During last night’s game, some fans at Yankee Stadium started the Wave in the 7th inning of a 9-3 game, spurring some debate between myself, Sean McNally (@SeanMMcNally), and Ben Kabak (@bkabak) about the etiquette of the Wave and whether it is ever appropriate. I defended it as allowable in certain circumstances, while Sean and [...]
The Yankees minor league depth at catcher has been well documented. Jesus Montero is knocking loudly on the door to the Bronx. Austin Romine is having a fine start to the season. Gary Sanchez has Montero-type upside at this point. J.R. Murphy‘s bat is hot in Charleston right now. This is definitely a position of [...]
Brien asked an important question Thursday: What did the Yankees get for Jeter’s contract? This is a complicated subject, but I have a very simple answer: ground balls. Lots. Of. Ground balls. Since 2005, Derek Jeter is second in the majors in ground ball percentage among all players with at least 2,000 plate appearances.
Simply put, ground balls are bad for offense. This is the entire theory behind being a ground ball pitcher. As common sense tells us, if the ball is on the ground, it can’t go out of the park. More modern sabermetric sense confirms this traditional wisdom. The concept of xFIP – a metric that judges pitchers only on strikeouts, walks, and flyball percentage – implicitly includes the notion that ground balls are good for pitchers and bad for hitters. This is because ground ball percentage is inversely proportional to flyball percentage, a major component of xFIP. However, ground balls aren’t all bad news for offense; they actually have a much higher batting average on balls in play than flyballs. This helps players who hit lots of grounders to have higher BABIP’s than those who don’t. Perennial batting title contenders like Ichiro! and Joe Mauer have traditionally hit lots of grounders. Problems arise when a player starts hitting ground balls in situations where they used to hit linedrives. This seems to be exactly what is occurring with Jeter; his 2010 and 2011 seasons have brought career highs in ground ball percentage and career lows in linedrive percentage.
In this post I will assess the potential causes for this ground ball spike.
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After torturing fans with three consecutive low-scoring, dull games, the Yankee bats came alive against Chicago Thursday night, tagging the White Sox for twelve runs and thirteen hits. But the box score doesn’t tell the full story of this game. There were at least four separate storylines. It all went away tremendously, but Edwin Jackson [...]
Last night, I shared two of my favorite pictures from my HOF trip. Tonite, some more, but Yankees-centric…
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After a couple nights of low-scoring games, the Yankees’ offense finally broke through Thursday night, in a game that had its fair share of strange plays and big hits. At the end of the night, the Yankees took a commanding 12-3 victory and managed to split the series against the White Sox after dropping the first two games.
The game did not start well for the Yankees, as Eduardo Nunez bobbled a routine grounder by Brent Lillibridge. Alexei Ramirez lined a single to left, moving to second as Brett Gardner tried to throw out Lillibridge at third, and the White Sox had two on and no outs to start the game. A grounder to third Carlos Quentin resulted in Alex Rodriguez getting the runner at the plate for the first out of the game, and CC Sabathia battled back and got the next two hitters to fly out, ending the inning without allowing a run.
The Yankees got on the board in the bottom of the third. Gardner worked a one out walk and moved to second on a wild pitch. Nunez walked and they pulled off a double steal. Curtis Granderson followed with another walk and the Yankees had the bases loaded. Nick Swisher walked, for Edwin Jackson’s fourth straight walk and the Yankees first run of the game. A sac fly by Robinson Cano pushed Nunez across the plate and New York had a 2-0 lead after three, despite still not having a hit.
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The Yankees look to salvage a split of their 4 game series with the White Sox tonight, with CC Sabathia throwing the first pitch for the Yankees at 7:05. Here is the Yankees lineup: Curtis Granderson CF Nick Swisher RF Robinson Cano 2B Alex Rodriguez 3B Eric Chavez 1B Russell Martin C Jorge Posada DH [...]
There were two baseball stories that I read today that I found incredibly interesting, and I wanted to highlight them here. The numbers behind a catch and a just-miss Mark Simon had a great post this morning comparing the hang time on a game-changing bloop double the Yankees allowed to the Twins a few weeks [...]
AAA- Scranton Until the unfortunate “ball meets balls” incident, Jesus Montero was still raking albeit still without any walks. He’ll miss a few games to nurse his “situation” back to health… Justin Maxwell has been on fire. The way he’s getting on base and his streak of HRs is pretty impressive. The strikeouts also [...]
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