Saturday, April 24, 2010

Rain Out

First off, I want to say how unfortunate it is that Rockies President, Keli McGregor, passed away earlier this past week. From what I know of him, he was very nice and sincere person. All the best to his family and friends.

It is somewhat fitting that we have dreary weather in the forecast for this weekend. Tonight's game got postponed due to rain/cold and will be made up tomorrow as part of a true doubleheader. I must say that I was disappointed to have the game called right I was getting to my seat, but I am pretty excited to go to the doubleheader tomorrow. I don't recall ever going to a doubleheader before, so this will be my first. I only hope neither of the games get rained out. Otherwise, I'll look forward to watching 'em play two.

Sunday, April 18, 2010

U-baldo!

I'm pretty wound up right now, but who could blame me after this happened. Looking back I wonder if people realize how special this is. Obviously, anyone should realize that it any no hitter is a big deal. It gets even bigger to throw the first in the history of your team, for any club. What really makes this special, is how miserable the Rockies pitching staff had been through most of the team's history. Until the past few years, the pitching staff was notoriously awful. Part of the improvement may be due to bringing in the humidor, but a large part of that was simply lack of pitching talent. Who can forget the immortal Jamey Wright or David Nied, and that legendary bullpen crew of Steve Reed, Darren Holmes, and Mike "Moonshot" Munoz? I certainly can't.

We've come a long way. We've gone from hoping the starter could hold the other team to less than 5 runs, to expecting quality starts every time out, and believing that a few members of the staff could throw a no-hitter. Now, it's actually happened. I for one won't forget Ubaldo's performance. More than that I won't forget the road the Rockies organization has traveled to have a starting pitcher who is even capable of throwing a no hitter, let alone actually doing it.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

Panic Time?!?!

This is always sort of a frustrating time for me to be a baseball fan. Every year it seems people get hysterical when someone gets off to a slow start, when they just need to relax and let things develop. There are a lot of examples of people jumping to conclusions base on small samples. Your centerfielder is hitting .190? Bench him? After 37 AB’s, probably not. Your team is playing .500 ball after 10 games, so turn the whole roster over? No. The team has scored 51 runs in those 10 games, and has scored at least 4 runs in 9 of those 10 games, so make drastic changes to the lineup? I don’t think so! The solution is to have some patience and let everything settle, if you will.

Earlier I read Dexter Fowler was a “liability” in the lineup, because of his .189 batting average, so I’ll use him as an example. Dex’s batting average has come in 37 at bats, which is pretty obviously not very many. So how many is enough to actually worry? We can build a simple hypothesis test for a player’s batting average based on his current average, and his number of at bats. Given Dex’s ability to get on base (which is the real thing we care about, and deserves more analysis later), he needs to bat at least .250 to be a useful part of the lineup. If I’m Dan O’Dowd/Jim Tracy I’m going to want strong evidence that he’s not before I hit the panic button. Assuming at bats follow a typical binomial pattern, we test the hypothesis that the player is a .250 hitter after n at bats. It turns out that the number of AB’s that a player batting .189 can have before we feel truly confident that he’s not at least a .250 hitter is 111. (I’m more than willing to explain my math, if anyone asks.) That means Dexter only has 74 more AB's to get his average above .190. Don’t worry, something tells me he’ll do it.