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A cry for help.

Last week, FanGraphs’ Joe Pawlikowski posed the above question to the entire world. Since I’m technically NotGraphs’ advice columnist, I thought I owed him a response.

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Swing, miss, get hit in the butt.

Brian Wilson threw this pitch.

It started in the strike zone, going, oh, about 95 miles per hour, and ended up in the dirt behind Jamey Carroll. Strike three.

Is this fair?

Strange thing, though, even though Wilson has talked about adding the pitch, he’s not throwing it a ton. At least, not enough to show up on either pitch f/x classification system on this site. In fact, it doesn’t show up on most classification systems.

They can be forgiven – Wilson’s regular fastball does move a lot anyway. Take a look at Joe Lefkowitz’s Pitch f/x tool and it says that Wilson threw nine fastballs and five sliders that evening. But those fastballs weren’t all created equal. Check out the the fastballs that showed the most movement, those last two blue dots on the left. Those fastballs moved 11 inches horizontally. He threw three fastballs that also moved about 11 inches vertically. His average fastball has been moving about six inches horizontally and seven vertically, so we’re zooming in on that filthy, filthy pitch now. He might have thrown as much as three of them that evening.

One final picture to help bring this home. You see that blue box on the bottom right corner of this strike zone plot? That’s the pitch, at least where it crossed the plate.

To recap:
1) The pitch moved double digits vertically and horizontally.
2) The pitch left his hand at about 95 MPH.
3) The pitch started in the strike zone, belt-high, middle-ish.
4) The pitch crossed the plate at the very bottom, very inside corner of the strikezone.
5) The pitch ended up behind the batter, about knee-level.

That’s gotta go on some leaderboard as one of the filthiest pitches ever.

H/T: Grant at McCovey Chronicles

Strikeouts are more than just a number.

One day I especially enjoyed from the last week of baseball was Sunday, when Jered Weaver and Josh Beckett put aside their mutual differences, joined forces, and collectively struck out 25 Blue Jays/Yankees on my behalf. That made me feel awesome.

If you didn’t catch the highlights or want to re-watch them, here’s Weaver’s clip, and here’s Beckett’s.

It wasn’t just how many guys they struck out, it was HOW they struck them out. These guys weren’t burying split-fingers in the dirt or running sliders off the plate. Each had multiple pitches they were getting swings-and-misses on even when thrown in the zone. It was strikeout dominance of the very highest class.

While I love seeing Jeremy Hellickson embarrass people with goofy slow stuff or Roy Halladay masterfully pitching to contact, the style of game Weaver and Beckett pitched on Sunday is like baseball steak dinner for me. They had everything: velocity, speed changes, location, movement, unpredictable sequencing.

Weaver’s going tonight against the White Sox. Beckett pitches Saturday against the Jays. I’d love to see them both do it again.

You know what? I’m rooting for Henneman.

Before watching this video, know some things:

1) Justin Kaufmann is, indeed, a real-life news reporter for WBEZ, the NPR affiliate in Chicago.

2) His beat seems to be all things Chicago, with an emphasis on snark.

3) There is no way to confirm if this Henneman figure is real, and whether or not she actually consumed enough adult sodas to put down an adult horse before the making of this video.

4) We are left hanging as to the eventual conclusion of the interaction. My guess is that an eternal life of domestic bliss ensues.

5) Harry Caray is up there, yeah.

6) It may be strange that Carson Cistulli calls his sister attractive, but once you factor genetic factors in, he’s actually calling himself attractive. Vanity!

7) Lists are fun! Maybe if we make it to ten we can post this on Bleacher Report as “Top Ten Pieces of Mindless Drivel That Occurred to Me While Watching a Crazy Youtube Video.”

8) Was that mean? Maybe it was. I take it back.

9) Watch the video now. It’s pretty funny. The language is SFW, but the content may not be depending on your work environment. Mine (pajamas on the couch) didn’t seem to mind.

10) Made it!

H/T: Bryan Melmed (pixelvisions)

Now that you mention it, I would like to buy a Volvo.

One thing I find interesting about the MLB.tv experience is the “commercial breaks.” To my knowledge they don’t show actual TV ads. Instead, they show either 1) the team logos or 2) MLB promos or 3) pictures of Volvos (and other static image ads).

Contrast this with other inter-inning experiences. In the olden days, watching games on cable TV, commercials gently enwrapped my attentions from the moment the game action paused until the moment it returned. Unless I desperately needed the fridge or some other domestic facility, I’d stay put between innings. At the ballpark, by comparison, there isn’t a lot of worthwhile inter-inning entertainment (apologies to Cotton Eye Joe). Normally I’ll chat with companions or buy beer.

