...And Down The Stretch They Come! MLB enters the home stretch

I just finished watching the Braves win with a walk-off home run from Justin Upton, and while baseball is still fresh in my brain, and before I switch my brain into English Premier League mode, I feel like I should type about baseball.  I think it's time to take a look around the leagues quick and see what's up.  

But before we look at the standings, remember Antonio Alfonseca?  That dude had six fucking fingers.  

Anyway...

 Fun.

Prediction for the AL?  I think it ends up being exactly as it is right now.  Perhaps Oakland will win the west, and Texas makes the wild card game, but that's about all I'd change.  

National League!!!!

Also fun, but maybe not as fun.  

The Dodgers and Braves have insurmountable leads.  The Reds are surging, the Cardinals are bleeding and the Pirates are hanging in there.  To me, the National League is a five team race already.  It will end up exactly how it is, and that's the way it should be.  Arizona has no business in the postseason this year. Neither do the Gnats.  

Three quarters of the season is over already.  I'm not one to advocate the watching of American League games often, but now I must do so.  There's just so much left to be decided out there.  Alright, have a good day, and go Arsenal! 

Probable Pitchers for 7-23-13 around the MLB

Tough day here at Safety Squeeze.  Why is that?  Trying to pick a pitching match up to highlight for tonight.  Sure, there are some quality pitchers toeing the rubber this evening, but most of them are against far infurior pitchers.  Well, see for yourself...

You see, not much to choose from.  Even the pitchers that are quality aren't that great.  I suppose this is what you get when everyone is on their fifth start after the All-Star break.  But if I have to choose one, I'll go with Jose Fernandez of the Marlins against Jhoulys Chacin of the Rockies.  Now, this game features two teams that are not doing too well in the grand scheme of the National League, but both of these pitchers are notable for different reasons.  Jose Fernandez is expected to be the teams ace...eventually.  He's pitched well this season, especially for a rookie on the worst team in the NL (maybe.)  Jhoulys Chacin is just flat out pitching over his head, but until he proves to me and everyone else that he's coming back to earth, I have to expect he's going to have a quality outing time in and time out.  I think Fernandez will be a solid starter...eventually. Right now he's doing fine, and I'll be curious to see how this one shakes out.  Well, as curious as anyone would be when the Rockies and Marlins get together.  

Okay, that's it for today.  Watch some baseball, eh?

Make Love Not WAR (wins above replacement)

So this morning I learned what Wins Above Replacement, or WAR is all about.  I thought it was probably stupid based upon it's name, and after actually looking into what it calculates, I would say it's not as stupid as I thought it would be, but it's still a rather useless statistic.  So basically it measures how much better a player is better than an average AAA-level or bench player?  That's stupid.  Number one, not all AAA players are average.  Sometimes a guy comes up and rips it up because he's pumped about playing in the majors.  It measures how valuable a player is to the team.  Like as if to say "without him, we'd be stuck with this jabroni over here and we'd be screwed."  Okay, fine, but if you watched a baseball game once in a while, you would see a guys value using your own two eyes, no?  Why not just look at his ERA, or even his SIERA?  Wins?  K's? I get that WAR is a composite score of a dudes value, but it doesn't tell me much.  So Cliff Lee and Clayton Kershaw have really good WARs?  NO SHIT.  Just look at any of their regular, standard numbers and you could gather that yourself.  Or better yet, watch a Phillies or Dodgers game.  That's how I figured it out.  I don't need WAR and I will probably forever roll my eyes whenever I hear or read anyone mention it.

I'm stuck in this spot between embracing advanced stats and stepping back and realizing that advanced stats are clearly for people that don't watch baseball.  I don't watch Rockies games, so I can learn how Michael Cuddyer is doing by reading about his WAY inflated BABIP this morning.  Makes sense to me, because he's Michael Cuddyer, so I knew something was up.  There's no way the Michael Cuddyer I remember could be putting up these kind of numbers without some luck.  But I imagine if I watched a few Rockies games, I could tell you he's on a hot streak right now, and baseball has this wonderful thing called Regression to the Mean, where every player either gradually gets better or worse over the course of a career.  Any jumps in productivity means their slumping or on a hot streak.  Many, many players throughout the season and throughout the history of baseball go up and down throughout their careers.  Things like BABIP help to show you when that's happening so you don't have to watch baseball, because who would ever want to do that?

