I wrote about the Baltimore Orioles on Monday. As it turns out, people have strong feelings about the Orioles. Most of the comments I got fell into one of these categories:
– The writer is an ass-clown, the Orioles are winning with hustle and poise and grit and spunk, and you “pencil neck baseball anylists” can take your WAR and shove it somewhere dark and humid.
– The writer is dead-on, the Orioles are winning with a dwindling stash of magic pixie dust, and you O’s fans better enjoy it now before your team CRASHES AND BURNS SUCKERS!!!1
– The writer is engaging in something called ‘satire,’ and evidently it worked.
For the record, I really like the Orioles. Clearly they are experiencing some luck, and they are also doing a lot of things well. I think they are an interesting outlier and I hope they continue to, um, outlie. It’s fun and interesting when our best knowledge turns out to be not perfect. Right?
On June 13, when Josh Donaldson was sent down, his line was an astonishing .153/.160/.235. In exactly 100 plate appearances, he had 1 walk, and that was in that final June 13 game. He had 1 home run, 7 RBI, and a total of 6 extra-base hits.
He has played 19 games since getting called back up in the middle of August. His line now stands at .231/.268/.408, which, of course, is nothing to get incredibly excited about.
But that means that since getting called up, in 79 plate appearances (through Monday’s games), he’s at .338/.405/.648. What has happened to Josh Donaldson, and, more important, why haven’t I activated him out of the farm system of my Scoresheet team??
A couple of weeks ago, based on the findings of a rigorous study, I offered advice to those baseball fans whose teams were effectively (though not mathematically) out of contention for a playoff spot this year. The advice was: regarding the AL, root for the A’s or the Orioles; regarding the NL, adopt the Pittsburgh Pirates.
As both Navin and Mississippi Matt have pointed out in the last week, there’s magic and mystery surrounding the Orioles as they continue to win despite what their run differential might suggest. They’re sitting in a tie for first place in the AL East, having bested the Yankees in a Labor Day weekend series.
The Oakland A’s have also been playing out of their minds, posting a 39-17 record since July 1. They’re still in the AL West divisional race, and, if the regular season ended today, would receive the second wild card spot.
Pittsburgh is friggin’ beautiful, even when it rains. Image: Justin K. Aller
Meanwhile, the Pirates have gone 12-20 since the beginning of August, all but wasting their 59-44 record before that.
My grandma passed away last week at age 96, having lived a long and, at least to me, quite remarkable life. Until she had a stroke at age 92, she lived independently, and went out almost every day, to the senior center, the library, the botanic gardens, museums, restaurants, the movies, everywhere. She took classes, wrote poetry, and probably over the course of her life watched at least a thousand Mets games on TV, and maybe quite a few more than that.
In the year or two before her stroke, she and a couple of her friends found themselves in the habit of going to the movies pretty much every weekend. At one point, I had the idea to blog her movie reviews, which, looking back on them now, make me happy I wrote down so many of her words and sad that she’s gone.
I came across one passage about the Mets, from 2008, about a month after Willie Randolph was replaced by Jerry Manuel. I found her take on the Mets at the time to be pretty amusing:
I’ve been watching the Mets game. They’ve been doing so well lately. Maybe they were threatened they would lose their jobs. All of a sudden they all got so good. I know they have the new manager, but he stands in the dugout, he never smiles, he seems like he is not enjoying himself, so I don’t know if he is the one motivating them, but something must be going on because all week they have been winning every game.
I was hoping I’d unearth more baseball-related content from the archives of my posts about her, but, alas, the only way I can post more about my grandma is to venture seriously off-topic.
Very well. In honor of not doing work at work, which might function as a pedestrian, contemporary definition of “laziness,” and following up on yesterday’s Leaderboards of Labor, I’d like to present Leaderboards of Laziness. Without further ado…
The Laziest Pitchers Based on Innings Pitched per Game
Minimum 50 Innings Pitched…
I almost feel bad for Bobby Valentine. Today’s piece in the Boston Herald (the latest in a string of articles itemizing everything terrible or could-be-interpreted-as-terrible-if-you-squint that Valentine has said or done) discusses a breakfast meeting Valentine had with owner John Henry yesterday, where, contrary to the hope of perhaps everyone, he did not get fired.
Asked if the meeting brought him any sense of nirvana, Valentine said, “I always feel good after breakfast. It’s one of my favorite meals.”
