“Mystique and Aura? Those are dancers at a nightclub.” - Curt Schilling
Tonight could be Pedro’s last game ever. There’d be no better way for him to go out than with another ring. I’ll be pulling for him.
This just in:
Yankees to acquire Cliff Lee in multi-million dollar deal to use in game #3
Let’s settle down with the sweep talk. It’s only 1 game. Cliff Lee was amazing last night. He made the Yankee hitters (other than Jeter) look terrible. But they aren’t terrible. They’ll be heard from this series. It was a huge win for the Phillies and it puts a lot of pressure on the Yanks, but it’s far from over. The biggest concern I have is Burnett tonight. Will he be “Good AJ” or “Bad AJ”? You never know with him.
I was extremely disappointed with the TV coverage last night- The split screens that showed us a view of the pitch, and also a view of what Derek Jeter was doing during that pitch were novel, and solved the age old problem with televised baseball- how do you show what Derek Jeter is doing, but still see the pitches? Inexplicably, they only showed us this view on like 30% of the pitches, leaving us to only guess what Derek Jeter might have been doing the majority of the pitches!
Losing team scores the last few All Star games.
3
4
2
5
4
7
1
3
1
8
1
0
2
I suppose you don’t find that as shutting down hitting.
Median of 3. I have no idea how that compares to all baseball games.
Edited by me.
Non-rhetorical question: have you ever taken a statistics course? I don’t mean to presume or imply anything.
You may be the only person on this board who wants to hear even MORE of McCarver’s yammering.
Actually, no. That’s about three runs per game, which is a perfectly normal score for the losing team in a major league ballgame.
If you’d think for just five seconds, the relevant statistic is runs scored by BOTH teams in the All-Star game. And in the last 20 All-Star games, the average runs scored per game is 9.4 - perfectly normal.
Soon, they will deploy this technology to cover baseball games not featuring the Yankees.
“And let’s see; here’s Jeter’s salmon appetizer arriving… a diving catch!”
Winning all star game scores
4
4
5
7
3
9
7
7*
4
6
4
13
3
6
3
8
9
13
Goes to show good hitting dominates good pitching.
Channelling gonzo: “But…but… If the winning team’s pitching wasn’t good, they’d have given up more!”
froths
As if you consistently see good pitching in the All-Star game anyway, and not just guys working on their offdays, or trying to use the break to get some rest too. Some crank it up to try to show off, some recognize their responsibilities to their teams not to.
You can’t tell shit from an exhibition game, folks.
Right, which is why gonzo’s “stat” is, as Jimmy Chitwood observed earlier, little more than a silly bromide or a platitude. Or, really, simply a description of the game of baseball.
One of the worst starting pitchers in the Major Leagues this year was Manny Parra. Parra started 27 games, and finished with an ERA of 6.36 and a WHIP of 1.83. His VORP, according to Baseball Prospectus, was -23.9!
Actually, Chien-Ming Wang was probably worse, managing a VORP of -18.7 in only 12 starts, with an ERA of 9.64 and a WHIP of about 2.7.
And yet, if you look at the batting average against these pitchers, you see that for Parra it was .306, and for Wang it was .365. So, even with these incredibly awful pitchers on the mound, the hitters who faced them still only got a hit about 30-35 percent of the time.
The fact is that, if you consider every plate appearance as a competition between a hitter and a pitcher, with the winner determined by whether an out or a hit is recorded (let’s leave walks aside for the purpose of this exercise), then hitters fail more than they succeed in the game of baseball. No-one has hit .400 in over half a century, meaning that every single one of the very best hitters of the past 50+ years have failed to hit on more than 60 percent of their at-bats.
The very nature of the game of baseball–with a round bat, a 90[sup]o[/sup] arc of in-play area, nine fielders with incredible skills and large gloves, and a pitcher hurling a small round ball at 80+ miles an hour–means that hitters will fail more often than they succeed.
To say that “Pitching shuts down hitting” is literally nothing more than a truism, a simple description of the game itself. And to suggest that this tells us anything special about the playoffs, or about the All-Star Game, is simply silly. The only real relevance the issue might have in the playoffs is that, due to the nature of the schedule, with off days between cities, teams can use their top three starting pitchers for a higher proportion of their games than is the case in the regular season. As a general rule, pitching doesn’t shut down hitting any more in the postseason than in the regular season; it’s just that the very best pitchers from each team take the mound more often in October.
And on a more fundamental level, it’s just not at all rational to think along those lines, because each of “pitching” and “hitting” is literally defined to the exclusion of the other. It’s zero-sum, always; the two are in direct opposition to each other. Pitching can’t dominate hitting as a general principle any more than heat can dominate cold.
… because as everybody knows, when the chips are down, cold is the energy-related state you want with the ball in its hands.
You will note that before the Series started ,our stat freaks were declaring the hitting juggernaut the Yankees put together as unbeatable. Their great hitting was proclaimed. But as usual pitching decides the games. Sure that is not a stat. But it trumps the offensive stats. If Lee pitches 3 games the Yankees are in a world of hurt.
Who do you think would win in a fight, triumph or victory? I’m just brainstorming here.
Name one of these people.
I have to hand it to Pedro, that was a better performance than I expected. He was really *pitching *tonight. Burnett’s been better and I know Girardi is going to take him out to start the 8th, which drives me fucking crazy. He’s shown no signs of getting tired, and he’s been really good. Let him pitch! As good as Mo is, you have no idea what kind of stuff he has tonight. Stay with the guy that’s already pitching great, dammit.