Starters and What to Watch For, 6-29-13 MLB Preview

I hope you guys managed to figure out who was starting all the games in the MLB the past two days without me.  Somehow, I know most of you struggled to figure out who would be the best matchups for each day, but honesly, I have company coming this weekend, so I had to spend a lot of time deep cleaning the apartment.  Also, I find it hard to sit down and type when my wife is home, and she took the last two days off work, so I was busy.  Is that okay with you?  It better be...

Here's today's starters.

As you can see, a full slate on a Saturday, per usual.  The trick is looking at these wonderful matchups and figuring out which ones are the ones to watch.  I've spotted a few, but I've not gone through all the trouble to figure out which ones are the most interesting besides the obvious choices...

So, the Safety Squeeze Pitching Matchup of the Day ™ ™is...

Cliff Lee and Hyun-Jin Ryu...wow way to branch out, Blogger.  Yeah, just take two guys who were already featured here this past week and rehash that shit.  Well, let me tell you, it's the best matchup.  The Dodgers got housed at home last night by these Phillies, but today is a new day.  The only reason that Dodger Stadium didn't empty out faster than **insert pop culture reference about substance abuse here** is because there was a fireworks show after the game.  Or, as Vin Scully would have had you believe if you were listening to his broadcast last night, to witness one more at bat of Yasiel Puig.  Ha, no Vin, you're the best, but they wanted to see the fireworks they already paid for.  Should be a good one.  

Another matchup that caught my eye is Chris Archer and the Rays against the Tigers and Justin Verlander.  Verlander's stats aren't that far out of line from what he's done throughout his career except his BABIP.  I expect Verlander to turn that around, as BABIP is a determination of luck, and his BABIP is elevated.  Once that BABIP evens out, expect Verlander to appear to be the guy he used to be, which he technically already is.  He's just been unlucky. Plus, it's not like the Tigers have the greatest defense.  I imagine a lot of the line drives that are being hit off him would be caught if the defense behind him was better.  

Okay, that's all.  Go watch the Tigers Rays game then the Phillies Dodgers game late, and you'll be a happy baseball fan of you make these choices.  

Advanced stats

There are a lot of advanced stats out there.  SABRmetrics, or whatever.  Listen, this all might just be coming from a place where I have a lack of understanding on the subject, but I don't really put a whole lot of stock in advanced stats.  That might sound weird, but I just think there are other ways of determining if a guy is a good baseball player or not.  Like, oh I don't know, watching a game.  I'm way more of an eyeball test kind of guy.  Does he look alright?  Then he's alright, isn't he? Guys get hot, guys get cold.  It comes and goes.  Everyone goes through this. I'll tell you right now, after writing this mini rant that I've been planning in my head, I'm going to go and search on Google "how to read and decipher advanced stats" and see if I can change my own mind on the subject.  But as of right now, I think fancy stats are only good for three things.  Number one is obviously fantasy baseball.  It's good to know if a guy is playing over his head or underachieving compared to what he usually does so you can win your fantasy league.  But this reason directly leads me to the number two and three reasons for using fancy stats for baseball is to sound smart, and to be right.  For me, I don't put much stock in being right all the time.  I've lost hundreds of arguments with my wife because I just don't care if I'm right.  She has to be right, it's in her nature.  It's part of what makes her special because she's determined to be right and smart and respected.  Me, I don't care.  I just want to get along with everyone and have a conversation about baseball.  Taht's why this blog exists.  I'm not going to (be able) to tell you that Tyler Lyons has a stranded runner rate of 91% because I looked it up.  I'll tell you that because the Sleeper and the Bust podcast told me that.  I had already dropped him anyway, but that helps the decision feel like the right one.  Is that a fancy stat?  Not really, that's a pretty regular stat, and I probably would have been able to tell you this stat if I had actually watched the Cardinals play for the past 15 days.

What I have watched is Atlanta Braves baseball, and I don't need fancy stats to tell you that Justin Upton had a terrible May, but his numbers don't look all that bad because he had an amazing April.  I know this because I've only missed a couple Braves games all year.  I know this team.  I don't know Cardinals very well.  I don't know Astros or Mariners or Yankees or Angels or really most of the league unless they've played the Braves.  I haven't watched any of their games more than an inning or two this year.  This is where I need people that read into fancy stats to tell me what they're doing.  Why do I run a baseball blog, anyway?

