So far this year Luis Ayala has predictably sucked the bag for the Twins, yet another in a long line of shitty, washed-up, cheap free agent signings uselessly made every winter by the hometown ball club.  I actually think he's this year's bullpen version of Livan Hernandez: ceasing to be basic major league quality and starting to toss a little BP out there.  His rankness on the mound was obviously there to see in the dramatic deterioration of his peripheral numbers since 2004 had the Twins front office bothered to look at them.  Contrary to what some say, this all actually began before his surgery.  His groundball rate went to pot in 2005 (2006 was the injury year), it's just that his ERA that year -- and thus his reputation as an effective reliever -- was salvaged by an off-the-charts lucky 84.5% LOB rate.  At least he still had above average control back then.  Here's them pesky facts of which I speak.

2003: 56.6 GB%, 1.6 BB/G
2004: 54 GB%, 1.6 BB/G

2005: 42.9 GB%, 1.8 BB/G
2007: 39 GB%, 2.6 BB/G
2008: 45.6 GB%, 3.3 BB/G (with Nats)

As anyone who's ever heard him already knows, the Chicago White Sox have the most infuriating, annoying, awful, over-the-top homer play-by-play guy (that's right: not the color guy, for whom one can make perhaps some excuse -- the play-by-play guy) in baseball: Ken "Hawk" Harrelson.  Last night the White Sox lost to the Toronto Blue Jays 14-0.  As a proud subscriber to MLB.TV, I saw the potential for fun and am now listening to the Hawk's call of this game.  It's beyond sweet.

He starts off full of his usual bluster and bravado, even prematurely splurting forth his nausea-inducing "He gone" taunt (slash "call") of any non-White Sox batter's strike out when Toronto's lead-off hitter in top of the first took a called strike two.  Listening to him stammer to figure out what was going on was big fun indeed.  As of "now" -- the top of the fifth -- Toronto's up 5-0 and Hawk is still (the incidents he's talking about happened in the first inning) harping on how the White Sox "should" really only be down by 2 runs, as if errors aren't part of the game.  What Harrelson manages to do is simultaneously exculpate White Sox pitching while not really holding their defense truly responsible.  It's as if luck and fate intervened on behalf of Toronto and it inexorably follows from the (debateable -- anyone interested in DIP stats will be happy to explain why RA is every bit as informative as ERA) "fact" that certain run's aren't the White Sox pitcher's fault that nothing is the White Sox team-as-a-whole's fault.  When Jim Thome was called out on a borderline fastball running back across the inside edge of the plate, Steve Stone (once a decent color guy, now he says "we" everytime he refers to the White Sox) made the premature point that the catcher framed the pitch and moved it back to a better position (mind you, this wasn't done in the "good job framing the pitch there" complimentary sense, but rather as a blunt statement of fact with the sniff of impropriety about it): when the producer ran the replay, it was revelatory inasmuch as the catcher actually barely if at all moved the pitch (which as I said was certainly borderline but most definitely not "obviously" inside, especially with the plate-crowding Thome up), so Stone was actually wrong, but did that stop the Hawk from proceeding to immediately bloviate with great gusto over the injustice (he flatly stated "bad call") purportedly prepetrated by the dastardly Toronto catcher, who in fact did far less to make the pitch look good than he could have, probably because the Umpire did not hesitate whatsoever to begin his strike three call, having clearly adjudged it on his own without the assistance of the catcher's supposed gamemanship?

It is "now" the bottom of the 5th and 6-0 thanks to two more Hawk-dubbed "gift runs".  Even when he is (sort of) describing how the White Sox are screwing up, he manages to convey the message that the Sox really do deserve to win and are the superior team but are just unlucky/victimized/etc.  Whoever screws up at the moment isn't so much excoriated as wondered at, as they are implicitly normally infallible.  The play of the other team is never really the cause of their success, either.  To listen to Harrelson is to realize that some amorphous, clandestine ill wind is the true cause of any White Sox failure-to-win.  I am gleefully anticipating the top of the 6th, when Toronto will post 6 runs and I have hopes the Hawk might go into one of his unintentionally (for he is never intentionally) hilarious, I-can't-believe-they-pay-this-guy emotional shut-downs when the opposition is crushing the White Sox, wherein he actually stops talking totally for a minute or two on end.

The whole thing is a bit mysterious, as besides money it's not sure why he is (pretends to be) such a White Sox fan: he's from South Carolina and never played for the White Sox.  His sole pre-announce-career tie to the club was doing his damndest to run them into the ground as the GM for one awful season in the 80's.  Anyway: gag.

Also: the Pirates lost in the bottom of the 11th yesterday.  It was fun to watch, but the Padres' color "analyst" is far and away my number two most hated local announcer in baseball.  He even mimics Harrelson's "he gone" schtick.  If you have a chance, the Marlins have a really good announce team.  The Twins' rube TV act might want to take a note or two, or at least hire a color guy not obsessed with himself and/or a play-by-play guy who can recognizes the difference between a medium-depth routine fly ball and a ball with home run potential.

