Hideo Nomo Has a Posse

ESPN shall apparently brook no criticisms of Bud Selig. The host of their Baseball Today podcast, Peter Pascarelli, was summarily wiped from history after offering a nauseating and forced apology for saying of the recently erected Bud Selig statue outside Milwaukee’s Miller Park that it could be improved by the efforts of Wisconsin’s pigeons.

If you catch his meaning.

Anyway, it’s all reminiscent of the time ESPN also forced “news” anchor Scott Van Pelt to apologize to Mr. Selig for questioning the value in his $18m salary. The network’s not really fond of any kind of criticism that might jeopardize their relationship with MLB.

The network even went so far as to remove the comments from the podcast. The show resumed with no sign of Pascarelli, nor any mention of his fate from the hosts.

VANQUISHED!

Seriously, I thought I might have to wait until at least the regular season to kick this little series off, but the baseball gods give and the baseball gods giveth again. Ever since my favorite club decided to trade for Milton Bradley (not a bad trade, really, as it allowed them to flush the contract and BMI of Carlos Silva), I figured I would keep watch and follow his routine blow-ups throughout the season. I expect the Ms to do well and to be competitive in their West, but even if they fall on their collective face, well, there will always be the Milton Bradley Watch.

Bradley was interviewed by the New York Times – who were no doubt simply angling to antagonize the misunderstood outfielder and cajole him into a money quote or two – and asked about his troubles during his Cubs stint. Did Milton try to simply move on and allow the water under the bridge by letting bygones to be just that? Why no, he did not:

Two years ago, I played, and I was good. I go to Chicago, not good. I’ve been good my whole career. So, obviously, it was something with Chicago, not me.

Yes! The man’s been good his whole career. For the one year where he was not good, it was “something” with the city. “Something” with the fans, Wrigley, Lou Pinella, the traffic- whatever. Bradley claims the Cubs expected him to be a 30 HR guy despite never hitting more than 20 before his 2008 stint with Texas. Chicago manager Lou Pinella disagreed with the assessment.

Ah, Milton. It’s only March 4. The Ms have yet to play their second game of Spring Training. Already, the quotes are rolling in. It’s certainly some kind of divine intervention that the Mariners play the Cubs this year in interleague play; if only the game were at Wrigley.

Here they are in CSV with MLBAM’s venue ID added. Here’s a schema you can use should you want to run them into a database:

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS `park_factors`;
CREATE TABLE park_factors (
    venue_id INT DEFAULT NULL,
    year INT DEFAULT NULL,
    name VARCHAR(100) DEFAULT NULL,
    R FLOAT DEFAULT NULL,
    H FLOAT DEFAULT NULL,
    HR FLOAT DEFAULT NULL,
    H2B FLOAT DEFAULT NULL,
    H3B FLOAT DEFAULT NULL,
    BB FLOAT DEFAULT NULL,
    PRIMARY KEY (venue_id, year)
);

MLB.com provides, among other things, all of the pitch information for each MLB and AAA game in XML format. It’s the data that drives their wonderful little service Gameday. If you want to take a spin through what the data looks like, start here and poke around. What’s key, most folks agree, is the Pitch/FX information, but there’s also pitch-by-pitch logs for every game.

I’ve put together a little package which includes (1) a schema for a MySQL database to retain the information, and (2) a python script which will handle fetching and parsing the XML data found on MLB.com servers. If you’re interested in such a thing, you can download it from the github project page.

There is detailed installation and execution information found on the wiki at github as well but just to provide them here:

./gameday.py

With the following arguments:

• --year=XXXX four digit year
• --day=X,Y days in a comma separated list
• --month=X,Y months in a comma separated list
• --type=[mlb, aaa] optional: which league to process. Default is ‘mlb’. Any of the categories found here (AA, etc) should work- I’ve just worked with MLB and AAA.
• --verbose Shows every HTTP request
• --delta Uses delta mode.

When delta mode is run, the script will store the last date it processed in the database. Upon next execution, it will start from where it left off. This is useful for running the thing nightly to grab the latest stuff.

A friend of mine was watching Nolan Ryan’s seventh no-hitter, broadcast today on MLB Network. One of the color guys – Tommy Hutton or Fergie Oliver – mentioned that the current Ranger hitter, Gary Pettis, was close to the all-time record for most seasons with 100+ strikeouts and a small handful of home runs. I don’t think the announcer clarified the number of home runs, but my friend sent me an email asking about such a record.

I pulled up ye olde Baseball Databank, one of the best resources around, and plugged in a query to show the players who put up seasons of at least 100 strikeouts and no more than ten home runs. Pettis indeed leads the bigs with six such seasons, actually passing the previous record holder, Omar Moreno, in 1990, the year before Ryan’s no-hitter. So it was all in the books by the time it was brought up on the air, but nevermind. What a glorious little record.

Five active players show up with two seasons meeting the criteria: Michael Bourn, Chone Figgins, Akinori Iwamura, Mark Teahen, and Michael Young.

All of these guys with the exception of Knoop are speed guys: Brock you may have heard of, and Moreno, Pettis, and Clayton have 1,072 stolen bases among them.

Michael Bourn had a breakthrough season in 2009 with 61 steals in 73 attempts and 678 plate appearances, solidifying himself by May 21 as the Astros lead-off guy. Given that he also struck out 140 times and hit only three home runs, he stands the best chance of moving up this dubious list should he keep the pace.

To illustrate the depths of their futility vis-à-vis the longball, the average HR/SO ratio for people hitting more than ten home runs breaks down per decade like so: