2023 MLB (non-Tigers) catch all thread

[SoCalTiger]

1 hour ago, Tiger337 said:

It may have been a misreading of Paredes' talent, but I don't think it was a panic move  I get the feeling the Tigers didn't regard Paredes highly for whatever reason.  He seemed ready to be given a major league opportunity and they seemed reluctant to give it to him.  I don't think Meadows power was clearly on the decline since he hit for pretty good power in 2021.  I would have been very happy with 27 home runs from him again in 2022

Fair points all around as usual but his slugging pct dropped a lot from 2019 and his defense was slipping also while his pay was increasing which made him a declining asset. I know I focus on this way too much but we tanked for so many years to get young controllable assets only to trade the best one away for a declining and now zero return. Plus the draft pick and extra salary cost seem to get overlooked but they are real assets. Especially sandwich picks. It would be nice to have third base settled for the next 5 years. 
 

And I do think Al panicked when Riley got hurt. His boss was publicly putting himself on notice and Al’s goodwill was running thin. Just my opinion. 

[RandyMarsh]

I don't know if Al panicked per se but I do think it's a possibility that the Riley injury was a factor just due to the timing of the trade. Maybe I'm forgetting about a Rays transaction that happened that made Meadows more expendable then but it just seems like if you were interested in him that you would've brokered a trade for him in the middle of the offseason or maybe even the start of camp instead of waiting till right before the regular season started. 

Or maybe Al wasn't the one that initiated the deal at all and it was TB's GM that saw the Greene injury and pounced at the chance to unload Meadows and take advantage of a team like the Tigers. I do remember even national guys coming up with hypothetical moves to make after the Riley injury most notably sign Conforto so it wasn't just fans on a message board that were wondering if the Tigers would make any moves to compensate for the injury. 

Edited May 17, 2023 by RandyMarsh

[Tiger337]

5 minutes ago, SoCalTiger said:

Fair points all around as usual but his slugging pct dropped a lot from 2019 and his defense was slipping also while his pay was increasing which made him a declining asset. I know I focus on this way too much but we tanked for so many years to get young controllable assets only to trade the best one away for a declining and now zero return. Plus the draft pick and extra salary cost seem to get overlooked but they are real assets. Especially sandwich picks. It would be nice to have third base settled for the next 5 years. 
 

And I do think Al panicked when Riley got hurt. His boss was publicly putting himself on notice and Al’s goodwill was running thin. Just my opinion. 

I'll just add that I think his big SLG year was an outlier rather than his standard year and that the next year was not really a decline.  We will never really know though since he is now messed up and may never even play again.    

[Tiger337]

2 minutes ago, RandyMarsh said:

I don't know if Al panicked per se but I do think it's a possibility that the Riley injury was a factor just due to the timing of the trade. 

Avila did not seem to be a GM motivated by panic.  If anything, he seemed to have the opposite problem of moving too slowly.  

[SoCalTiger]

1 minute ago, Tiger337 said:

I'll just add that I think his big SLG year was an outlier rather than his standard year and that the next year was not really a decline.  We will never really know though since he is now messed up and may never even play again.    

Very true and his 2021 numbers were solid as you stated. It’s very sad and Meadows has the most to gain by playing again but I also doubt he ever will. 

[RandyMarsh]

It's not quite as good as the first one but Gallen joins the most exclusive club in baseball and that's the club of pitchers that killed bird with throws. 

 

[Biff Mayhem]

10 hours ago, RandyMarsh said:

It's not quite as good as the first one but Gallen joins the most exclusive club in baseball and that's the club of pitchers that killed bird with throws. 

 

Randy Johnson's bird was annihilated, this one appears to be dead but intact. 

[CMRivdogs]

Back in the days when I golfed a bit, I had a friend who hit a low line drive off the tee and took out a bird (it wasn't a goose, probably closer to a starling or mocking bird that inhabited the course)

After his shot he turned to his partner. "I told you I'd get a birdie on this hole"

[oblong]

I saw a tweet referencing the RF overhang at Tiger Stadium and it brought back a memory of a discussion that I'm sure existed on this site previously.

