might give them a shot at winning with Manship.
I didnt actually look up their entire team stats until I read your post but holy Christ, that is one sorry-ass pitching staff. If the Twins can come back and make the playoffs, surely that will be the worst starting rotation to ever make the postseason?
Their “best” starter is Nick Blackburn, a slop thrower who’ll probably be out of baseball in three years. Scott Baker’s got stuff but he gives up homers like they’re going out of style. You’ve got one bad pitching staff when someone can honestly say “Hey, it might help if Carl Pavano’s healthy for the playoffs.”
Kansas City damn near came back, but the Twins held on. It’s only a one game lead but the Twins must face Greinke tomorrow. Detroit still controls their own destiny. I love a playoff race.
RickJay must be thrilled today. His wish has come true. JP Ricciardi is out!
Not only was he fired, I was told Ricciardi was wrapped up in Vernon Wells’ contract and thrown into Thunder Bay. San Diego is also firing Kevin Towers after 14 years.
I love seeing teams make the playoffs at the last minute, so I’m digging the races in the Al Central and the NL West (although both of those teams are already in).
There’s quite a few people in San Diego who aren’t especially happy about this move. Towers wasn’t perfect, but he put together some good teams for the Padres, and even this year, with a dramatically slashed budget, he managed to overcome the loss of Trevor Hoffman and Jake Peavy and put together a team that actually offers some hope for the next few years. The Padres have the second-best record in the NL over the last two months.
I haven’t followed all the ownership ins and outs closely enough to really have a grasp on what’s happening, but quite a few commentators are saying that this is essentially new owner Jeff Moorad’s style, that he is more interested in putting his cronies into management positions than in actually running a good ballclub. Well, i don’t know if that’s true or not, and you get a lot of that sort of sour grapes talk when there are changes in personnel, so it could be nothing, but it seems to me that Towers made more good than bad decisions over his tenure.
Maybe the Jays could have a talk with him?
Well, Minnesota managed to overcome Zack Greinke for another victory over the Royals. Greinke gave up 4 runs over 6 innings, while Nick Blackburn went 7 and only gave up two. The Royals tied it 4-4, but a home run by Cuddyer in the 8th put the Twins on top for good.
Detroit really needs a win tonight.
Doesn’t look good. ChiSox up 4-0 in the 5th. We could be witnessing two historic collapses - the Tigers and the Dodgers. The Dodgers magic number has been one for the last six games. Dodgers 0-5, Rockies 5-0.
Well, it’s all over in Detroit, and we now have a tie at the top of the AL Central. Tomorrow will be very exciting.
Someone might have spoken too soon, methinks.
Kershaw is pitching incredibly so far in LA. He is perfect through 3, and has 7 strikeouts already.
Of course, as the inimitable Vin Scully pointed out, getting a lot of strikeouts can actually be bad for your pitch count, and Kershaw is at 44 pitches already. He could do with a few first-pitch grounders to keep the count down a bit.
Still, he’s looking awesome tonight.
That’s funny. I saw that on my BlackBerry during the Tigers game (I took **gonzomax **to the game) and told him “Hey, I bet **RickJay **will be happy today.”
Christ, Tigers. Get some offense. They were hitting the ball pretty hard all night long, but always at people. I don’t know why the Tigers started Figueroa, though.
Stat boys jump all over Grienke. But the fact that he did not pitch head to head against any of the 4 other Cy Young contenders is not a number for their abacus to handle. The fact that he was able to escape pitching against the Yankees and Red Sox , for the whole season is not a coincidence. Then today is a huge game ,he comes up empty. The Twits beat him like a baby. So he winds up with 16 wins. That is a number. In gams he started the Royals went 17-16. That is a number. A bad one.
That is an argument.
A bad one.
How are those Tigers doing?
I guess gonzomax thinks nobody else knows the Royals suck.
It’s sort of funny, right?
I mean, in Greinke’s games the Royals went 17-16. If they had that winning percentage over the course of the season, they would have won a total of 83 or 84 games, instead of the 65 they actually won. In non-Greinke games, the Royals were 48-80.
So…
Winning percentage in Greinke starts: .515
Winning percentage in non-Greinke starts: .375
And, as i noted in a previous post, the KC bats actually sucked even more than average on the days that Greinke pitched.
Yeah, that Greinke, he’s a bum. The stats tell you nothing about him. :rolleyes:
So you mean they would have been just about as good as the Tigers?
It is a damn good one. You guys just are obdurate in your beliefs. Yes, I am pissed that he came up like a rookie in the biggest ,most important game of his season. I was buying your well reasoned arguments that he is almost unbeatable. That he was so good he would shut the Twits down. but they just spanked him.