Friday Morning-ish Astros, etc. Round Up
by Stephen Higdon on Aug 21, 2009 11:07 AM CDT
in Link Dumps
A few links before the lunch break to help tide you over until game time:
- A hat tip has to go out out to FarmStros on this one. Kyle Greenwalt's hometown newspaper has an in depth interview with him on what it was like to transition from being in high school to being a professional baseball player, virtually overnight. It really is a fantastic read to get a human interest take on life in the minor leagues. Thanks, FarmStros. For those of you not following him @farmstros you're missing out some good haikus. He's got a 40-day streak going...but can he hit 56?
- Speaking of minor league action, Minor League Splits now has aggregated minor league recaps for every organization. I've got it bookmarked for the Astros, I imagine several of you will/have too.
- Doug Brocail threw a simulated game yesterday and Astros.com's piece has nothing but positives to say about it. Yesterday, though, Alyson Footer was describing how he was getting crushed by Jason Michaels and Edwin Maysonet over twitter. Her best guess is that he doesn't get activated until the rosters expand.
- Although no one really saw it coming, Michael Bourn is a star caliber player.
- Brian McTaggart checks in with Mike Hampton to see how he is reacting to his potentially career ending injury. It sounds like Hampton's effort to rehab instead of have surgery is a last ditch effort to be able to pitch once more and the retire on his terms. He really doesn't want to hang'em up yet, though:
"I'll take it one day at a time," he said. "Who knows? I still like to pitch. I don't really know how to do anything else than play baseball. It's my profession, and once it's gone it's gone. I don't know if I can find anything else than I'm smart enough to do."
- Brett Cecil won't live this one down for awhile, I imagine.
- A trio of BtB articles: Finally, someone at BtB is beginning to question how a team could consistently outperform their PythagRecord. A fan post about the anatomy of a ground ball with tons of pretty looking graphs and interesting insights. Finally, part one of their "Effort in Sports" series sets up what should be a pretty interesting bit of discussion.
I wonder
where Bourn’s 2009 season would rank among the all-time single-season turnarounds.
Only_A_Lad - August 21, 2009
I don’t know. I can’t find a B-Ref tool to search for that very easily. However, the fact that I was able to think of a turnaround which is pretty close (on the first time, without doing research) makes me think it may not be all that rare. Trying to think of a similar type player, I looked Corey Patterson. I’ll use wOBA:
2002 Corey Patterson .297 wOBA 2003 .359
2008 Bourn .276 wOBA 2009 .354
Yes, Bourn is a bigger turnaround…hmm…now that I have been playing around, looking for comparable events, it isn’t as easy as I thought. You can find comparable jumps in wOBA, but they are qualitiatively different , in that the player went from mediocre to very good (not very poor to good) or else the player didn’t get as many plate appearances in his bad year (it’s unusual for a player with an wOBA as bad as Bourn’s in 2008 to get as many plate appearances as he did). Two examples of comparable turnarounds I have found: Konerko in 2003-2004 went from .301 to .378 and Carlos Quentin in 2007-2008 went from a wOBA of .206 to .414 (wow!). But I should mention that Quentin didn’t even get 300 PAs in 2008 (not surprising, given the wOBA).
clack - August 21, 2009
The Brett Cecil brain cramp is bad, but I bet it has happened at some previous time in major league baseball. Although the article portrays his blunder as the worst ever, I think Hampton’s mistake in LA, when he couldn’t catch the ball when he tried to toss it in his own glove, is worse. It’s similar to Cecil’s, in that Hampton didn’t realize time hadn’t been called (Hampy says he thought he saw/heard the ump call time) when he went to retrieve a ball.. But it was more damaging, because when Hampton missed his glove, the ball went all the way to the dugout and allowed a runner to score. Cecil’s brain cramp only resulted in a runner advancing from 1st to 3d.
For those who didn’t read about 23 year old pitcher Brett Cecil’s faux pax in his first appearance in the majors: The ball got loose and he went to retrieve it. He intended to ask for a new ball, because that one was scuffed up. So he tossed it in the dugout. He didn’t think to wonder whether time had been called. The umps moved the runner to 3d, while Cecil stood near 1st base with arms in the air, asking “what did I do?”
clack - August 21, 2009
yeah, there was an example this year where someone threw the ball into the stands w/only 2 outs
thinking it was 3. Derek Bell did that at least once as well. Not exactly the same, but along the same lines.
lnewcomer - August 21, 2009
Milton Bradley did it this year for the Cubs
AstroAndy - August 21, 2009
Here’s the video of it
AstroAndy - August 21, 2009
Berkman and Lane both did it as an Astros outfielder in earlier years.
clack - August 21, 2009
i was going to chim in
with this as well. i’d think forgetting how many outs there are is worse than not realizing that time hadn’t been called.
littlevisigoth - August 21, 2009
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