The Game We Didn't Catch

[It’s my turn to blog but I’m leaving the field open for Numenius, whose birthday it is today. – Pica]

We went to San Francisco today to catch the Giants game on the occasion of my birthday. Unfortunately a storm decided to pass through San Francisco at the same time. Undeterred, we trudged the seven blocks from Montgomery BART to the ballpark clad in rain jackets and ponchos through the rain, hoping the weather would let up in time for us to see some baseball.

The game wasn’t called off, but was in indefinite rain delay by the time we got inside the ballpark. We headed up one escalator flight to promenade level, where we milled about, happy to be under a roof, and grabbed a lunch consisting of garlic fries and hot chocolate. We were never even to make it up to our seats.

It didn’t let up. We watched the in-house televisions giving pre-game coverage commemorating the 10th anniversary of the opening of the ballpark. Eventually they switched the telly over to the final round of the Masters golf tournament. A bit surreal — watching golf (which we never watch) hanging out in front of a hot dog concessionaire, the rain pouring on the field of AT&T Park, all on my birthday.

Our giving up time was 3 PM, two hours after arrival. It was still coming down on the field at that time. The game had not been called — they were going to do everything possible to play the game today due to the logistical difficulties of rescheduling the game with the Atlanta Braves later on.

We left the ballpark. Two minutes later, it started letting up, and the sky was bright to the west. We wondered if heading out when we did was a mistake.

We took BART back to Ashby Station, where we had left our car, and got the radio. By 4 PM they still hadn’t made a decision about the game, and were checking on the condition of the field. By 4:45 when we were three-quarters of the way back to Davis the game was a go, the start time scheduled for 5:10 PM.

Back at home for the first pitch. Tim Lincecum didn’t get much warmup in, and it showed in the first inning: he walked a batter and gave up a two-run home run to Brian McCann. But he settled down quickly, and didn’t give up another run.

San Francisco’s offense got started in the 4th inning — Pablo Sandoval hit a triple, and was singled home by Aubrey Huff. Pablo had his first big day this season, later on hitting a home run and a single. Tim Lincecum ended up with 10 strikeouts. Jeremy Affeldt pitched two innings to close out the game, only giving up a home run to the Braves’ rookie phenom Jason Heyward. Giants win 6-3 — we weren’t there to see it. A fun day regardless.

On Being a Fan

Most of my friends aren’t knitters. Most of my friends aren’t birders (though many are, perhaps the largest single group). Most of my friends aren’t sketchers or artists. Most of my friends aren’t calligraphers. Most of my friends aren’t the slightest bit interested in sports of any kind, especially not baseball.

Yet most of my friends seem to tolerate all these things in me. Thank you. It’s baseball season again, which has me happier than I can describe, and I hope you’ll forgive the effusion for a little while. It will settle into the June doldrums for both the Sox and Giants, into the vague hopes of August, into the dashed dreams of September. But for now, baseball leafs out as it does every spring, full of hope and promise.

Play ball.

So It Begins

The baseball season opened this evening with a ratings-capturing matchup between the Red Sox and the Yankees at Fenway Park. After spending all day at the office, I rode home through driving rain to arrive in the middle of the fourth inning, where Pica was listening to the game on ESPN radio, the Red Sox down 5-1. But the Red Sox came from behind twice to end up winning 9-7. Not a pitcher’s duel, this game, both starters Josh Beckett and C.C. Sabathia being chased out fairly early. A good start to the baseball year. The Giants open their season tomorrow in Houston with Tim Lincecum going against Roy Oswalt.

A Bit of Spring Training

Earlier in the week we got a note from our friend Susan the hardcore San Francisco Giants fan, excited to be catching on the radio the first spring training game on the radio. Today was my turn. I walked into town for lunch today and brought my handheld radio, just in time to catch the noontime start (actually one minute early) of the Giants playing the Diamondbacks, the play-by-play and commentary by Jon Miller and Duane Kuiper. It was still 0-0 by the time I arrived at Crepeville for lunch, after which I did the bookstore rounds, ending up at Borders where I picked up a copy of the 2010 Baseball Prospectus. (They were out of stock earlier in the week).

The Giants were ahead 9-4 when I started walking home, and I think they ended up winning 12-6.

Of the Giants’ organization these days, Baseball Prospectus leads off by saying:

When is it time to make a change at general manager, even if the GM is the longest-tenured in the game and a respected figure? When do you throw up your hands and admit that the man you have put in charge has no idea how to solve his team’s problems within the boundaries you have set for him? The Giants have reached the point where they need to answer that question, because they have been stuck in a terrible rut.

Sounds about right.

