Wednesday, March 09, 2005
Calls to the Bullpen
- Did you know that Dave Ross was the Dodgers' player rep as noted in the Times today? I guess it makes some sense, as most player reps are guys for whom English was their first language; only Eric Gagne, Odalis Perez, Kaz Ishii, Giovanni Carrara and Cesar Izturis have been Dodgers longer than Dave Ross's brief career, and none of them grew up speaking English.
- Word is that Izturis is working on a healthier lifestyle to prevent a second half decline. According to Gurnick, Izturis "batted .305 through July and finished at .288, hitting .259 over that period, leading to speculation that his 5-9, 187-pound frame can't quite take that kind of workload." Uhh, okay. If the speculation were up to me, I don't see how that would enter into the discussion. His BABIP was down from .328 through July to .308 after, which given the sample size is pretty typical variation and not sufficient to suggest fatigue. And it's not clear to me that fatigue or Izturis' small frame is responsible for his striking out more in August and September, which was as big a factor in his batting average decline as his lower BABIP. In reality, his poorer numbers from August onward are more a factor of chance and cherry-picking; July was Izturis' best month ever, so a sample which excludes it will be low. Here's a chart, where BIP/AB is balls in play per at bat and NipBA is batting average normalized for a .300 BABIP:
AB H AVG HR K K/AB BIP/AB BABIP NipBA
While his numbers for August after July aren't as good as before July, the difference isn't significant as it's well within the bounds of normal variation.
Apr-Jun 304 90 .296 2 30 .099 .895 .324 .275
Jul 116 38 .328 1 9 .078 .914 .349 .283
Aug-Oct 250 65 .260 1 31 .124 .872 .294 .266 - Excellent, excellent work by David Pinto today at Baseball Musings. Pinto created graphs to show the intricacies of David Eckstein's defensive range. I was pretty inspired (both by Pinto and by working with Studes for THT), so right now I'm working on some graphs of my own which should debut soon. Actually, my apologies for such a brief post today; I'm working on a lot of other stuff right now.
