Series Preview: Seattle Mariners @ Chicago White Sox

Although it was hard to concentrate on the dirt with Jeff repeatedly screaming (warranted) obscenities at Griffey, I was enjoying seeing exactly where Yuni mussed up the neatly raked infield. His foot traffic patterns were routinely directly against the outfield grass, and he got within about 6-7 feet exactly once.

It’s April 27th!!!

sb and I decided that Yuni has essentially been ordered to take the first two pitches. Either that, or he’s responded to a request for more patience by acting like a petulant little child and taking two pitches as an act of defiance before proceeding to swing like mad at everything else.

In both the 2nd and 7th innings, Yuni glowered at two passing pitches before promptly popping out to Brandon Wood in foul territory on the third pitch. PitchFX says all 4 of the pitches he took were either in the strike zone or just (and I do mean just) outside. Of course, he did ground into a fielders choice in the 4th on the first pitch.

Normally I agree wholeheartedly with your beer selections, but to knock Rock Bottom? Really? I don’t do the Seattle one hardly ever due to a bad experience, but the Bellevue Rock Bottom is consistently phenomenal, even going so far as to win the gold medal for best American-style strong pale at last year’s Great American Beer Festival. I know how you like your darker beers, and their brewmaster tends to lean towards IPAs, wheats and reds, but he does all 3 very well.

Admittedly, I’m a bit of a fanboy and the $2 mugs (22 oz) on Tuesdays and Sundays could have me thinking biased. But it’s one of my favorite places to drink beer.

You say of Colon: “His low tRA is based entirely off his batted ball profile which right now boasts a good ground ball rate and an incredibly not-going-to-sniff-lasting 7.3% line drive rate.”

You also say of Corcoran: “His 2008 was too good for me to want to jettison him this early into 2009.”

So a couple of things here…
1) Corcoran’s great 2008 was based in part on a great GB rate, but it was amazing due to a freakishly low LD rate. That is, his 2008 was in many ways similar to Colon’s fast start in 2009. Would you agree, or do you think Corcoran’s 2008 would have been very good even with league average or regressed LD rates? I see Corco’s tRA* is higher than I would’ve expected, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

2) tRA just uses the run values of each batted ball type, so yeah, Corcoran/Colon look great. tRA* regresses each component towards league average, which makes a lot of sense. tRA doesn’t take a pitcher’s career stats into account, however, so I’m guessing each component (BB%, K%, LD%, GB%, etc.) get a blanket regression? I say ‘blanket’ when it’s really more complicated, since y’all do park-specific averages and all that stuff. Is this right? I keep thinking that what you really need is something that regresses K rate much less than LD rate, or GB rate less than HR rate or something. But hey, maybe it already does that.

Corcoran’s tRA – after regressing his LD% towards average – was still under 4 last year. Very nice. But if he was ‘lucky’ on LDs, that pushed his GB up as well. When you regress an LD rate, what do you assume those batted balls become? Use that season’s GB/FB? Career numbers? 50/50?