New Yankee stadium serves the fuckers right: super-quiet, no atmosphere, with the silliest home run physics anyone's seen since Mile High Stadium.  Hit a pop fly to right?  50/50 it carries for a home run.  Anyway, the title promised this had little to do with baseball per se, and it's true.  Read this and seethe:

Yankees Use Cops To Enforce Religious Patriotism

Twins pitching smacked around an especially pathetic Orioles spring training lineup today.  Newcomer slash inexplicable (save that its the Twins' front ofiice) spring training signing Bobby Keppel (2007 AAA FIP: 5.42; 2008 AAA FIP: 5.98) blew a team-effort no-hitter in the 9th.  Liriano faced the minimum 12 hitters in 4 innings, striking out 5 and walking none.  6 of the 7 other batters he faced grounded out.  Domination = yes.  There were 3 Twins errors and I can only peg one of them for sure to a non-Liriano inning based on BF numbers, so I'm not sure if he was perfect or not.  Nathan fanned 2 of the 3 he faced.  NoGo homered.

I am compulsively buying sets of old reprint baseball cards on Ebay.

I'm watching the Ken Burns baseball thing, and this prompts me to look up Ty Cobb's career numbers, and granted everybody knows the guy was obscenely good (and a total jerkstore), but I don't think people understand how good.  His lifetime K% was 2.7%.  That's ungodly.  That's, like, impossible.  By way of contrast, Wade Boggs's was 6.9%.  Cobb's lifetime OPS+ was 167.  That would have led the whole freakin American League last year.  Remember OPS+ is a relative statistic, so that means over his entire career, including would-be twilight seasons in his late 30s and early 40s, Cobb was better than the rest of the league to a greater extent than any player could manage to be in just a single season last year.  When you figure his OBP numbers are more impressive than his slugging numbers and that the O portion is roughly 1.8 times as important as the S portion, the mind reels.

Less than month 'til opening day and 13 months until outdoor baseball in the Twin Farms!

Aaron Gleeman has a semi-sabremetric-oriented Minnesota Twins blog, but he also posts lots of random crap which I generally ignore -- celebrity mainstream pop culture dullness and such.  The other day, though, he posted the following video of Lebron James knocking down jumpshot after ridiculous jumpshot, scoring 16 in less than minutes.  It's stupid and pretty entertaining.



There's a great new xBABIP (Expected Batting Average on Balls in Play) statistic making the rounds.  Unfortunately, the early findings do not bode at all well for a certain hometown ballclub.

Here's the original article.

The relevant bit only dawned on me after an initial surge of more optimistic interest.  There's a list of the players whose xBABIP differs most in a positive direction from their "oldBABIP", which is a now discredited way of predicting BABIP based on line drive percentage + .120, a number I've used in the past but which it now turns out doesn't have any predictive power.  Using the line drive based oldBABIP, these players were supposedly overperforming for their hitting ability based on the (in)frequency with which they hit line drives, but the new xBABIP model (it's basically proprietary as far as I can tell -- click the link for details) predicts them to have much better BABIPs than those predicted by the LD% "model".

Anyway, a bunch of Twins are on that list of highest differences between oldBABIP and xBABIP, but it turns out that all but Denard Span's xBABIP is still less than last year's actual BABIP.  That is, they still overperformed and can be expected to regress if they hit the ball in a similar fashion to last year.  Casilla's was just a shade less (i.e. no big deal), but NoGo, Delmon Young and (SURPRISE SURPRISE) Nick Fucking Punto all overperformed their xBABIP by around 30 points.  In other words, their batting averages and other non-HR hitting numbers were probably all better than they "deserved" to be given the sort of contact they made.  Let me pause, reflect on the resigning of LNP and put a bullet in my head.  Here's the list.

  YEAR  NAME                BABIP        xBABIP   old-xBABIP
  2008  Gary Matthews Jr.   .289         .307         .252
  2008  Hunter Pence        .298         .290         .236
  2008  Jeff Mathis         .231         .269         .217
  2008  Alexi Casilla       .288         .281         .235
  2008  Fred Lewis          .365         .336         .293
  2008  Carlos Gomez        .324         .301         .260
  2008  Delmon Young        .334         .306         .268
  2008  Nick Punto          .331         .304         .267
  2008  Jacoby Ellsbury     .305         .326         .290
  2008  Lance Berkman       .336         .309         .273
  2008  Rickie Weeks        .266         .294         .260
  2008  Denard Span         .328         .338         .306
  2008  Michael Bourn       .283         .277         .246
  2008  Yunel Escobar       .303         .296         .265
  2008  Erick Aybar         .297         .304         .274
  2008  Brendan Harris      .312         .297         .273
  2008  Jason Varitek       .270         .295         .272
  2008  Coco Crisp          .308         .321         .298
  2008  Howie Kendrick      .351         .316         .294