PItchFX data from Brad Lidge’s two World Series appearances from the wonderful brooksbaseball.net:
Game 1 (2 fastballs, 13 sliders):
Game 5 (4 fastballs, 12 sliders):
31 pitches over two appearances, and only 6 of them were fastballs. That’s just ridiculous, especially for a hard throwing closer. But hey, he can throw it for strikes, so why not?
Lidge has [...]
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Gammons wrote this piece yesterday, with the lovely headline: “Weather turns Series into worst ever.”
He wrote this before last night’s game, the conclusion of first ever suspended World Series game. It’s actually pretty hard to believe that there has never been a postseason game suspended by rain before. I guess usually they’re really careful about [...]
The Onion:
In a postgame press conference following a Game 7 loss that halted another magical Red Sox playoff comeback, Boston second baseman Dustin Pedroia informed the nation that you can’t win them all. “Realistically speaking, you cannot win literally every game you play,” Pedroia said. “What I’m trying to say is, there are many variables [...]
There’s a lot to say about this game, and there are a lot of things that presumptive AL manager of the year Joe Maddon screwed up pretty badly.
Matthew Carruth at Fangraphs:
Wheeler had pitched 3.1 innings back in game 2, when he had only four outings all season longer than four outs and the last one [...]
From Fangraphs:
According to the empirical win expectancy, the chances of winning a game when down 7-0 going into the bottom of the 7th inning is about 0.6% (based on 17 wins in 3053 games from 1977-2006). And within 15 minutes and an Ortiz 3-run homer, they were right back in it. It was so weird [...]
Most (normal) people watch sports as a social activity. They gather with their friends at someone’s house with a bowl of chips and salsa, or at some bar with a pitcher of beer. And for the most part, in this sense I am one of the normal people.
But when it comes to the Red Sox, [...]
So, after they swept the NL’s best team in the first round, the Phillies dominate the Dodgers in the NLCS. The Phillies are obviously deserving pennant winners, but it goes to show that the playoffs depend so much on luck.
It’s weird how somehow I’m sort of surprised that the Phillies in the World Series, even [...]
Maybe he just keeps hanging on to compile as many of these as possible. Art Martone points out on the ProJo Sox Blog:
Mike Timlin made his 25th League Championship Series appearance Tuesday night, tying Mariano Rivera’s all-time record.
Earlier this year he broke the record for all-time relief appearances for a right-handed pitcher. If he decides [...]
Watching the Dodgers/Phillies game last night, it was brought to my attention that Hong-Chih Kuo has had two Tommy John surgeries. This surprised me because in general, after the second TJ you are pretty much done. Usually they have a hard time even deciding if you need a second one, because the first reconstruction pretty [...]
I’ve heard multiple discussions about what an atrocity it is for the first round of the baseball playoffs to be only five games. That after an eternal 6-month, decadently large 162-game sample size to decide who makes it, it’s unfair for the best teams to be subjected to such a crapshoot as a 5-game opening [...]