Baseball and Stuff - Tony LaRussa, Trevor Bauer, Jason Isringhausen

Baseball and Stuff

·        Having Tony LaRussa as a special advisor to major league baseball can’t be a bad idea. You can’t have too many good heads like this.  You have 30 teams that could all be having difficult questions needed answering. Sending people like Joe Torre and LaRusso to work it out is a class act.

·        Trevor Bauer stood by his opinion that balls are not necessarily harder hit up in the zone compared to lower in the zone throughout the debate. While it is possible that the balls are not physically hit harder, the likelihood for them to end up in places where the hitter can gain extra bases does increase. Bauer seemed extremely confident in his position, and by the sound of it he was basing it off of data – which would be very interesting to see if this were the case. The numbers ran by Jeff do not necessarily debunk his theory, but they do explain that more hits come from balls in the lower part of the zone and more extra bases come from balls up in the zone, which certainly does not help Bauer’s argument. We will most certainly follow Bauer’s numbers in this regard throughout the season, once he reaches the Majors, and also throughout his career - link

·        This is what baseball can do to the soul: it has the ability to make you believe in spite of all other available evidence. My son, John Michael, is 10 years old. We are in the bleachers. He leans in to me and says that the pitch is going to come in high and fat. It’s still a new language to me. The pitch is thrown, and indeed it does — it comes in high and fat, and 94 miles per hour. A-Rod leans into it like he’s about to fell a tree and smacks the ball and it soars, that little sphere of cowhide rising up over the Bronx, and it is a moment unlike any other, when you sit with your son in the ballpark, and the ball is high in the air, you feel yourself aware of everything, the night, the neon, the very American-ness of the moment. - NYT

·        Jason Isringhausen made the LAA 25-man. Why didn’t the Mets resign this guy? David Rubin tells me he was too expensive. Yeah that $12mil Frankie Frank deal looks real good right now.

·         In celebration of the new season, Seamheads.com and The Baseball Gauge are proud to announce our new Wins Above Replacement. The updated calculation has two major changes from our previous system. The first upgrade is our Fielding system, which now uses Runs Saved from Michael Humphreys Defensive Regression Analysis. This allows us to compare and evaluate fielders from all eras of Baseball history and accurately place a value on their performance. To find out more about DRA, check out his book Wizardry and/or take a look at the DRA series at The Hardball Times. Humphreys also provides an extremely informative appendix, describing the method. Not only does this new fielding system allow us to evaluate defensive ability, it also helps us estimate how a team’s defense helps or hurts its pitching staff. - link

·        Astros Release Livan Hernandez.

·        Braves sign Livan Hernandez.

·        Angels option top OF prospect Mike Trout to Triple-A Salt Lake

·        Blue Jays acquired former Mets RP Ryota Igarashi from the Pirates

·        Twins option Drew Butera to AAA Rochester.