Yeah, this is probably going to end soon.
Asked what he and Henry talked about, Valentine said, “What do you think we talked about? Art? Liverpool? We talked about baseball, our team, what he’s concerned with, what I deal with.”
(Other favorite meals of Bobby Valentine: Lunch, Dinner, Snack After Loss, Brunchholz, and Fettucine Alfredo Aceves)
And as we celebrate labor by farting in bed, our laptops searing our thighs, our favorite MLB teams and players will be toiling away for our pleasure. Why not honor the players that have done the most work this season by perusing the following Leaderboards of Labor? There’s no good reason not to — save meat stupor. Meat stupor is the perfect reason to not be able to see straight enough to read these leaderboards.
Those pitchers who have labored most, as measured by Pitches Thrown, Innings Pitched, and Total Batters Faced
This first Leaderboard of Labor (which is sortable) shows the top 20 pitchers in terms of Pitches thrown. It also mostly contains the top 20 pitchers in terms of Total Batters Faced and Innings Pitched. However, pitchers like Homer Bailey and Ricky Romero have faced a lot of batters without cracking the top 20 in terms of IP or Pitches thrown; so, they’re not on this leaderboard.
Note: This post was composed on Friday; the numbers have changed since then, and quite possibly for the worse.
I just wanted to take a minute to talk about this. I’ve spent some time on this website, looking at the many numbers. I’m no number-reading expert or anything, but I’m pretty sure that according to this website, the Baltimore Orioles are bad at baseball.
It takes a big man – and I’m speaking in terms of metaphors, not junk size – to admit when he needs help. You see, I’ll be taking a trip tomorrow to the very small town of Suring, WI for a family reunion. How small of a town is Suring, WI? Well, the image below is a recent one of the downtown area of Suring, WI.
I see they’ve installed a street light since my last visit.
I’m not worried about the town in and of itself, however. I’m worried more about the fact that a large portion of my family (father’s side) will be occupying this town at one time. Moreover, I’m worried about conversing with this group of people. Not to go all Doc Hollywood on you, but I live a different life than most of my kin. My day consists of things like public transit, sidewalks, smartphones, and black people. These are things to which my brethren are not very accustomed.
Though it may sound as if I’m making value judgments, I am not. I am merely trying to set the scene for what I will be dealing with tomorrow. I haven’t seen many of these people since my wedding and some even prior to that. As with any meeting of long lost family, there will be the normal barrage of questions pertaining to my life, of what it consists, and what I’m doing with it. My wife will not be joining me, though my parents should be able to vouch for her existence. I can talk about my home and my dogs, which will be just fine, but the conversation will eventually turn to my occupation. My day job, as it were, is fairly easy to explain. I fix computer systems for an insurance company. Boom. However, my parents will undoubtedly bring up my other venture, baseball writing, much of which appears on this very site. This is where the wicket gets sticky.
To most of my relatives, saying I write about baseball on the Internet sounds completely made up. I may as well say I am an underground astronaut or a unicorn rancher. Despite my numerous requests, I have still not received my NotGraphs business cards, so providing proof will be difficult. Assuming we can get past that, another set of questions will arise:
“Do you get to travel with a team?”
“What’s a clubhouse like?”
“Have you met Ted Williams?”
This is where I need help. I need to try and explain my position here at NotGraphs to a group of people unfamiliar with things like GIFs, Twitter, advanced statistics, blogs, irony, and the Internet in general. Since I am in a bit of a drought right now in the way of friends and positive influences, I turn to you, fair NotGraphs reader.
You’d be doing me a huge solid if you could provide a succinct, one-sentence answer explaining NotGraphs that can be understood by a more, let’s say rural, audience. Some of you will attempt to be clever (and will most certainly fail), but I know there are some out there who can assist me in my conundrum.
Highly Important Note: This post was composed prior to the author’s reading of Mr. Baumann’s quite similarly motivated post of earlier today We coordinated this completely on purpose.
Those of you who, for whatever reason — novelty, I suppose — read our “stepchild” site Fangraphs, in addition to Notgraphs proper, will have noted the dramatic rollout this week of the new metric “Fielding Dependent Pitching.” I applaud the Fangraphs team for their effort and encourage them to keep at it, but here at Notgraphs we remain, to put it politely, a step ahead. Here I would like to announce our newest product, an advanced metric that brings us a massive step closer to the holy grail of fully understanding and predicting pitcher performance.
