This is stupid. And why would you ever bet an NBA starter that he could not make a three-point shot?
Tim Duncan Admits He Bet on Basketball
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Baseball Notes: The In-Game Half Lives of Professional Pitchers
Early in Victor Martinez’s career-renaissance season, that being the 2014 Major League Baseball season, I expounded– in a manner so brief it likely took less time to read than the length of an average Martinez plate appearance– upon one component of the (i.e., Rod Allen’s, colloquially) notion of Martinez as a “professional hitter”: Martinez’s ability to extend his plate appearances. I contended that one of the team benefits of Martinez’s approach is that it pushes pitchers to reveal more of their arsenal earlier in the game.
In looking for general evidence of this beneficiary concept by inverting the point of focus from hitters to pitchers, I found Ben Lindbergh’s recent analysis of pitcher performance. The broad, basic point: within a game, pitchers perform worse each subsequent time they face a batter.
Thus, if batters benefit from increased exposure to a pitcher, it would seem to make sense that, assuming they’re paying attention in the dugout, Martinez’s teammates would benefit further from the disproportionately lengthy plate appearances Martinez induces. Lindbergh’s conclusion confirms this:
The times-facing-hitter penalty isn’t as much a fatigue effect as it is a familiarity effect that compounds as hitters have time to study their prey.
(His article goes on to discuss pitchers’ attempts to strike back against this trend.)
While many will be watching Martinez for the wrong reasons this season, keep an eye on him and his ilk to see whether they can continue to help their teammates in secondary ways, regardless of what happens to their own primary production.
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Previously
Baseball Notes: Rule Interpretation Unintentionally Shifts Power to Outfielders?
Baseball Notes: Lineup Protection
Baseball Notes: The Crux of the Statistical Biscuit
Baseball Notes: Looking Out for Number One
Baseball Notes: Preview
Tom Izzo Is The Best Coach In Modern NCAA Tournament History — By Far (via FiveThirtyEight)
A No. 7 seed unseats a No. 2 in the NCAA tournament’s second round about twice every three years, but there was something about Michigan State’s upset of Virginia on Sunday that felt more routine than that. Perhaps it was the fact that the Spartans had toppled the Cavaliers just last season, but beyond that, no second-week tournament run from Michigan State qualifies as surprising at this point. As you might have heard, Izzo’s Spartans are now 13-1 all-time in the round of 32, and they’ve visited the Final Four more often (six times) than they’ve lost in the tournament’s opening weekend (five times).
Digging deeper into the numbers only solidifies Izzo’s reputation as Mr. March. A few years ago, FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver wrote about how unlikely Izzo’s teams were to have consistently advanced as far as they did from the seeds at which they started — and that was at the very beginning of the five-season stretch (from 2010-present) where the Spartans advanced to four regional semifinals and one regional final. By any standard, Izzo’s teams tend to wildly exceed their expectations once the NCAA tournament commences. … Read More
(via FiveThirtyEight)
ALDLAND’s March Madness Bracket Challenge: Sweetening the Pot
On Monday, Brendan announced ALDLAND’s 2015 March Madness bracket challenge. This is our fourth year hosting an NCAA tournament contest, and our second in a row partnering with Baddeus Thaddeus Lenkiewicz. Important: there still is time for you to join. Click here to submit your picks for a chance to win limitless fame and one of the other “prizes” Brendan detailed in his post.
As an added incentive, we are bolstering the first-place prize package with a Mike & Mike Fifteenth Anniversary t-shirt from the gift basket the Mikes sent us for being such good listeners and always finishing our dinners before getting up from the table. Shirt is one-size-fits-you because they only sent us one (a Golic-ish XL).
Garbage Time debuts with Adam Carolla unchained
Fox Sports 1’s newest show is a weekly program hosted by Katie Nolan. Based on the debut episode, which aired Sunday night at 9:30 and is available in its entirety here, the program will mix “Weekend Update”-style headlines with Olbermann-like short commentary segments, and guest conversations. We already know from her extensive online work and role on the late Crowd Goes Wild that Nolan can be both funny and precisely critical.
