chasfh

Speaking of James Woods … errrr …

yes because of course he would 🙄

I know. I was funnin'.

They were very predictive of Soto last night!

I like the Statcast stats a lot. They are designed to take into account quality of contact and placement of batted balls, with their attendant likelihood of falling in safely, to help us understand how well a player is doing in the thing they are supposed to be: driving the ball hard if they're hitting, and inducing soft contact if they're pitching. There's really nothing else hitters and pitchers can actually try to do. Outside of bunting for hits, or doing swinging bunts, batters really can't "try" to get base hits other than hitting the ball hard and hoping you did it right so it will fall in. Granted, these are forward-looking metrics. Soto's stats said he was doing great: 1-0, 3 saves in five appearances, 1.59 ERA. But his Statcast card indicated that this was a mirage, and in this particular case, we happened to see the result Statcast forecasted versus his traditional stats. Statcast's intention is not to tell us how a batter did in terms of slash lines or outcomes, but rather what we can likely expect the batter to do in future at bats, under the reasonable assumption that if they've been hitting the ball hard and bad-lucking into outs, they can probably expect more hits to fall in if they keep hitting the ball hard like that. Yes, that's an assumption, and sure, "ass you me" can always apply. But it's a better assumption that the batter continue to hit the ball hard as his track record has indicated than it is to assume that a batter's quality of contact is a completely random circumstance, or worse, that a batter is going to suddenly change how hard he's hitting the ball because he's due. Ironically, FIP is very much also a process-oriented stat like the Statcast stats are, in its attempts to weed out the luck of outcomes from balls in play and boil it down to what a pitcher''s ERA "should be" based on the things he can better control: strikeouts, walks, HBPs, homers. In this way, FIP is quite related to Statcast stats. wOBA on the other hand is very outcome-oriented and has nothing to do with quality of contact.

lol woba and fip are "older stats"!

lol fluffing fulmer

Next time Hinch needs a save, I would bet a dollar to a dime that he will throw Soto out there. I have little doubt of that. In terms of who's throwing better during the season, there's really little debate to be had. It's Fulmer, and whether it's for next the save opportunity, or for one a month from now after Soto will have had two or three more high-profile meltdowns—just to make extra special certain it's persistent—Fulmer's gonna get his chance.

I misunderstood the original question—the first Tiger younger than I was Nelson Simmons in 1984.

I would say that compared with Soto’s Savant card above, this is a pretty good reason to give Fulmer a chance to lock down ninths.

As much as we’re piling on Haase this morning, can we finally start to conclude that Soto is not really a closer? I mean, he’ll do as a placeholder during a rebuild, but when is it going to be our turn to get a shut-down guy?

Haase deserved a shot to extend his fifteen minutes. I think we know now.

Whoa C-Mo is wearing U-of-M(innesota) colors. That’s a definite choice!

Later

Now THAT was a punch in the gut. Oof.

Oh. My. Effing. God.

Wow, way to carve up Kepler there, Greggy.

Oh, Jesus, we’re done for.

Jesus, stats just showed Soto has given up 10 walks in 9.1 innings at Target, and what’s the first thing he does here?

Where does Kreidler play here?

Luck be a Soto tonight …

That was guts pitching by Fulmer.

Well I would except for one thing

Calling it the “Civil War” has developed into a bit of a peeve of mine, because it wasn’t really a true civil war. It was a war between two nation states, and except for areas along the actual border, where you might have seen some brother-against-brother shit, the sympathies one way or the other were pretty clear cut based on geography. On the other hand, what we call the “Revolutionary War”? That was way more of an actual civil war. Sure, an army from another land came from across the sea to fight it, but it also split colonists on a house by house basis all across the colonies, not just in any one corner of it. There was a lot of internecine battling that was among neighbors only, no redcoats involved. That looks a lot more like a civil war to me.