That brings me to my final point here.  What does advanced stats do for me as a fan?  Not as a fantasy baseball team owner, but as a fan of the Atlanta Braves and of baseball watching in general, how does knowing Dan Uggla's BABIP (if I knew what it was) change the way I feel every time he strikes out or flies out or grounds out or walks....which is all he does...Or hit a home run.  If Dan Uggla could just start hitting doubles I'd be impressed.  But he just doesn't.  And I don't need to look at any type of advanced stat to know he's not had a good year.  Knowing advanced stats does very, very little for me as a fan watching games.  What I care about is wins, strikeouts, hits, home runs, web gems, double plays, no-hitters, disputed calls, weird pitching wind-ups, weird pitching deliveries, 17 inning games, position players pitching, catchers throwing their masks off to make a catch on a popup behind the plate, "is a hit or is it an error?" yada yada yada.  Fancy stats are for people that don't watch baseball games.  That's my conclusion.  If that's the way you want to experience this game, then go for it.  Do whatever you want, but I'll just watch the game.  

Jeremy Bonderman to Start Today for Seattle

I can't sit here and tell you that I actually went out of my way to watch a whole lot of the 2003 Detroit Tigers.  You know, the one that went 43-119?  Were it not for an amazing rally in the final week of the season, this was the worst team in baseball history.  All that has been well documented, and after the signing of Pudge Rodriguez and the hiring of Jim Leyland, the Tigers turned the franchise into what I consider to be the class of the American League right now.  As a man who spent the first 26 years of my life in Michigan, I was very aware of the Detroit Tigers ups and downs, even if I didn't consider them "my team."  They were the game on TV, they were my dad's love, and they were my first baseball love.  While I don't live and die with Tigers baseball these days (or the days I'm about to talk about), I certainly have a long-term interest in the team and the team's performance.  I've watched my fair share of good, but mostly bad Detroit Tigers baseball. Most of my friends and family are Tigers fans.

 Just 10 short years ago, that's when this historic-for-the-wrong-reason season happened, I remember a couple things about that.  I've tried to block most of it out, mostly Bobby Higginson until about 25 minutes ago, but there are a few names I'll never forget.  The names Mike Maroth and Jeremy Bonderman.  A couple young pitchers thrown into the fire to burn because the team didn't have any other options.  While their owner was slinging $5 carryout pizzas and blowing all his cash on the Red Wings (don't think it's a coincidence that after the NHL lockout of 2004-2005, when the salary cap went way down, suddenly the Tigers had money to play with for free agents?) the Tigers grew increasingly and embarrassingly bad. 20 year old Jeremy Bonderman, in his first year with the big leagues, was run out there for 28 starts...and he lost 19 of them.  What were the Tigers supposed to do? They didn't have anyone else.  Bonderman had stuff, but he was just a raw kid.

I'll never forget that, what a man must learn getting pummeled for months on end.  It has to do something to you mentally and emotionally.  Well, things eventually turned around a bit for Jeremy, as he did get to start a game in the World Series just three seasons later (which he lost, but whatever, he started).  So I've always rooted for Mike Maroth, who lost 21 that year, and Bonderman.  Those guys took a beat down and didn't quit.  Bonderman would go on to an injury-riddled and shortened career, being diagnosed with Thoracic Outlet Syndrome, and then having Tommy John surgery.  I don't know if anyone really thought Jeremy Bonderman would ever pitch in the majors again.

But he's pitching today!  For Seattle!  Against the Twins!  There's nothing sports fans like more than winning championships, talking smack to fans of teams that are not your own, and a good comeback story.  This is the comeback story for the ages if he can pull this off.  Needless to say, I'll be watching for sure.  Jeremy Bonderman, I wish you the best of luck.  I want you to succeed so badly.  He used to throw that wicked slider for a strike that just broke off and made batters knees buckle.  I hope he still has that.  He's one of my favorite pitchers because of all the bullshit he's had to deal with and he didn't quit. I mean, look, I can't even write a post without using two huge paragraphs describing just half of what he went through.  The point here is to tell you that, if you are able, you should watch the Mariners game today.  Dude hasn't pitched in the majors since 2010.  I hope he does well.  I really, really do.

-BJP

Baseball Needs More Day Games

Baseball needs more day games.  I mean it.  More more more day games.  Of course, this is a pretty selfish request.  As a subscriber of MLB.tv, I have the privilege of watching whatever baseball game I want (except for the Braves and Reds whom are blacked out in my area) whenever I want.  When I want it is in the early afternoon.  As a stay at home dad, when the wife is away at work until 4:30 pm, I get to stay home and watch baseball...er the kids.  I watch the kids...and baseball.  I think there should be a baseball game on every day.  After all, baseball is supposed to be a lazy afternoon pastime anyway, right?  So I end up with a lot of Cubs games, which would be fine if they were a better team.  I mean, this week they certainly looked like quite the contender for the pennant, but let's be serious for a minute, they were playing the White Sox, after all.  It's not like they were beating up on any first place teams... Oh, except the first place Arizona Diamondbacks.  But let's not get carried away with that.  Watching the Cubs all the time is okay...but you know, I'd like a little variety.  A little bit of everyone every day would be really nice.

