Goin' coast to coast watching all the girlys shaking!

No Sleep till Brooklyn! by the Beastie's of course.

Good work Mosely!

Lately the Song of the Day has been whatever I've heard on the drive to work. A great song that put me in a good mood despite the August slowdowns.

100 million points for you and a picture

http://www.baseballamerica.com/today/minors/hotsheet2004.html
Our very own Gustavo Chacin is #12 on the BA Prospect Hot Sheet. Aside from Vermilyea, I think Chacin is the only Jay to reach the top 20 this year. COMN.

If Lilly is frustrated with his command and going into deep counts then I have one piece of advice for him that I think I've given before. Stop throwing the curveball so much when your control with it has always been terrible. Throw more changeups. I think the changeup is his best pitch and he just doesn't use it nearly enough, especially when he gets ahead and has a chance to finish the at bat early.

I'm thinking of last night when he had Millar down 1-2 in the count and then for some reason tried to throw two straight curveballs which missed the strikezone and put him in deep trouble with runners on and a full count. He then threw a fastball which was fouled off and then FINALLY threw a changeup that got the strikeout. Maybe he could have gotten the strikeout four pitches earlier if he didn't think of it as a last resort. It's his curveball that he should consider a last resort.

I'm not 100% sure but I think Josh Banks cracked the top 20 earlier this year braden.

As for Arnold, it's hard to say what his future is. A move to the pen seems sensible but then Sidney Ponson has been pitching with a partial tear in his labrum for years.

http://bradbury.sewanee.edu/Balltypes.pdf
COMN for a fascinating study on batted ball types (line drives, fly balls and ground balls) on pitching results. The bottom line is that line drive percentage globally does exert a significant effect on pitching results, but at a much lower level than the three true outcomes- walks, strikeouts and home runs allowed. For individual pitchers, (Glendon Rusch, are you reading this?) line drive percentage might be very important in understanding results.

The study was done by the author of a blog called Sabernomics. Sounds like Moffatt territory to me.

That study is interesting, and the most interesting thing for me is that BB, HR, and K rates are not related to BABIP variance, as I was nearly sure they would do. In other words, in the most blatantly basic form:

in general good pitchers aren't any better than poor pitchers at preventing hit on balls in play, or vice versa.

Some pitchers are better than others, but apparently it's independent of whether they are otherwise good or bad pitchers.

Oh! Yes! I forgot. This means that a new and more accurate DIPS should be capable of being constructed if you have, and want to use, LD% in the calculation.

Next step is to move onward from DER, and back the team LD% out of the calculation. The big challenge, though, in all this is figuring out a way of accurately measuring LD% in the first place. Determining batted ball type is not easy (it's easy to define, you do it using physical factors; but it's not easy for an observer to see) and much "LD" determination is bound to be self-fulfilling prophecy, where hits are called LD and outs FB.

Yup, Craig. That is the upshot. A more accurate DIPS that'll be much better for Glendon Rusch and his ilk and a little better for most pitchers.

You can define "line drives" pretty objectively with a stop watch and a zone chart. You'd first have to set some standards for contact to ground or glove. I don't think anyone is doing this yet.

Incidentally, one weakness of the study is that it uses IF/Flyball ratio, rather than absolute no. of popups/9IP. Pop-ups are turned into outs at almost the rate that strikeouts are, and it would be a shocker if a pitcher who gets an abnormally high number of popups (e.g. a knuckleballer) doesn't have performance better than would be projected by the three true outcomes.