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Braves Ongoing Season Comments Thread..
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Comments
There are more examples that I can bring, I’m sure, but this forum is lagging badly for me right now on my computer (as bad as it does on mobile normally), and there are some definite intentional misses, but I don’t think getting down 2-0 to Goldy, a guy that’s been down from his career but is still dangerous, was his intentions in one of my examples. Yes, the sequence ended in a DP, but it was a missile on the ground with a missed spot. He’s lucky that it was right to Ozzie, or it’s 2-0 Cardinals, and who knows how that inning and even game ends up as his command was off badly in that inning as I remember it.
It’s not to say that he’s not off in ways, as he is. The big difference is he’s missing more to lefties I think with the sinker (that goes back to the Pirates having good low-ball lefty hitters that exposed that, if his command wasn’t perfect against them, he was always gonna have a tough time vs them). But it’s not one huge difference. He can go back to pitching like he did up to June 7th mostly and he’s probably going to still allow more runs than he was allowing because of sequencing being not quite as perfect. Maybe I’m way, way wrong and we do have our next top 5-10 starter in the bigs but it’s very likely that the simple answer is that his start to the 2019 season will be…one of his best stretches of a very good career when looking back (as I do think he has more top stretches coming).
To be honest statcast is bad for me lol, as I’ve been the person that sometimes ticks people off big time in different channels with how I occasionally ask “if someone pitches a scoreless inning, but 3 missiles were hit off of them that were caught, did they really pitch that well? Or, if someone pitched a scoreless inning, but walked 2 and had missiles hit off them that were caught, did they pitch that well?” Well, statcast enables me now. You can look at every single pitch that was thrown now. It’s unreal that it’s free stuff.
Edit: The end of the story for me is when the pitcher is saying that "just a few extra hard hit balls found grass instead of gloves on me, and some of those were finding gloves in previous starts", I think I'll side with that pitcher, and not a man on the internet.
I think maybe you're getting a bit too fine and not seeing the forest for the trees with Soroka GG. I predicted Soroka would be our best pitcher over a year ago. What he did over 11 games this season was pretty much what I thought he is capable of. He will be great if he can consistently control and command his pitches like he was doing. He has the lowest career ERA over his 1st 20 games in the past 40 years. He is the only pitcher in history to start a season giving up 1 or fewer earned runs in 9 of 11 games. He had huge movement on all of his pitches and most hitters looked completely overmatched. These things were not accidents.
My concern is whether he can get back to where he was and stay there. I have absolutely no questions about what he was doing before these last few games though. He was pitching as well as any pitcher I've ever seen. Makeup is the great unknown with any athlete. Can he control Mike Soroka ? If the answer turns out to be yes and e stays relatively healthy, he'll be great.
Talking about Soroka ill say this, and you never know with a pitcher each pitch could be their last.
The kid is incredibly mature for his age. Now compare that to Folty who pouts constantly.
Soroka could pitch the exact same as he did in those first 11 starts of the season…
and probably still get at least slightly worse results. Sequencing isn’t always going to go in his favor even if he deserves it, and honestly his start against the Tigers was a preview of what’s probably going to come at times. Sometimes, you’re going to throw good pitches or have the hitter fooled, and yet on a check swing they’re going to bloop it perfectly into the outfield grass for 2 runs to score. Not much can be done about that.
Honestly, we need to just agree to disagree here. I’m going to just continually look it at in the more modern way with strike zone charts and video of pitches that I can look at to refresh my memory, and you’re going to look at it in the old school, eye test way.
Of course Soroka could have gotten slightly worse results, or slightly better results. There are many outside influences on a pitcher's statistics . There's also ''isolated stats'', which is an attempt to identify and quantify the things completely under the pitcher's control. . He pitched great though, not good, great.
''A more modern way''...my ass.
Mike Soroka was brought up at 20 years old. he is 21, he is 11-2, his career ERA is 2.66 and his career whip is 1.14.
Max Scherzer first made the bigs at 23 years old. His ERAs before age 27, 3.05, 4.12, 3.50, 4.43, 3,74
His WHIP ratings before age 27. 1.23, 1.34, 1.25, 1.35, 1.27.
His won loss record before age 27. 52- 42
Modern enough for you ?
ERA wins and whip aren’t modern ways to view pitchers though. Here’s a good article on a more modern way to do it https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.beyondtheboxscore.com/platform/amp/2014/6/2/5758898/sabermetrics-stats-pitching-stats-learn-sabermetrics
I am inclined to agree with Georgia girl, she’s obviously put in some effort. Granted we get info from the same source apparently, so confirmation bias. Shout out to talking chop, if you want to learn some baseball it’s an awesome spot.
We had a leadership conference the other day at work and something said resonated with me. 1. “Being wrong feels an awful lot like being right, until you’re proven wrong” and 2. “Any hypothesis that can’t be proven wrong isn’t a good hypothesis.”
What evidence would it take for you to admit you’re wrong on certain baseball things? I’m sure you feel you’re right on soroka, but heat maps shared by Georgia girl kind of disagree that his command is much worse.
This is a brain dead argument. If you can't understand how great Soroka was pitching without obtuse stats, you're lost in egg headed nonsense. I'm actually beginning to think Kirb and GG are one in the same.
You know what, let's stop counting HRs and just determine which hitters have the more optimum launch angles bat speed and exit velocity. We can keep score that way. Forget ERA, wins and losses, whip, those things are SO yesterday.
I agree with @WCDawg on this one. When evaluating a pitcher ERA is at the top of my list. The game is about scoring more runs than the other team so the fewer runs a pitcher allows the better chance his team has to win.
efreeman3. Score and stop the other team from scoring, there's little new under The Sun. Era will never be a secondary stat.
Is there a stat that combines runs produced by a player and runs scored by that player. It would seem at first glance to be important.
Donm. I forget who came up with it but RAF Runs Accounted For works like this.
You simply add a player's RBIs and runs scored together
example 110 RBIs + 120 runs scored = 230
Then subtract 1 for each HR the player hit because that run has already been accounted for with his runs scored. say he hit 30 HRs , that leaves 200 runs accounted for.
Taking it a bit further for his Percent Of Team Offensive Value or POTOV, divide the 200 runs he accounted for by the total runs his team scored, say 500.
So the player's raw RAF is 200, his TOV is 40%. That would seem a very solid measure of his offensive contribution.
The RAF would give you a similar value to what adding assists and goals together in hockey to get a player's point total does. The POTOV would give you his offensive value to is team compared to other players on the team.
Why these matter vs say ''launch angle'' is they are actual run production, an end vs just a means too that end. As Coach Richt used to say, ''there is more than one way to skin a cat'', I'll add, but the cat is still the net value.
WC - thanks for the info. I've always felt that the game revolves around scoring runs. You have to score at least one to win. I'll try looking that thing up.
donm. It might be a quaint notion but I agree scoring as many runs as possible while surrendering as few runs as possible still seems like the most promising path to success in MLB...call me old fashioned.