The legend of a RF'er standing under the overhang waiting to catch a ball only to have it land in the overhang or off the facing to be a HR.... I have my doubts but will defer to those who understand trajectories of batted balls better than I do.  Is this a myth? People swear to have witnessed it but I am willing to believe it's one of those things that we hear about so often it just becomes assumed as a fact.  

Is this something that could be analyzed given the information we have on home runs today and the likelihood of a ball needing the specific kind of arc required to do that in Tiger Stadium?

I recall a detailed discussion on this a long long time ago.... I think Brian Bluhm participated in it.

 

[chasfh]

50 minutes ago, oblong said:

I saw a tweet referencing the RF overhang at Tiger Stadium and it brought back a memory of a discussion that I'm sure existed on this site previously.

The legend of a RF'er standing under the overhang waiting to catch a ball only to have it land in the overhang or off the facing to be a HR.... I have my doubts but will defer to those who understand trajectories of batted balls better than I do.  Is this a myth? People swear to have witnessed it but I am willing to believe it's one of those things that we hear about so often it just becomes assumed as a fact.  

Is this something that could be analyzed given the information we have on home runs today and the likelihood of a ball needing the specific kind of arc required to do that in Tiger Stadium?

I recall a detailed discussion on this a long long time ago.... I think Brian Bluhm participated in it.

 

I've always had strong doubts about that, too. It sounds so much like an urban legend. I took a hack at trying to replicate what the least severe angle would have to be in order for this to happen, and ... gee, I don't know. I'm not as sure now that it couldn't happen, especially if somehow there was a swirling wind pushing a moon shot back.

 

[RandyMarsh]

I might be misremembering but I'm almost positive I read an article years ago that broke down the physics to prove that yes any ball that landed in the upper deck would've been a hr in the lower deck as well. 

[gehringer_2]

In a vacuum, the ball would travel as a parabola, so it would not come down any steeper than it went up. Given the air, it slows down as moves outward so it does come down steeper than it goes up. Add head wind and it will get steeper still, but you'd have to posit a wind strong enough to virtually stop the ball's flight to get that steep a descent. This does happen all the time on infield pops, but they don't leave the bat with much forward velo to start with. I had a computer model for slow pitch softball pitch trajectories that I could probably modify for this but I don't really have the spare time to spend on it right now. But think about it this way: As an OF, how many balls have you seen that drop uncaught that don't still bounce strongly toward the wall or fence? Because that's the condition of a ball coming down that steeply - when it hit the ground its bounce would be have to be virtually straight up if it had no forward velocity left. It would drop in place like a uncaught IF fly.

[oblong]

how hard would one have to hit the ball at an extreme launch angle to travel 330 feet yet come down at that angle?  

Do we have data on current trajectories given all the lidor and high speed cameras in use now?  Seems like you could analyze what's been hit since we have that tech just to see if any would fit this profile.

I'm not saying it never happened but from listening to old timers they make it sound like it was a regular thing. 

 

[gehringer_2]

34 minutes ago, oblong said:

how hard would one have to hit the ball at an extreme launch angle to travel 330 feet yet come down at that angle?  

Do we have data on current trajectories given all the lidor and high speed cameras in use now?  Seems like you could analyze what's been hit since we have that tech just to see if any would fit this profile.

I'm not saying it never happened but from listening to old timers they make it sound like it was a regular thing. 

 

The question is how much you can trust the OF's perception? I would guess that typically he is  still moving back when he sees ball drop in the upper deck and probably mis-judges after the fact that *he* would have run into the lower deck wall before he got to the to ball.

Edited May 18, 2023 by gehringer_2

[Tigeraholic1]

Didn't old Arlington Park mimick the RF overhang from Tiger Stadium?

