While looking at whether or not Mark Teixeira and/or Alex Rodriguez should bounce back this next season (look for a post on this later this week), I ran across some interesting stats. Teixeira had his worst season since 2006 and A-Rod his worst since 1995, and I wondered why that was. Fluctuations in their BABiP is the easiest culprit as A-Rod (.274 in 2010; .318 for career) and Tex (.268 in 2010; .303 for career) each saw their BABiPs drop well below their normal rates, but when I looked deeper to find out if this was more fluke than decline, I found something troubling in both players’ O-Swing% (the percentage of times a player swings at a pitch outside of the strike zone)—they increased dramatically. Curious, I took a gander at the other major position players to see if they did the same, and what I found was also troubling—A-Rod and Tex were not the only ones, and their increases were actually smaller than other players’ increases.

(Data from FanGraphs)

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Crusty Murray Chass has been oft-criticized for his anti-statistical analysis stance and “I’m not a blogger” platform, but what Chass does best is tell stories about some of the legends of the game. Chass has been around this game for a very, very long time and that’s afforded him a great perspective on some of the characters in baseball history. So while I vehemently disagree with his “get off my damn lawn” attitude towards guys like me, I am always happy to read something like this, where I learn a little bit about a player from baseball history who I knew little about prior:

For [Fred] Lynn to be eligible to play in the post-season should the Tigers make it, he had to be in Detroit by midnight that night. The Players Association later challenged the rule, but in the end the matter became moot because the Tigers finished a game behind the Red Sox.

But in the immediate aftermath of the trade, when the Tigers were still in first place, Lajoie had a decision to make. He knew that Lynn technically had not arrived in Chicago on his chartered jet from Anaheim, where the Orioles were playing, by midnight. He knew that the plane had not entered Chicago air space until 10 minutes after midnight.

Lajoie could have said that Lynn had beaten the deadline and, an official in the commissioner’s office said, the office would have accepted his word. But Lajoie chose to be honest.

“He didn’t get there,” Lajoie admitted the next day. “They were over the city limits about 10 after 12.” Asked why he didn’t fudge the time, Lajoie said, “I just felt a rule’s a rule. There’s no sense playing with it. That’s the rule and we’ll live by it.”

Good story about a man, Bill Lajoie, who I knew very little about. Nice work, Murray. Thanks for sharing that with us.