Archive for Audio and/or Visual

Host of ESPN’s Around the Horn Tony Reali has — probably against his better judgment — made it known that he’s a reader of FanGraphs. In the following audio clip, sporting-type writers Michael Smith and Bomani Jones betray their own respective interests in the sort of advanced analysis provided by this site.

A person who doesn’t do that sort of thing is frequent Around the Horn guest, and columnist for The Denver Post, Woody Paige. Not only doesn’t Woody Paige read FanGraphs, he also doesn’t read our very secret sister site SandGraphs that’s totally secret.

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What follows isn’t the strangest thing you’ll ever see — especially if you ever see the avant-garde films of Maya Deren — but it’s likely to elicit a cartoonish double-take in even the most stoic of this site’s notably stoic readers.

Most baseball fans will know that Homer Bailey is a right-handed pitcher for the Cincinnati Reds. Fewer — but still many — will know that Bailey was a seventh-overall draft pick out of a Texas high school in 2004 and appeared on Baseball America’s top-100 prospect list four times — including two appearances (in 2007 and -08) in the top 10.

What no one probably knows about, though — or, at least didn’t know before last night’s WTMJ radio broadcast of the Reds and Brewers in Cincinnati — is Bailey’s rich family history.

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Phillies right-hander Vance Worley currently possesses a swinging-strike rate of 5.5% — which swinging-strike rate would typically produce a strikeout rate of about 12%. Instead, at 20.6%, Worley has a considerably higher strikeout rate than that. That he features the lowest opponent Z-Swing% (that is swing rate against pitches within the zone) among qualified pitchers goes a long way towards explaining how Worley has been successful — namely, by inducing a great number of called strikes three.

But you needn’t take my — or even LeVar Burton’s — word for it. Indeed, here are five actually different audio clips from Worley’s Friday night start against San Francisco (box):

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In this chapter of Advanced Lipreading, we’re considering some of the difficulties posed to lipreaders by non-native speakers of English. Below are three such real-life examples, with Miami Marlins baseball manager Ozzie Guillen.

Guillen is a native of Venezuela, and, while he’s a fluent speaker of English, has preserved many of the phonological traits of South American Spanish, which can present ambiguities in the labiodental fricative, for example, and the palato-alveolar sibilant — and similar distortions in the corresponding visemes of those sounds.

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People — and by “people” I mean “a select group of people who, one assumes, are accustomed to making poor life decisions” — people have, at times, expressed interest in hearing those portions of Dayn Perry’s FanGraphs Audio appearances which fail to make the actual, published episodes of same.

What follows is just such a thing — is, in fact, the entirety of the ca. 43-minute phone call I recorded with Perry on Thursday morning, which phone call ultimately produced six entire minutes of content.

Note that, unlike regular episode of FanGraphs Audio, what follows contains profanity (although, it should be said, less than usual for Perry) — and, as well, at least a full minute of the guest audibly evacuating his bladder.

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I found this really cute picture of Matt Cain and his kid from the Home Run Derby. Sweet dreams, NotGraphers of my heart!

The NotGraphs Investigative Reporting Investigation Team can proudly confirm that last night, during the second inning of the match between the Boston Red Sox and Oakland Athletics, only a few seconds before the recorded footage you’re about to watch, NESN Red Sox broadcaster Jerry Remy whispered to his colleague, Don Orsillo, “Dance as if nobody is watching, and love like you’ve never been hurt.”

Orsillo really took the advice to heart. The man can jam. Turns out, however, that a lot of people were, you know, watching.

Today, this Fourth of July, like every other Fourth of July, I’m reminded of this incredible video:

Enjoy the holiday, my friends. As I told my comrades at NotGraphs last night, please celebrate accordingly. And, finally, on behalf of Canada: Thank you, America. For everything. We don’t say it enough.

God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.

A few observations:

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