[oblong]

13 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

The question is how much you can trust the OF's perception? I would guess that typically he is  still moving back when he sees ball drop in the upper deck and probably mis-judges after the fact the *he* would have run into the lower deck wall before he got to the to ball.

Good point.  How many times do we see an OF jump for a ball that's about 30 feet up the wall or into the stands?

TV tech wasn't the best prior up to 1999 so we can't really tell where the ball were hit.  My seats at Comerica are midway between 1B and RF and I saw some epic VMart, Papi, and Prince moon shots.  In this scenario I think the short RF hurts the cause of this ever happening.  The point you make on the wind is valid though along with any other factors like spin.  

[gehringer_2]

16 minutes ago, oblong said:

Good point.  How many times do we see an OF jump for a ball that's about 30 feet up the wall or into the stands?

TV tech wasn't the best prior up to 1999 so we can't really tell where the ball were hit.  My seats at Comerica are midway between 1B and RF and I saw some epic VMart, Papi, and Prince moon shots.  In this scenario I think the short RF hurts the cause of this ever happening.  The point you make on the wind is valid though along with any other factors like spin.  

Either last year or the year before Dickerson talked a lot about some test/study work done on how much the wind takes off the travel of a hit to the OF. IIRC, and I probably don't, but someone probably remembers, the number was something like a 10 mph winds shortens a fly by 20 ft. So it would be hard to say it never happened since you might get a 30-40mph wind gust. But the fluid mechanics at the stands will be complex - in fact in a double deck stadium like Tiger Stadium they directly block head winds as the ball gets closer to the fence. Might also sometimes have been that the wind was blowing from the LF corner and a ball the fielder thought was coming down to him got blown laterally further toward the RF corner and so catches the upper deck stands.

I think this what was going on that Dickerson had been reading up on - it has been a couple of years:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2018/10/23/understanding-the-meteorology-of-a-fly-ball-may-help-baseball-teams/?sh=9f651a86a5c2

Edited May 18, 2023 by gehringer_2

[Sports_Freak]

Bob Costas on MLB network just called it A GRAND SLAM HOME RUN. Uh....we decided that's redundant. He's a great announcer too.

[casimir]

I really don't think the overhang turned any fly balls into home runs.  But it makes for fun lore.

[Sports_Freak]

49 minutes ago, casimir said:

I really don't think the overhang turned any fly balls into home runs.  But it makes for fun lore.

Try telling that to Jack Morris...lol

[Biff Mayhem]

5 minutes ago, Sports_Freak said:

Try telling that to Jack Morris...lol

Try telling anything to Jack.

[Motor City Sonics]

I just saw a tweet (or something) through Facebook that Angel Hernandez has only worked 1 game this entire season - back on April 3rd.    Has the league finally had enough?     I can't stand him, but I hope his health is okay.       

I love the fact that there are people doing sabermetics on umpire performances.     Maybe MLB is listening.  

 

Players and umpires get released or sent down for poor performance, why not umps.  

[Tigeraholic1]

I got to tour our local minor league booth recently and they showed us alot of the behind the scenes stuff. There is a person who now controls the pitch clock. I asked "who runs that?", assuming it was someone on the umpire crew. I was told it was ran by the home team. That was suprising, talk about a little home field advantage! I assume the big league clubs umpires run those clocks? 

[casimir]

2 hours ago, Sports_Freak said:

Try telling that to Jack Morris...lol

 

2 hours ago, Biff Mayhem said:

Try telling anything to Jack.

Why waste any breath?

[oblong]

34 minutes ago, Tigeraholic1 said:

I got to tour our local minor league booth recently and they showed us alot of the behind the scenes stuff. There is a person who now controls the pitch clock. I asked "who runs that?", assuming it was someone on the umpire crew. I was told it was ran by the home team. That was suprising, talk about a little home field advantage! I assume the big league clubs umpires run those clocks? 

good question.  I could see it being something like an intern or something.  But it's also kind of important since it affects actual play.