ALERT:
Oh my. Hat tip to Big League Stew for the heads up.
Coco Crisp awesome
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Category Archives: Other Baseball
Phillies fans should take this well
I hate the fans. It is bad enough that they bother us during the season, but they will not leave us alone in December when we go out to eat. We stayed here during the off season last year, but we will be going to California this year. There must be something particularly bad about Phillies fans because all the players leave in the off season.
– Sarah Madson, wife of Phillies reliever Ryan Madson.
Hope you like being intentionally vomited on, Mrs. Madson. Via Mike.
Well this is weird
Zach passes along this bit of weirdness from a rain delay during a college baseball game:
The especially strange part is that some of these seem like they had to have been rehearsed. The only explanation I can come up with is that college baseball teams — these ones, at least — participate in the age-old football-camp tradition of performing sketches to build chemistry. (By “age-old” I mean we did it in high school and I’ve spoken to a few people from other high schools that did the same thing.)
My high-school football team went away to some camp in Pennsylvania for a week before every season, and the last night there each bunk would put on some sort of short show for the rest of the camp. The catch was that the bunk with the best performance (as determined by the coaches) got to sleep in and skip the next morning’s 3.5-mile run. So every year the bunk with mostly linemen in it — my bunk — just put in way, way more work on the sketch than everyone else. Junior year I wrote a full musical number that culminated in a kickline.
The annual thorn in our side was my friend Bill, a quarterback, who did such astounding impressions of every coach that his bunk didn’t even really need to script anything to produce a hilarious sketch.
Duff McKagan recognizes the whims of small-sample size
Yeah, that’s right, Duff McKagan from Guns N’ Roses. Turns out he writes a column for ESPN.com, and thinks it’s important to keep the first 10 games of the baseball season in perspective. I would imagine you need a good deal of patience to put up with Axl Rose for as long as McKagan did. Also: McKagan is a Mariners fan, and you better believe I’m going to try to get him on the phone for to preview the next Yankees-Mariners series on the Baseball Show. Both of these are ridiculous pipedreams, but we’re also hoping to land Geddy Lee to chat Blue Jays. The Bass-ball Show?
The predictive value of the first ten games
It’s clear from the chart that there is some correlation between a team’s first 10 games and the rest of the season. Out of the 39 teams that won three or fewer of their first ten games, only the 2002 Angels finished the season with 90 or more wins. (After starting the season 3-7, that Angels team won 99 games and the World Series!) Two others (the 2006 Padres and the 2007 Phillies) managed to make the playoffs despite slow starts. Though it wouldn’t be an unprecedented comeback, the Red Sox and Rays have a lot of work to do to catch up to preseason expectations.
Dewan looks at teams’ records after the first 10 games of every season since 2002 to determine what percentage of slow-starting and fast-starting squads win 90 games and/or make the playoffs. Fear not, Mets fans: 21% of teams that started out 4-6 still managed to make the postseason, so 2011 is far from over. But you knew that.
What I would love to see — and as I asked at the Baseball Think Factory thread where I found this — is the same chart made up for the some arbitrary other ten games of the season, like the first ten games of August or something.
It seems reasonably intuitive that if you stopped a season at any given point and looked at every team’s last ten games, those that won seven or more would more likely (not certainly, just more likely) be good teams that would go on to win 90 games and make the playoffs, and the teams that won three or fewer would more likely be bad teams unlikely to reach the postseason.
So what I’m wondering is if the first ten games of a season are any more predictive than any other ten games of a season. I tend to doubt it, but I have been surprised before.
Alfredo Griffin, 1987 Topps
In the comments section earlier, Justin mentioned Alfredo Griffin, which reminded me of one of my favorite baseball cards ever. Why does the 1987 Topps set obliterate every other year and brand? (Answer: Because I was six years old and getting into baseball for the first time, almost certainly.)
Rivals no more?
Luke O’Brien at Deadspin points out that a Wall Street Journal article claiming that Phillies fans no longer consider the Mets a rival used doctored photos of Phillies fans holding up innocuous signs.
First off, anyone who thinks that Phillies fans no longer hate the Mets should go to Citizen’s Bank Park dressed in Mets attire. You’re talking about deep-seeded and very likely Freudian animosity toward the whole city, not the type of fleeting distaste that’s going to pass after a couple years of the Phillies being good.
Second, I have uncovered the original undoctored* photo of the Phillies fan that the Journal Photoshopped. Here it is:
*- Obviously I didn’t really. In reality this man may not endorse vomiting on children. Also, I originally had the sign say “SOMETHING HOMOPHOBIC!” but I decided that there are unfortunately plenty of Mets fans that yell homophobic things at games and I probably should avoid vaguely accusing the entire city of Philadelphia of homophobia.
Temptation overwhelms Marco Scutaro
Via Drew:
Manny Ramirez up and quits
Apparently Man-Ram broke the drug policy again and retired rather than appeal and face another suspension.
Seems like a desperate move for a guy who has already tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. I’ll miss watching him play; for better or worse, he was always entertaining.
Here he is playing cricket:
So was I wrong?
On Wednesday morning, I wrote that the Phillies’ offense is not very good. In two games since then, the Phillies’ offense put up 21 runs against Mets pitchers.
I am not the type to cling to an argument just for the weird satisfaction of convincing myself I’m always right. I’ve gotten plenty of stuff wrong, in print and otherwise, and I’m more than willing to admit it when I do. But I’m not rolling back on this one yet.
It’s two games. Two games, two games, two games, two games.
In the paper this morning, the theme of basically every baseball article is: “Can you believe that ____ is happening?” Can you believe the Red Sox and Rays are 0-6? Can you believe the Mets’ pitching has been terrible? Can you believe AJ Burnett is 2-0?
Yes, I can easily believe all of these things because we’re six games deep into the baseball season and all sorts of odd stuff happens over every six-game stretch. After six games last year, Jeff Francoeur had a .538 on-base percentage. Pick any one week of any season and isolate that week’s numbers. Look at the league leaders and the teams with the best records for that week. They will very likely be very different from the full season’s.
The glory of the baseball season lies in its length. Over 162 games, the great players and great teams distinguish themselves. Fleeting hot streaks and stretches of good luck are balanced with slumps and misfortune, and in the end we have no trouble identifying the awesome and the terrible. Six games in the course of a 162-game season tell us very little.
In the case of the Phillies, outside of Shane Victorino and Carlos Ruiz every one of their hitters is playing well above his head. Wilson Valdez, Ryan Howard and Placido Polanco all have OPSes over 300 points higher than their career lines. Neither Jimmy Rollins nor Raul Ibanez is likely to maintain an OBP above .400.
I know just citing sample size over and over again makes for boring blog posts, and for that I apologize. But I’m not going to invent some narrative suggesting Wilson Valdez is suddenly an MVP-caliber hitter because he had a nice week. Nor am I going to buy into talk that the Red Sox and Rays suck, for that matter. We need to let this all play out a little before we can draw any real conclusions.
Tedquarters 
