Peabody: Life, Friends Baseball

“Matt Moore is a highly-rated lefty who this season has allowed a .398 OBP to lefties. That is unusual! Blake Beavan is not a highly-rated righty and nobody cares about any of his statistics.” Jeff Sullivan of Lookoutlanding blog, wrote the above remarks going into the game.

It is worth considering beyond the fact that Beavan shoved the ball up Sullivan’s patoot.

Most Sabermetric guys believe in the big average, that the thing is that all players are identified by their stats against the average player. That is are they that average guy or are they worse or better. Using the word average is maybe misleading but it is a refined “average” for sure that looks at all players ever, or in some cases just since 1990 or so. It measures and quantifies that player very quickly. It says Blake Beavan is 20 years old and he looks like either average, below average or above average and attempts to say how far etc. Now I know he’s not 20, but you get it.

For real young players it is not so good, because they can get a lot better or as in the case with Justin Smoak, get worse. What the various formulas do a bad job is measuring how much better can a guy get and how?

For example Blake Beavan’s stuff has been described as a strike machine. Wimpy stuff, with great command, he does not walk many and he does not strike out many. He gets hit hard too often and gives up home runs, so he’s a replacement level starting pitcher or worse even than that.

What was different about today? It’s too early for the pitch fx data, but according to my loose notes he threw a bunch of curve balls today and before this he’s thrown very few. He threw them early and late in the count and he threw them for strikes and near strikes. He struck out five today and had no walks and his fastball which sits 90-92 and touched 93 was on guys due to curve ball. For today he adjusted. If he can do that he is not the pitcher that is below a replacement level starting pitcher.

For him its a sense of having a new toy. From the Sabermetric perspective and probably all around its just one game. But he did something today that nobody’s seen before from him. Let us see if he can repeat it.

Despite going 5-7 on the trip the Time’s bell cow Geoff Baker led off with a hitless wonder label on the story and missing in action since his “crescendo” of hitting woes is Larry Stone after the M’s pummeled KC and hit enough to take two of three from Tampa Bay and just missed winning all three.

It sure feels as if Stone is channeling Chuck and Howard, but that could be my take only.

Meanwhile Wedge is giving Ackley his Brendan Ryan yo-yo treatment, in one day and out the next. Smoak never gets a respite. Most favored nation status?

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 22nd, 2012 at 2:31 pm by terrybenish and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.