Meaningless stats
Did you know Baseball-Reference is now updating every night? The greatest site of all time just got even better. You can forget hunting through ESPN or Yahoo for splits. Now you can just stroll over to the greatness that is B-R and get a guys current line right next to his career statistics.
Fun things learned while strolling through B-R this morning:
Turbo is tied with Dioner Navarro and Adam Kennedy for the most double plays grounded into so far. Shocking.
Felix Hernanez’s ERA+ is “infinity”.
The Mariners averaged 31,369 fans per game for the first three games of the year. The Royals averaged 31,803 fans per game. The M’s attendance per game is the lowest of any AL team during the first series.
The average age of the Mariners batter is 30.1 years old, and the average age of the pitchers is 29.0.
Travis Hafner has drawn four walks in two games. The Mariners offense has drawn four walks in three games.
Shea Hillenbrand has been caught stealing twice. Does he not know that he’s Shea Hillenbrand?
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I’ve been waiting seven years for this day. Thank you Sean!
By my count, Vidro’s line so far…
12 Plate Appearances
2 K’s
1 BB
9 Groudballs (one hit, two GIDP, one error that should have been another league-leading GIDP where Crosby dropped the ball, and 5 ho-hum outs)
…and the M’s are dead last in the AL in OBP.
That’s a stat that might not change with a larger sample size…
Thanks to Safeco, the M’s are leading the league in fewest homers allowed.
Its almost sad to read that attendance stat, from what our attendance use to be and to one of bottom teams.
We’ve been outdrawn at home by the Royals.
The Royals.
Yes but the Royals have been hosting the Red Sox which bring out a lot of visiting fans.
That crowd I saw on ESPN was sure a pro-Red-Sox crowd.
…
A team BA of .180. Yikes! That’s bad, as well as the OBP. Nice to know that Hargrove preached patience to the hitters this spring.
Also, to wit, does Mike Scoiscia know Shea Hillenbrand is Shea Hillenbrand? Not sure Shea can ignore a steal sign from the dugout via the coaches… unless he reverts to old habits and plays for himself. Not sure the ship is sinking just yet, tho….
I am guessing Hillenbrand was picked off and was “caught stealing” at second. I didn’t see the games, just a guess.
Attendance this year is actually 8% higher than last year’s first home series (28,987) – and the team still turned a tidy profit in ‘06 (even before the Nats sale proceeds came in). They will still draw 30-35K on the weekends, boosted by Griffey’s return, Edgar Night, Yankees & Red Sox, sunny weather, and a never-ending supply of kids promos. The beauty is that none of those factors depends on their actual W-L record. If they happen to “compete” in the AL West, it would be all upside from a revenue perspective IMO.
Funny, I was just reading the Shea Hillenbrand comment in the BP 2007 book, and it had a line about how “he thinks he’s a bit of a star.”
I think Shea’s just trying to think outside the box.
I checked I think yestereday over at BP – they listed Felix’s ERA+ as 48,000.
The combo of your Shea Hillenbrand comment and Royals news reminds me of one of my favorite baseball quote, by former Royal Clint Hurdle after he made a bad play on a fly ball:
“I went after it like I was Willie Wilson, but I forgot I was in Clint Hurdle’s body.”
Yes but the Royals have been hosting the Red Sox which bring out a lot of visiting fans.
Any Red Sox game within 2000 miles of Boston will attract 20,000 Red Sox fans. Roughly half of them will have travelled from Boston.
Don’t these people have jobs? LOL.
Well, yeah…And that should be the point from the management side. They ARE doing their job from the marketing side–and that is as it should be. They really SHOULD be worrying about their baseball operations, because with all that money spent, they SHOULD be competing and that added revenue is “low hanging fruit”.
[napoleon]I wish I had like a infinity of Felixes. Dang.[/napoleon]
Thinking outside the box is great, but unless your feet can keep up it’s a good idea to keep them near the base.
You know, as I said to someone last night, I’d be very happy with taking two of three all year, and doubly happy to take two of three from the A’s, and insanely happy to take two of three from the AL West. I just don’t think it’s going to happen. As great as Felix is, he’s not going to be that dominant against every team in every start, and if the M’s aren’t able to provide run support for the other four starters who will never suppress the opposing team the way Felix did to the A’s…. But I’m not saying anything you don’t already know.
Maybe we could send Baseball Reference a few dollars to hire someone to build a less-blinding UI.
I thought Turbo was supposed to be clutch.
You know, if this kind of thing interests you or you’re just curious about what exactly Betancourt is testifying about on an off-day, there’s an article over at Fortune (via CNN). It’s a little vague on the specifics of the case but it does sketch in the outline and actors:
The story also makes this interesting observation:
Fortune/CNN is updating the story daily, so we should hear some details of Betancourt’s testimony tomorrow.
