Smoltz Reverie Overflow Thread

if he had given up 6 runs in 3 innings yesterday, with 3 strikeouts, you would have posted the same thing?

it’s a very, very hard pitch to learn and control, by all accounts. I just think that if he could learn it, he could be an effective closer for the next 10 years or until he blows out his elbow.

While I understand the Padres suck, he dominated them. That’s what we’d expect a good pitcher to do, right? Dominate a bad lineup? His performance doesn’t prove that he’s going to be good from here on out, but it was consistent with what a good pitcher would do.

….ohhh.

is reserved for Kip Wells.

Make the fucking trade.

I don’t want to sound cynical, but I heard earlier in the season after a good Welley start, that someone detected that he was off-balance and it was corrected. But Waino’s claim of the arm angle fix sounded pretty reasonable.

Definitely none with the CB. That split to end the 3rd inning had some ridiculous movement too.

It looks like a straight fastball until the last ten feet or so, when it dives out of the zone. I always thought that was the idea….you’re trying to trick the batter into starting a swing above the knees and then the thing is suddenly below the knees.

Did he throw an actual curveball all day? I didn’t really notice one….

I think USC has as many questions going into a season as they’ve had in the Pete Carroll era there. Michigan State and Michigan are both down this year, and the literally don’t play anyone else in the top 70 in college football.

They have as good a chance at a zero or one loss season since Lou was there.

Of course they could just totally suck.

But I don’t despise them personally, I just don’t particular care for/about them.

Horrible on both sides

He’s been all of, oh, 3 months, and he’s their starting QB after having not played football in 4 years.

or just more relievers?

College football is different for people like me and JD. We were literally raised on it. I know the rest of the country gets sick and tired of hearing it (sort of like the Yanks and Sawx), but it really is different in the SEC. And until you see a big game in person in Knoxville or Baton Rouge or Auburn or Tuscaloosa or Gainesville or Athens, it’s really hard to describe. Especially at night.

I mean, sure there are a few thin reasons that ND could be good, but I feel like I was hearing something along these lines right about this time last year.

Those pre/post-game interviews are probably how he talks all the time. Several Cards have used “goof” to describe him. (Which is why it’s hilarious that he thinks Motte is crazy… Sauce must talk more than he does.)

He’s also on the low end of the size pool. 6’2" 195.

on every play, which can lead to some goofy things sometimes. Someday day Holliday is going to take a high fly ball on the warning track and then look and see Ryan standing right in front of him with a shit eating grin on his face.

Tony/whoever needs to f’ing stop putting out “must run” signs from the bench.

Hit and runs drive me fucking crazy. Brilliant way to run into a bunch of stupid outs and screw players up both at the plate and on the basepaths.

Albert, Tony, and Ryan were all asked about the play. All said Ryan messed up. Why? Because Ryan messed up on the play. Do you expect them to say something like,

“well, obvouisly something went wrong with the play. We don’t know what though?”

My big thing is the only shots they’re using are largely showing Venable’s back, and at the point of the tag. You can’t judge speed and direction from those shots. There was a whole context to what happened that’s just ignored. And there might be a language stumble involved, since Albert might (possibly) be talking about Venable throwing the elbow in the earlier game, not this game.

It’s pretty maddening when they then slow down the point of contact and then say, well, maybe he wasn’t throwing an elbow.

Either way, Albert walked away. He was ready to consign it to rookie inexperience.

again, if this weren’t the second time, I don’t think Albert would’ve thought twice.

I mean, if that had been Prince Fielder… well actually there was a guy who stopped in his tracks this season. Who would try to run through Prince Fielder?

It was the Padres….

hmmm.

It is not a screwball. This is not debatable.

0,0 is a pitch thrown with no spin and only affected by gravity. Above that on the Y axis a pitch is rising relative to a pitch without spin because of the backspin imparted by the pitcher.

here’s a guess. By centering it at zero (position of a ball with no spin) it lets you put balls that move at different speeds on the same chart. The idea would be that batters’ natural tendency is to expect a ball to follow a non-spin trajectory, and it’s deviations away from that null hypothesis are what matters.

Check out the Beyond the Boxscore Primers here here and here that Sky so graciously put together.

Here is the money quote:

In a movement graph, we don’t care about where a pitch actually ended up, but instead care about how it got there. Our point of view is again from the catcher’s eyes and the axes are again horizontal and vertical, but this time they represent change in location due to spin, not absolute location. Change in location compares a pitch’s actual final location at the front of the plate to where physics equations would have expected it to end up given no spin at all (and no knuckling effects).

So the fastballs don’t actually rise, per se, but are up however many more inches than would be expected. In that sense, the origin is where a pitch would be expected to cross the plate given no spin.