MLB.tv is different. When I’m watching on my computer, I can flip to another game when whatever I’m watching goes into a break. This is fun, although it comes with an ADD factor; I find myself less immersed in the atmosphere and discrete drama of each game when I’m switching between two or more.

The real conundrum is what to do with myself during commercials when I’ve hooked MLB.tv up to my living room TV, because then it’s too much trouble to get up and switch to another game. And until I figure something out I’m stuck on my couch watching slideshows of Volvos.

The MLB.tv-from-the-couch experience is, if you will, the developing world/final frontier of baseball watching, and sitting here at the brink of the abyss I feel a vertiginous indecision over how to conduct myself. Read a book? Check email? Play a very short game of Call of Duty? Think about… junk? Frankly, I’m not quite sure why corporate America is leaving this decision up to me.

Mustache Watch continues today thanks to the suddenly helpful Jeff Sullivan of Lookout Landing (and also, it should be noted, of SBN’s Hot Corner, where yours truly has submitted some of what I’ll call trademark wisdom).

In this edition of the Watch we encounter a still of Henry Blanco from yesterday’s Diamondbacks-Cubs game. Blanco’s case is a curious one: as the attentive reader will note, his (i.e. Blanco’s) facial hair has forced his mouth into a perpetual scowl. I’ve never seen this personally, but a friend of mine had an uncle with a similar condition.

It goes without saying: the only known remedy is grotesque, inhumane.

Eccentricity!

It looks like Tim Byrdak is looking for entrance music when he trots out of the bullpen, and he’s willing to let readers decide for him. First, we’ll have to decide what we’re voting for, or it’s likely that TedQuarter’s “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun” lark will win. And do we want that? Well, maybe we do.

But let’s talk it over first.

Some suggestions, for your perusal:

The LOOGY Clap by Lazy Mary
Ghetto Ways by Scissors for Lefty
I Just Can’t Live that Fast Anymore by Lefty Frizell
Half a Man, Lefty & Pancho by Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson
Sling Shot Part Two by Lefties Soul Connection

Or we could do something not-so-lefty, and just plain badass:

I Don’t Want To Be A Player No More, Big Pun
This Modern Love, Bloc Party
Mistress Mabel, The Fratellis
Hurricane, Jamie LIdell
Daft Punk Is Playing At My House, LCD Soundsystem
*The Sweat Descends, Les Savy Fav
Fire On the Bayou, The Funky Meters
Electric Feel, MGMT
Wanna Be Startin Somethin, Michael Jackson
Young Folks, Peter Bjorn and John
Coming in Hot, Peter Tosh
Simon Says, Pharoahe Monch
*Loud Pipes, Ratatat
2 More Dead, RJD2
*Hash Pipe, Weezer

*Mine if I as a player. I can’t decide.

H/T: Ted Berg

Thanks to reader and soon-to-be fantasy baseball nemesis Matthew Watts for the graphic. Thanks to yours truly for the team name.

As I cycle through my favorite sporting color schemes in my head, I notice that many of my favorites include the color yellow. However, at the same time, I notice that so few teams are willing to use it as a primary color. This comes from an already thin crowd which dares to use yellow in the first place – to the point where the only two teams that pop to my mind with primary yellow jerseys are the Los Angeles Lakers and the Michigan Wolverines men’s basketball team.

There are only two real candidates in Major League Baseball to use yellow jerseys: the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Oakland Athletics. The Pirates really, really need to make a yellow jersey in much the same style as the above (think a color swap of these jerseys, which are awesome by themselves). The A’s finally brought back a modernized version of the classic 70s (and early 80s) alternates. This jersey immediately becomes one of my favorites in the league. Huzzahs to those around the Athletics for making this happen.

Artiste de l’art: Susan Miller-Havens. Artiste de la vie: Pedro Martinez.

Kind of piling it on at this point in our private life-achievements competition, Pedro Martinez will have his portrait unveiled today in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery. Here’s a sneak peek of the painting, which is called “El Orgullo y la Determinacion (Pride and Determination).” The artist, Susan Miller-Havens, has several other baseball-related paintings on her site.

Since Pedro first achieved greatness in bilingual Montreal, and since our topic today is “fine art,” I thought I would reproduce the following brief news story on this matter from the French-Canadian website Canoe.ca. Read the rest of this entry »