Amusing side-note to the jury selection:
I never would have guessed that there are 150 MLB players from the Dominican Republic. Can that possibly be true? Or did they could minor leaguers?
23: 150 out of 750 MLB players doesn’t seem too unreasonable. There are a gazillion MiLB players.
I was looking at the Cincinatti/Cubs box score and I see Dunn is hitting second. There is alot of stuff about lineup positioning not mattering, but that seems like an odd place to me. Am I still thinking to “old fashioned”??
Last I checked, every team seems to have like 5-10 Dominicans, so that number doesn’t seem too unreasonable to me. The DR has taken MLB by storm these last couple decades.
750 is only the number of players on active rosters at any given time (until roster expand in September). Well over 1,000 players appeared in major league games last year.
My new nickname for Jose Vidro: “V-Drought” ….
Jose Vidro: The Puerto Rican Carl Everett?
Wells @ 21: I hope not, because if they do, it will probably be loaded up with all kinds of elaborate flash and stuff with a 50k stylesheet and will take forever to load. I like the way B-R pops back and forth. Please don’t turn it into MLB or ESPN or any of the thousand other major sites that are pretty and unusable.
1257 players were active last year at some point. I don’t know if that means they all registered an appearance in a game or not. But yes, 150 of them were Dominican, 11.9%. There are quite a few more Dominicans in the big leagues than there are African-Americans. One of the big stories in recent years has been the relative disappearance of American blacks from baseball — down by more than half in the past decade or so — accompanied by a huge increase in Dominicans, Venezuelans, and Puerto Ricans (who are technically Americans — PR is part of the US), but are almost always counted separately). There are almost as many Venezuelans as African-Americans.
The only non-Latino American blacks on the M’s (”traditional African-Americans”, as this gets more complicated; I have an “African-American” co-worker who was born in Africa of East Indian ethnicity) are Rhodes and Ellison, I think. Ibanez is American born but Latino in origin. HoRam is Latino but American and white. We have four Dominicans (Beltre, Guillen, Batista, Mateo), two Venezuelans (Lopez, Hernandez), a Puerto Rican (Vidro) and a Cuban (Betancourt). We also have two Japanese and ten non-Latino American whites.
On the 40-man roster, we have two additional Venezuelans (Cesar Jimenez and Oswaldo Navarro), a Korean (Baek), and a Curaçaoan born in the Netherlands (Wladimir Balentien).
Don’t forget Michael Wilson.
Wow that BR site is ugly.
As Dave points out, it’s the best website of all time. Ugly? It’s beautiful; did you see the rows and columns of beautiful numbers? And practically every word on the entire site is hyperlinked; it’s really the most spectacular use of the hyperlink on the web, like a Baseball Encyclopedia where you can see every page at once. Year-team-league-player, blam blam blam. I’ve spent probably over a thousand hours clicking through it.
I also just compiled a nationality list for the M’s minor-league franchises and then accidentally erased it. Dammit! When is the whole world going to go to infinite-undo?
Michael Wilson is African-American, you’re right.
When I researched stats before my fantasy drafts, BR was the only place I went. When I want to look up something, BR is where I go. It doesn’t look great but they’ve compiled EVERYTHING. The only thing I can think of that’s missing are individual boxscores, and retrosheet has that covered. But really, that’s nitpicking.
Steve’s right – B-R’s site is very nearly perfect. It’s like the online unabridged OED of baseball (the online unabridged OED is also a great site featuring extensive internal linking).
We can add Michael Wilson to the Reggie Cleveland All-Stars!
You just got Simmons’ed!
The Royals only drew 23,170 today, the attraction of Matsuzaka’s debut notwithstanding. So comparing three-game totals (the only meaningful possibility, since Opening Day crowds distort the numbers when not comparing like samples) Seattle fans are ahead of Kansas City. Though of course beating the Royals is no great accomplishment.
Oh my! Apparently DMZ can be nicknamed “The Rooster” now. I’m watching ESPN and they’re talking about…
dun dun DUUNNNNN!!!
Francisco Rodriguez and the allegations that he’s cheating!
Well, they haven’t talked about it yet. Apparently Orel Hersheiser is going to make a formal ESPN Sportscenter rebuttal on it tho. They’ll disguise it as “his opinion”, but I’m relatively sure that ESPN will downplay this as much as possible.
Then let the controversy and conspiracy build so they can milk the story more.
In the entire M’s system last year, from the Mariners on down to the Arizona League, 225 players appeared at least once.
Of these, 147, or 65.3%, were born in the USA. This includes as many as 12 Latino players, such as Ibanez and Guardado, Marcos Villezcas, and so on. The Latino number is not too reliable, as I don’t know if, for instance, Danny Santin (born in Miami) is Latino or not. Note also that Chris Snelling was born in the USA, and is counted there, not in Australia below.
The Dominican Republic supplied 24 players, or 10.7%.