Consolation In Defeat

The baseball season ended this evening in disheartening fashion with the Yankees convincingly beating the Phillies 7-3 to win the World Series, an event dreaded this year ever since the New York team pulled out of the doldrums of playing under 0.500 ball with a 9-game winning streak in the middle of May. We look for consolation in this time of loss:

1. Perhaps it is karmic balance for having a Democrat in the White House again; when the Yankees last won the World Series in 2000 Clinton was still president.
2. We didn’t have to witness would-be and perhaps future Commissioner of Baseball George W. Bush present the trophy to the winning Yankees. (Bush did however a couple days ago throw out the first ball at Game 3 of the Japan Series.)
3. Baseball was never meant to be played in November: maybe this oddly late Series will convince the powers-that-be of baseball of that fact.
4. A-Rod didn’t win the Series MVP award.
5. I live far enough from their home base that I don’t have to put up with much gloating from Yankees fans.
6. If September had gone better for the Giants and they had made it into the playoffs and then somehow snuck on through on the basis of stellar pitching from Cain, Lincecum, and Zito to win the NL championship, we didn’t have to just see the Giants being thrashed by the Yankees 4 games to nil, the Yankees outscoring the Giants by a total of 34 to 3 runs.
7. There are only 15 or so weeks left until pitchers and catchers report to Spring Training!

I Iz Not Impressd By Ur Clozur

Charlie refuses to show any excitement during the final pitches of today’s Giants game, which they won over the Chicago Cubs 5-1. We wonder if he’s a Tigers fan.

Winning Season

The SF Giants beat the Arizona Diamondbacks 5-2 this evening, thus winning their 82nd game this season. This guarantees that they will have a winning season, as the season is 162 games long. With 10 games left to play, they’ll win a few more before the season is out (the most likely number is 5 games).

Barring a collapse by the Colorado Rockies, the Giants won’t be in the playoffs this time around, but given that a) the Giants haven’t had a winning season since 2004 and b) the Giants were widely predicted to be pretty lousy this year, I’m quite pleased. This year has been fun to follow.

Did Brian Wilson Just Pitch 101 MPH?

It sure looks like it. The Giants were hanging on to a 3-2 lead against the Brewers in the bottom of the eighth when they called for Brian Wilson their closer to get the final five outs. Earlier in the game our radio broadcasters thought the stadium radar gun was reading a bit high for the starting pitchers; anyway they reported that the radar gun hit 101 during one of Wilson’s pitches.

So I checked out the statistics from Wilson’s performance as reported by PitchFX. This is an independent measurement technique from the radar gun. According to PitchFX, Wilson today threw 18 fastballs, with an average speed of 100.3 MPH, and a high of 102.2 MPH. From looking at his velocity chart here, that was his fastest pitch sequence yet recorded by PitchFX.

Wilson got his five outs, and the Giants won the game 3-2.

Lure Of PitchFX

We came home this evening and caught the final bit of the Giants game on the radio. They were playing the Phillies, and Brad Penny, who was pitching for the Giants for the very first time, was throwing a gem, shutting the Phillies out through 8 innings, the Giants going on to win 4-0. I was following the early part of the game using MLB Gameday, which has very nice visualizations of the trajectory of each pitch thrown. (“Whoa. Penny’s pitching well”, I thought).

A company called Sportsvision has been capturing this pitch-by-pitch data for a little over two years now; they have a set of high-speed cameras installed at every major league ballpark to track the flight of each pitch and compute the trajectory parameters. This system, which they call PitchFX, generates the data for the Gameday visualizations and for similar graphics shown on TV.

It turns out this PitchFX data is freely available from the MLB Gameday site (in tedious XML format), and at something like 500,000 pitches thrown each season in the major leagues, that is a lot of data. By now there are a number of good websites featuring this data — for instance, here is a set of graphs showing Brad Penny’s performance this evening.

If they gave PhDs for sabermetrics there’s room for hundreds of dissertations using the PitchFX data; it’s fun to think of what analyses one could do with the data. Once they get their image processing algorithms worked out, the folks at Sportsvision are aiming for a complete digital record of every game event, including where the ball gets hit and where the fielders move to on each play. Then we’d have thousands of baseball dissertation possibilities.

Consistency Out Of Change

Yesterday evening we went with Barbara to see the Sacramento River Cats play the Fresno Grizzlies. The River Cats lost the game 6-3, but ended up clinching the division then when the one team that had a mathematical chance of catching the River Cats in the remaining games of the season also lost. The River Cats have been playing in Sacramento 10 years now and have won their division 8 times. They have also gone on to win the Pacific Coast League championship 3 times so far. I am marveling at their success. This is Triple-A baseball: the whole point of the league is to develop players to go on and play at the major league level. You can’t have a classical team dynasty because the rosters at Triple-A are changing all the time, a hundred plus times each season. Any superbly talented player doesn’t stay at the Triple-A level for long to contribute wins for the team; instead he quickly gets promoted.

So how have the River Cats done it? I don’t know. They must have a very effective managerial office. But we can’t forget the loyal fan base. Go River Cats!