I usually look forward to Wednesdays, because that's when a lot of series' wrap up with day games so the teams can hit the road early for their next town/series.  I win there. A whole bunch of day games. Saturdays and Sunday's provide excellent day game action.  I can watch them.  I'm not in charge of any kids when those games happen but...I'm at work.  Don't tell my employer but I watch a lot of baseball while on the job.  Sorry, boss, I have an addiction to feed.  So that's good.  Day games on the weekend are good.

This little story comes about because I've become a baseball consuming monster.  I did this last May/June as well.  The big difference is that this season I've been watching baseball regularly since the day the season began.  Last year, it was only at about this time of the year that I started paying any attention to the season at all (thanks Stanley Cup Playoffs).  So I've gotten the same increase in baseball consumption as last year, but this time it's on top of my previous obsession.  This means I'm staring at clocks waiting for games to start.  This means that on days where there is no day games, I get sad and lost and lonely.  Thankfully, as I write this all down, there are games set to begin in about 15 minutes.  Indians - Rays, yo!  And they just finished up playing each other at like, two this morning because of rain delays.  Love it.  I just love it.  So lets watch some baseball, and preferably when the sun is high in the sky.  

One Tenth Done: My Reactions to MLB 2013 in April

We have played one tenth of the Major League Baseball season.  What we just watched, we'll just do that nine more times, and the season will be over before you even realized,

Some say that September wins are more important than April wins, and that may be true, a baseball team can really change complexions over the course of a season, but September wins will surely have a lot less pressure applied to them if you can get more wins in April.  Teams that get off to a hot start have a much easier path to the post season than teams that start slow and have to play catch-up all season.  Sometimes it works in the favor of the team with the slow start, but if you don't get up off the mat soon enough, you can be cooked by mid June.

One team that I recall getting off to a slow start and getting their act together was the 2005 Houston Astros.  If you remember, that team made it to the World Series against the White Sox that year.  A lot was made of their 15-30 start to the season, and I always since then check the standings at the 45 game mark, and see who is around that record at that time.  I look at that team and think, if the Astros could do it, anyone can.  So just because a team gets off to a slow start, doesn't mean their season is necessarily cooked.

The Tigers last year had a slow start, and were trying to catch the White Sox all year, and they did.  That was a good team that was underachieving early.  The 2005 Astros were a decent team, as well, a team that, if I remember correctly, had been in the playoffs the season prior.  They were expected to be good and started slow.  That's the difference between them and, lets say for example, the 2013 Houston Astros.  What a mess.  But it's not a surprise that the Astros are terrible, everyone knew they were going to be at the start of the season.  So the fact that they're bringing up the rear in the standings in the American League is no surprise at all.  Don't expect a miracle run out of these guys.

I tend to focus on the terrible teams in baseball because I feel bad for that teams fans.  I'm also very grateful that that team has never been my team.  I have this sick fascination with poor baseball teams, because it doesn't take much to be really bad.  Every team is pretty good.  Every baseball team since baseball has had a season that we record and recognize has won at least 40 games in a season.  And there is always fans in the stands.  It just amazes me that there were any fans in the stands at all for the 2003 Detroit Tigers season. Why would you waste your time?  It's just fascinating.

So 16 games (or so) into the 2013 season, we're starting to see who is good and who is not.  It's never for sure at this stage, but you can start to see it.  The Braves and Nationals are for real.  The Cubs and Marlins are really, really bad.  That's easy.  We all knew that going into this.  But it's the American League that I find really intriguing.  The AL east standings look like 2007.  The West looks like...well, not what I was exactly thinking, and the Central looks really mixed up.  I thought the Red Sox were going to be bad this year?  And I didn't think the Yankees had much of anything?  How are they the tops of the East?For the record, I wasn't drinking the Blue Jays kool-aid.  I just figured basically switch the Sox and the O's and you'd have what I expected.  But who gives a shit what I expect?  That's why they play the games.  It's early, and the difference between the last place Jays and first place Sox is only six games.  Same thing with the last place Indians and first place Royals, which is only 2.5 games.  There's still a lot of shaking out to do.  It's still too early to really say for sure who's who in the AL, but it surely feels like a different year over there.  Too bad I don't watch American League games.

More on that subject....very soon!

Go Baseball!

P.S. I've seen two instances of paper planes being flown onto the field in Toronto this season.  What's up with that?