Venezuela 19, or 8.4%
Canada 6, or 2.7%
Colombia 5, or 2.2%
Puerto Rico 4, or 1.8%
Australia, Cuba, and Taiwan 3, or 1.3%, each
Japan, Korea, and Mexico 2, or 0.9%, each
Curaçao, Italy, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, and the Virgin Islands supplied 1, or 0.4%, each. The birthplace of Balentien is reported in different places as Curaçao or the Netherlands; he’s listed as Curaçaoan here (but not in my post 32 above).
For this, I used http://www.thebaseballcube.com, which is the SECOND best website in the world. B-R doesn’t do minor leagues, unfortunately.
Thus endeth the most useless of all the useless statistics lesson for today.
25: You’re too old-fashioned. If I were managing the Red Sox, for example, I’d probably be batting Manny 2nd, behind Youkilis, then Drew, then Ortiz.
They talked about it. Orel argued that using a little stick-um for grip was culturally acceptable (which I discuss in the book) but it’s when you use too much and get movement on the ball that you get in trouble (which I also discuss in the book).
I like that I’m referred to as “a website” and not mentioned by name, much less the book. Sigh.
As expected, Sportscenter and Orel was playing it off as something to help grip the ball better and was even claiming that not only do 65% of all pitchers use something like that to help “grip” the ball, but that it HELPS the game better because now errant pitches aren’t dinging off people’s domes.
Y’know… this is the kind of half assed shit I expect from ESPN. The weather wasn’t cold, pitchers without control do not make it to the big leagues, bean balls are not as common as they were 30 years ago, and the rosin bag is there to help grip. Anything else that you have on your body / hat to help doctor the ball is cheating.
By the way, the big story from today’s Royals-Red Sox game:
Zack Greinke is back. I’m really happy for him.
Well, I don’t think they mentioned the website’s name for several legal reasons. I mean, it would be referencing your book indirectly and therefore promoting it. So I’m not surprised about that at all.
But God, what a half’assed reply. Hearing Gammons say that is hilarious, especially since you reference an article of his where he talks about Tommy John of cheating in the book!
> then Drew, then Ortiz.
You want to make it easier on the opposing team’s bullpen management by sticking consecutive righties in front of consecutive lefties?
Mike Myers does not like facing Manny in between Ortiz and Drew. He’d love to face Drew then Ortiz.
Yes! I wrote that up in CGB: 60-something in Anaheim is not at all the same as using something a little tacky in the World Series in Detroit, where it’s cold and nasty.
You know, I didn’t think the buzzsaw of hype could spin any faster, but after Kaibutsu’s* performance today the Dice-K dynamo may start altering the earth’s magnetic field in the Boston area. Does everybody realize the frenzied maelstorm the M’s are walking into for Matsusaka’s home debut on the 11th? And if that wasn’t enough, his first pitch will be to Ichiro. Red Sox Nation. The nation of Japan. And, bobbing along like a cork in a hurricane, the good ship Mariner. At least we get to watch on TV. This is going to be nuts.
(And I hope the M’s light him up like a bag of reservation fireworks)
* “Monster” — see here (and 333 pitches in one 90 minute bullpen session? Really? Yikes.)
Any Red Sox game within 2000 miles of Boston will attract 20,000 Red Sox fans. Roughly half of them will have travelled from Boston.
The reason, as the other poster enquired, is that it is very difficult and expensive to attend a Red Sox games. I can see it being cheaper to fly to Seatte to watch the game, especially this year.
Steve T:
Yeah, it would change baseball’s landscape/demographic numbers a bit if the Cuban players could be signed. However, Chavez has been making noises about nationalizing Venezuelan baseball, as the players are often signed for dirt-cheap. If so, that’d really piss off MLS who has established a LOT of academies there. And would change that demographic landscape yet again.
Don’t these people have jobs? LOL.
Their job is to drink until their livers give out.
Before 2004, they were romantic, snakebit, lovable drunks. After 2004, they’re just drunks.
Give me Yankees fans any day over Bosox fans. Yeah, Yanks fans are arrogant and full of themselves, but they’re hardcore fans and decent people.
Last year this drunk Yankees fan gets up and starts swearing at the ump at the top of his lungs in his NY accent. Then he looks down, sees my two year old, and apologizes profusely for using profanity in front of her. (I hadn’t said a thing, he just saw her there.) Then he offers to buy me a beer. We ended up talking for about an hour about baseball.
Meanwhile, every time I go to an M’s-Bosox game it’s the same smell of stale beer and vomit flowing from the most arrogant, priggish drunks on the planet. Yeah, I know it’s the way it used to be (having grown up in Texas League parks), but even then, the drunks generally weren’t all this asinine, or combative. And they’re always really young, like they’re in Seattle on Daddy’s trust fund.
Damn, I want their jobs
Wait, no I don’t! I value my internal organs and my intelligence.