Nineteen-year-old Miguel Sano was drafted signed as a shortstop. He was then seen as oversized for that position, so he was moved to third base. As the above photo — where he is compared to the 5’10”, 175 lb. Eduardo Escobar — shows, he may be a little large for third base as well. But Sano’s largeness doesn’t just apply to the baseball field. Miguel Sano is too big for many, many things.
Dodgers prospect Yasiel Puig, flipping the bat even in his MLB.com profile image.
In today’s sporting journalism, there is all manner of coverage: injury coverage, transaction coverage, rumors coverage, steroids coverage. “Where is all the bat-flip coverage, though?” one is inclined to ask. To which question, the author would like to whisper the answer (i.e. “NotGraphs”) softly into all of America’s respective ears. Given the wild expense of such a project, however, and the implications it might have in terms of violation of privacy, etc., allow me just to present the three following animated GIFs of Dodgers outfield prospect Yasiel Puig — all captured shamelessly and totally sans shame from Puig’s media page at MLB.com.
Including this footage of Puig flipping his bat with the Cuban national team:
By popular demand*, here is the companion piece to Eno Sarris’s excellent Joey Votto on Hitting, published yesterday. As this is an exploratory post on a poorly understood subject, my intention here is not to give you any kind of exhaustive analysis, but simply to highlight some basic strategies that will be familiar to attentive fans. I hope that gathering these in one place will be enough to get a conversation going, because what we’re looking at here is quite possibly the next frontier in sabermetrics.
The Pickup Line
As Baseball America’s Ben Badler has made clear by way of an internet weblog post, 18-year-old Japanese right-hander Shohei Ohtani made his spring-training debut today for the Nippon Ham Fighters, with whom he signed after considering the possibility of moving straight to affiliated baseball following high school.
Embedded above is complete footage of Ohtani’s appearance versus Rakuten. Included below are increasingly less informative annotations for that same video.
0:09 — Ohtani roars and shakes his fires in the burdened air takes the mound.
0:17 — Uniformed Japanese youth clap in unison.
1:56 — Casey McGehee appears before our eyes.
2:00 — Ohtani throws his first pitch at 143 km/h — or, roughly 89 mph.
2:07 — A man celebrates his fortune: a foul ball off the bat of the real Casey McGehee.
Perhaps the strangest seven minutes I’ve spent all week is watching this WGN video compilation of 1970s Cubs spring training coverage. Learn all about how the Cubs are going to win it all in 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978, and 1979. Go Cubs. Go.
Did you know Ernie Banks can sing (sort of)? And Jose Cardenal can juggle (sort of)? Now you will!
Walt Whitman, in his classic of the effing genre “Song of Myself”, declares that every atom belonging to him “as good belongs” to everyone else. One assumes, however — in light of the footage embedded here, from today’s Braves-Pirates spring-training game — that there are certain atoms belonging to Pittsburgh’s Michael McKenry that Whitman might let the catcher keep to himself. Like the ones in McKenry’s swimsuit area, for example.
Our next installment of SCPG involves Desmond Jennings taking care of a “Can of Corn.”
As our GIF shows, Bronson Arroyo also knows his way around a can of corn.
The following tweet is entirely and in-no-way altered from the original (click to embiggen):
As spring winds down, it’s time to get you updated on the weaknesses of the spirit as well as those of the flesh. Here’s the latest news:
Jerry Hairston blames his recent slump on a piece of advice from his childhood that has recently taken root and developed into a larger problem. “My little league coaches encouraged me to ‘be the ball’, and it made a lot of sense,” he told reporters after a recent spring training game. “But the other day I started thinking about it, and I realized I really was the ball. I mean, basically we’re part of everything, right? I’m me and the bat and the ball and [Rockies pitcher Jhoulys] Chacin all at the same time. It gets a little confusing.” Hairston has decided to go on the 15-day DL to find himself.
Meanwhile, Red Sox prospect Xander Bogaerts admitted that a brush with the teachings of Heraclitus had interfered with his learning curve at the plate. Having discovered the maxim that change is the only constant in our lives, and that “we never step into the same river twice,” Bogaerts reported difficulty with pitch recognition, having no deductive experience to apply the spin and location of each pitch to. When asked how he planned to deal with the problem, Bogaerts replied, “I’m not sure I can, bro. But luckily, even though every pitch is a new pitch, every Xander Bogaerts will be a new Xander Bogaerts. So let’s hope that dude knows what to do when the time comes.”
