BS Report, Take Two
20 April 2010
In which Mr. Simmons and I discuss the collective defenestration of Red Sox fans and other matters baseball. Also cardboard cutout chickens at the Big O. And the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. Because I’m a loon.
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Hey Jonah,
Just wanted to say nice work on the podcast, and thanks for giving the Giants some love. I do wish you had recorded it today, though, so you could have cited the fact that the Padres managed a whopping one hit and still beat poor Jonathan Sanchez.
This team makes me so angry!
Sanchez is awesome. My pitching staff in my 24-team Strat-O-Matic league is:
Lincecum
Carpenter
de la Rosa
Price
Sanchez
So much goodness.
Always find it interesting how it can take pitchers longer to break out. Sanchez and de la Rosa both good examples – always watch the K rates, over time they pan out more often than not.
Jonah,
Great work on the BS Report. I’m more of a basketball, soccer guy, but I heard you on the first BS Report and was absolutely fascinated by it. I haven’t followed baseball much since being obsessed with Moneyball almost a decade ago, but you make me want to catch up on the sabermetrics revolution.
Just a quick question on this podcast. Do good pitchers throw fewer pitches per inning? You mentioned that pitches per batter has been the same over the course of history, but a bad pitcher faces more batters. If so, then why don’t we chart pitches thrown instead of innings? That should be the real metric for fatigue and injury prevention.
Ed
P.S. A shameless plug for my website, http://www.thepowerrank.com/, which will soon have some baseball content.
Hi Ed,
I was actually mistaken about the number of pitches thrown per game. It’s walk rate that’s remained static for the past few decades, not pitches thrown – that’s gone up.
Pitches thrown/pitches per batter/pitches per inning are widely tracked already. They’re just not yet as mainstream as innings (not to mention ERA, W-L etc.). Teams are already all over this, though. The smart teams do in fact look at pitches more than innings in deciding how to handle starters. And not just pitches, but pitches thrown under duress (i.e. 35 pitches in one inning, with multiple runs scoring and lots of pitches thrown from the stretch, etc.).
Thanks for the kind words, and for dropping by the site.