BeerGraphs is coming. Hopefully, we’re only two weeks away. We’re collecting content right now, and setting up the leaderboards. We’re ready to destroy another fun thing — beer — with nerdy numbers. I’m setting up meetups and editing, and trying to figure out nuts and bolts, but I’m still writing about baseball.
Dodgers Catcher A.J. Ellis let me into his brain. He talked to me about how supportive his wife has been over the years, while also getting into some of the nuts and bolts about how he’s become one of the most patient hitters in baseball. I took a look at his words and his stats, and added some pictures to boot. He finished with a memorable simile, which had him shouting a pitcher’s name in the Dodger’s clubhouse. Great guy.
Then I talked to Andrelton Simmons, mostly about defense. He combines research with a great sense of his strengths in order to get the most out of his athletic tools. Hearing him talk about where he positions himself was very interesting to me. One of his comments spawned a funny jokes piece ha ha. (I’m bad at those.)
With R.A. Dickey struggling, I took a look at his velocity. Turns out he might be a little bit more like a conventional pitcher than we thought.
Jason Marquis did something I’d never seen before in baseball.
It’s rankings week at RotoGraphs. I hate rankings week.
I did some research on old dudes that hit the DL with shoulder problems — Roy Halladay fits the bill. I found that after the season in which those 35+ year old pitchers hit the DL, they averaged another 59 innings the rest of their career. More than half were done done, as in never pitched again. ESPN picked it up a couple times and ran with it, with Jayson Stark giving me a couple paragraphs of credit, which was really nice of him. That was part of a three-day ESPN blitz for me, as I called that Junichi Tazawa was going to close for the Red Sox (most thought it would be Koji Uehara, but managers prefer velocity) and the Fantasy Focus guys were kind enough to give me credit. And my piece on Clay Buchholz and his spitball made the front page for a day. I love ESPN.
I don’t love Adrian Gonzalez, not in fantasy. The power is not coming back.
Over at Getting Blanked, I had a couple pieces. The first was about the rise of the strikeout and the home run and what that meant for fantasy baseball. The second was about a friend of mine failing to come up with an equation for expected walk rate for pitchers, and yet still providing interesting analysis for fantasy players looking for values.
enosarris.com 