Email a copy of 'West Notes: Astros, Ziegler, Stewart, Towers' to a friend
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By Jeff Todd | at
Email a copy of 'West Notes: Astros, Ziegler, Stewart, Towers' to a friend
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Joe Valenti
The Diamondbacks are keeping Kevin Towers for his fluency in Spainglish. Good use of the word simpatico KT
Derpy
MLB Players are eventually going to be forced to remember how to slap hit. Slap hitting is the counter to a shift. You move your dude, I hit a groundball to the hole you just made. The basic defensive configuration minimizes the ability to slap hit, so by definition any shift from that will increase the effectiveness of a slap. The more extreme the shift, the more effective a slap. MLB hitters moving back to slap hitting would essentially kill off the shift within a few years.
Pete22
Can someone explain how if the shift is so effective is BABIP unchanged and still at high levels compared to all other eras in modern baseball history (1950’s until steroid era)
Yr-BABIP
2009-299
2010-297
2011-295
2012-297
2013-297
2014-298
There is no discernible trend in the last couple of years despite the number of shifts increasing exponentially these past 2 years
jb226 2
You’re looking for a bigger effect than there is. As the article states, the Astros have the best results and have saved 44 hits. That’s not substantial in a game where even the worst offensive teams will have well over 1,000 hits in a season.
For fun, I added up all of their numbers. There were 368 hits saved from the shift according to their data. At this point in the season, with a little under a month left to go, there have been 36,927 hits. That ratio works out to 0.99%.
In other words, the effect of the shift over every hit in a baseball season is inherently going to be lost in the noise. It’s going to be less than the random variation from season to season.
That said, it is a nearly free improvement. Four teams managed to lose hits, but the other 26 teams managed to save hits for doing nothing other than standing someplace else.
It’s not that it’s a big improvement — it’s that it’s an easy one.
MJ 3
It is just time for the D-backs to hire somebody out of Section 111. I am actually being quasi-serious. With the situation they are setting up in the front office for the foreseeable future, they will be hyperanalyzing every breath taken by the next gm anyway so why not give it to a person in the stands.
LazerTown
KT will only stay on if it’s someone he can control?
TBH if I was GM I would want him gone. He got fired for a reason, now move on.
tesseract
Agree, In the real world when you get fired for not performing you don’t get brought back to be an “advisor”
Mikenmn
The Astros’ managerial search is interesting. They want an experienced person–dugout experienced at the MLB level, but one who will manage on directive from the front office and the stat guys. That’s going to be interesting. There are many modern managers who do pay attention to advanced stats, but I really wonder how many of the are willing to take direction from the FO with that level of granularity.
tesseract
The talent pool is extremely small (for what they are expecting). Only guy that comes to mind is Joe Maddon
tmengd
Maybe Larry Bowa. He has become Sabermetric savy recently. Is old school and follows the above criteria?