I watch a lot of baseball, and being a geek, I analyze the baseball I watch pretty heavily. I use MLB Gameday, Baseball-Reference.com, and various other tools to aid me in this odd hobby. In all the time I’ve been doing this, I have never seen something like in the video below.
After last night’s game (and it was a good game) between the Red Sox and Yankees, Jonathan Papelbon blames his blown save on two things; an excellent Yankee line-up and a lousy job of umpiring by Phil Cuzzi. Now the only thing more common in Major League Baseball than bad umpiring is the likelihood that a player or manager will use it as an excuse. Papelbon cited a microscopic strike zone by Cuzzi as another obstacle to overcome. I decided to go and look at the at-bat in Gameday to see if the claim had any merit. My initial reaction, after seeing the at-bat live, was that Papelbon was probably full of it. I small strike zone is not a problem if it is consistent. What I saw (and what you can see below) is something that I have never seen before on the pitchFX display on Gameday: The strike zone changes during the at-bat!
Baseball season is once again upon us. There are 2,430 games between Opening Day and the last day of the season, not counting the All-Star Game or post-season. Those of us who love baseball will be ther first to admit there is significant downtime – commercial breaks, pitching changes, pitcher and batter idiosyncratic motions and twitching, just to name a few. Here are some helpful things you can do to make those 4 1/2 hour pitcher’s duels livable.
10. Go to the bathroom.
While this may seem like an obvious choice being that it sort of “self-imposes,” don’t sell short the time you can waste on the potty. If you have a laptop or a Blackberry, you don’t even have to be disconnected from reading posts on your favorite blog named Miscellany Buffet.
9. Get A Snack
Again, though sort of an obvious choice, the nuances can be tricky. You need to pick a snack that won’t add to your indigestion should the rally take a long time, seem at all uncertain, or never come at all. You should not choose anything that is too difficult to hold onto since you’re probably watching the game on the couch and need to have a hand free periodically for commercial channel surfing, grabbing your drink, and the obligatory, occasional scratching. What is baseball without scratching? (more…)