What remains to be seen is whether she can use her growing influence to draw good guests. If the premiere episode is any indication, this shouldn’t be a problem either. The first guest was FS1 NFL guy and (possibly former) BlackBerry user Peter Schrager, who seemed to succeed at 1) avoiding the use of his chair’s right armrest, and 2) convincing Nolan that wild wheeling and dealing during the NFL offseason is a good thing. Next up was Adam Carolla, who reportedly and completely believably “spoke at” Nolan for the better part of an hour to fill a five-minute segment, which is embedded above. Schrager and Carolla were good first-episode guests because they are interesting and entertaining, but also because they are used to carrying their own segments, ensuring that there would be no lulls in the conversation.
Garbage Time airs Sunday nights at 9:30 on Fox Sports 1.
The only surprising part of Will Ferrell’s tour de baseball
Everybody had a good time with Will Ferrell’s Major League Baseball debut last week, and that’s no surprise. Will Ferrell is funny and good at making people laugh, and, it’s always seemed with him, the bigger the stage, the bigger the laughs. Ferrell started Thursday as an undrafted amateur free agent signee of the Oakland Athletics, and he finished the day as a San Diego Padre. In between, he appeared in games as a member of eight other teams and played every position, including designated hitter (pictured above). He even has his own Baseball-Reference page!
All of this feels like it belongs within Ferrell’s entertaining wheelhouse. Close examination of his B-R page reveals a little surprise, however:
Who knew Cincinnati held Norm’s rights to begin with? Maybe it has something to do with the Marge Schott joke he made on Weekend Update nineteen years ago, forever “preserved” on this broken NBC.com video? Baseball, like Norm, proves to be a continually unfolding mystery of the most enjoyable variety.
Detroit Tigers 2015 Season Preview
My own Detroit Tigers series for the upcoming season– name to be revealed in due course, but let’s just say I wish Wallside Windows would sponsor it– will be underway at this site soon. In the meantime, I have collaborated with Mark Sands to produce an extensive preview of the 2015 Detroit Tigers for Banished to the Pen, which is available today.
The full post is available here.
When do baseball teams score runs?
One of the marks of a smart baseball writer is the ability to sense a trend, research its existence and nature, place her findings in context, and present her conclusions in a way that meaningfully educates readers. Inherent in this ability is the wherewithal to know when to stop researching a trend or pressing on a concept, realizing that the fruits of the work have been or soon will be exhausted. Sometimes a person who is not a “smart baseball writer” by the foregoing definition will noodle about on an idea for so long, he’ll end up with a small pile of research that no longer has any bearing on any meaningful conclusions.
Two years ago, I decided to investigate a hunch that the Detroit Tigers were having trouble scoring runs late in games. My initial research mostly seemed to support my hypothesis, and a follow-up look appeared to confirm it more strongly. More than merely interesting (and fleetingly self-satisfying), it also was informatively concerning, because it placed the team’s well-known bullpen problems in a more nuanced light: relief-pitching woes alone weren’t the problem, because the lack of late-game scoring was compounding the problem of surrendering leads during the final frames. As strange as it seemed, the Tigers had interrelated shortcomings on both sides of the plate.
One comment I received in the course of sharing those findings stuck with me: I needed to place this information in context. After all, there are plausible reasons to believe that all teams might, perhaps to varying extents, experience decreased run production in the late innings.
And so it was that, two years later, I finally discovered Retrosheet, a site that compiles inning-by-inning scoring data to a more useful degree than the resources I’d utilized back in 2013. What follows are two graphs of the inning-by-inning scoring of sixteen teams for the 2014 season. Continue reading
Mike & Mike at Fifteen
ESPN Radio’s national morning show, Mike & Mike, turns fifteen on Friday, and the guys were kind enough to send some of their fans a gift basket as a way to say thanks for tuning in. Fifteen years is a long time to hold down a national morning radio talk show, and it’s better to start out broadcasting from a supply closet than to end up in one. I can say this about Mike & Mike: you wouldn’t be reading this website without them. Would I write that if we hadn’t just received six pounds of apparel, signed photographs, flavored popcorn, and enough Notre Dame cookies to make me look like Golic? Sure would. Has our coverage of the Worldwide Leader been tainted by the free copies of ESPN The Magazine that started appearing outside our door a couple years ago? Sure hasn’t. (Judge for yourself.) More than cookies, clean laundry, and magazines, though, all I really want from ESPN is for them to bring back the original Mike & Mike theme song (I’ll mail you a cookie if you can find it online), and maybe be a little kinder to Detroit.
Spring is Springing
Spring is here, and with it baseball. My latest post at Banished to the Pen previews this afternoon’s spring training game between the Philadelphia Phillies and the University of Tampa Spartans.
The full post is available here.
