Ichiro Turned These Into Hits

You might not be able to tell, but I'm currently trapped in a rabbit hole of PITCHfx data. Have been for a few days. It's what led to that post about the worst swings. All I want to do is look up things and then find them in video and make .gifs of them if they're interesting. It's all I've been able to think about. It's hard to think about anything else, because compared to PITCHfx data, nothing else matters. In baseball. Other things do matter in regular life, like eruptions and eruption warning systems.

This is a post of .gifs, inspired by research into PITCHfx data. I can't help it. Maybe it will be the last one for a while. It probably will not, since, again, rabbit hole. It's not like spring training's going to get interesting for a few weeks anyway, and you should know that I said "interesting" out loud all sarcastic-like. I said it so sarcastically that I heard a sarcasm detector explode down the street. I live in a neighborhood of scientists.

These .gifs show bad pitches that Ichiro turned into hits. Each of these pitches shows up in the data as being more than two feet away from the center of the strike zone. Hold your hands out in front of your face. Estimate two feet between them. That's a big distance. Especially if you're a bad visual estimator. Two feet is a long way away from the center of the strike zone.

On the one hand, these are .gifs of Bad Ichiro. On the other hand, these are .gifs of Regular Ichiro, doing something that few other players can do. More importantly, these are .gifs of baseball, and they're .gifs in which the Mariners aren't doing horrible things, so I consider this a step up from Friday.

To the singles! And keep an eye out for Yuniesky Betancourt, without whom one of these .gifs would not have been made.

In preparing these .gifs, I was reminded that Ian Snell and Sean White were Mariners as recently as 2010. A year ago, Ian Snell retired, and then unretired. He signed a minor league contract with the Dodgers on May 25. He allowed 11 home runs in 22 innings in triple-A before he was suspended by the team for the rest of the season. Ian Snell is 30 years old.