#7 Lou Gehrig

As this series returns from far too long of a vacation, I have to start with this statement: If you have not seen The Pride of the Yankees, you are not a baseball fan. Please leave this site immediately and do not return until you have fulfilled this critical obligation.

"Lou was the most valuable player the Yankees ever had because he was the prime source of their greatest asset - an implicit confidence in themselves and every man on the club."
Stanley Frank

Atypical for this series, which has generally proceeded in a fairly linear fashion, for this great of the game, what he did on the field, as half of the greatest hitting duo the game has ever seen, as a man whose power was as prodigious as it was profuse, as the embodiment of durability and hard work that was unmatched for over half a century and as the seventh greatest player to ever swing the lumber, none of that mattered as much as the simple, inspiring reminder to always look on the bright side.

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Two of the more interesting stories for our beleaguered team this year are closer Huston Street and setup man and AN author Brad Ziegler. Having read the title (and not being an Angels fan), you have probably figured out which player will be the focus of this article. AFTER you finish reading this article and commenting on it thoroughly, head over to Hardball Times, where our own salb918 has written a fascinating article on Brad Ziegler and why his slow pitch softball delivery is so effective. He has graphs … I like graphs … I have graphs too, so stay and enjoy my graphs … then go check out his article.

So Huston Street has been a pretty frustrating player for a lot of us. I had always seen him as the heir apparent to Dennis Eckersley. In celebrating that, I hung my signed, framed SI with Eck on its cover next to my signed, framed Beckett with Huston on the cover.

But, see, there is a difference between Huston Street and most closers. Health issues this year, aside, Huston Street is a really, really good pitcher. Over his career, he has done a great job of not allowing the opposing team to score very many runs. The problem, though, is that he has just been too darn consistent. Whereas his overall numbers have generally been in line with the bottom of the top tier or the top of the second tier (depending on how you define them) of closers, he has blown quite a few more saves than you would expect. Why? Because, in accumulating saves and avoiding blown saves, consistency is a bad thing. The more evenly his runs allowed are distributed, the more blown saves he will have. Because of that, though, the A’s win a lot of games that Huston blew the save in. They are 2-3 this year, for example. Because of that, saves and blown saves underrate Huston’s ability as a closer. How much, exactly, is a story for another column.

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Okay, so there's no actual contest ... but I need some help on A's knowledge. I'm planning a future Staturday column assessing BB's overall success or failure in trading. I still need some information on PTBNLs and cash that completed trades.

Questions:
How much cash did we get for Kevin Melillo?
How much cash did we send to Atlanta with Kotsay? $5.3m
How much cash did we send to Chicago with Kendall? $6m
Who was the PTBNL we sent to Washington for Jermaine Van Buren?
How much cash did we get for Adam Melhuse?
Who was the PTBNL we sent to San Diego for Jack Cust? Cash, $100k
Oy, it takes too long to type out sentences ...
Cash for Langerhans (the first trade)?
PTBNL (along w McBeth)  for Denorfia? Ben Jukich
PTBNL on each side for Saarloos? Denham/Manon
Cash paid for Murphy?
Cash paid for Karsay?
Cash paid for Ryan Glynn?
Cash acquired with Dotel?
Cash acquired for Jose Flores?
Cash or PTBNL with Kielty for Lilly? $10k
Cash with Lilly?

Thanks for your help!

Update: Making progress, thanks everyone ... keep it up!

Back in March I commented on the similarity between the way Ichiro Suzuki and Jack Cust produce very, very dissimilar results. Ichiro has confounded PECOTA for years because he is a truly unique player. Jack Cust, with his limited MLB experience, had not had the chance to prove whether his own uniqueness was merely a function of small sample size or whether he was truly unique.

In that article, I noted how unique Jack Cust was in that he had the 8th highest line drive percentage in the league, a fairly low fly ball percentage but the highest HR/FB percentage. Also, particularly remarkable, given his relatively high ground ball percentage, he was the only player to fail to get a single infield hit. Each of those added up to an acceptable batting average, despite a ton of strikeouts and mammoth amount of power. Oh yeah, he also walked a lot.

So where do those things stand now?

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I present to you the fourth and final installment of Pitch, Blease. We have looked at the wide variety of pitches thrown in the majors as identified and described using PitchFX data. To this point, the key things we have learned are that having a good fastball is important – but having reliable secondary offerings is the key to being a high level pitcher.

Building on that, in this final installment I wanted to look at a couple of larger issues, the first being, how many pitches is the right number of pitches?

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Some readers of this site may have noticed that there has been quite a lot of activity surrounding a recent event, the 2008 Major League Rule 4 Draft. Although it is not typically accompanied with the same fanfare of the NFL or NBA’s draft, these two days in early June have more of an impact on the fate of our beloved franchise than virtually any other in sports. As such, loyal readers must forgive this author for taking a break from his ongoing series, Pitch, Blease, which, you need not worry, will be picked up in three weeks, to delve into some numbers surrounding the draft.

No, the topic has not yet been beaten to death. The numbers I will be exploring are very different from the extensive set provided by Taj Adib and others over the last two days. Instead of focusing on the players drafted, I will be looking at trends over the last few years and what that tells us about this class.

The data is courtesy of Baseball America and runs from 2005 through 2008. I would have preferred to go back a couple more years, but that is as far as they do and this author is lazy. In case anyone has become interested, Staturday is in search of an intern to help out in compiling the basic data that allows us to do our work.

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Hello deal target audience.

My parents are celebrating their 28th anniversary this 27th of July and my dad wants to take my mom to the game for it. He was looking on the website, though and, naturally, couldn't find anything except mid caliber seats available -- the best being deservedly taken up by the team's loyal season ticket holders.

You see, my parents raised me and loved me and laid the groundwork for turning me into the A's fan that I am so I was hoping I might find one of ya'll on here who have awesome season tickets (fourth row behind home plate or something like that ....) who might be willing to let a single game go, at hopefully not much more than face value, for a good cause.

Thanks a lot!

~Devo

“Christ, you don't need a quadrophonic Blaupunkt! What you need is a curveball! In the show, everyone can hit heat.” –Crash Davis

In the last appearance of Pitch, Blease, we saw that the effectiveness of a pitcher’s fastball is very much dependent on a pitcher’s ability to compliment it with breaking/off speed pitches. Heat only helps if you do not have to throw it all the time.

In this article, we will explore some of these other pitches, the curve, slider and change. Before we get into that, here is the article on the knuckler:
Wakefield throws it. He throws it a lot. He throws it slowly. Small Sample Size warnings apply to any conclusions drawn from that data set.
The splitter is only thrown often by a few guys – too many to summarize that succinctly and to few to write a meaningful article about.

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Jack Cust is back. After today’s game, Jack Cust is riding a seven game hit streak over which he has posted a .458 Avg, .552 OBP and .791 Slg, good for a 1.343 OPS. What’s more, over those seven games he’s only struck out five times. Incredible, just incredible. I think I have figured out what his problem was … he’s not used to playing baseball in March/April. His first PA in Japan was only his second ever in the early season. Not only that, but in that one at bat he struck out as a pinch hitter facing Ramiro Mendoza in a blowout loss to the Red Sox. Curiously, the player he replaced was none other than Larry Bigbie. April has been a traumatic month for Cust.

via assets.sbnation.com

Bobby Crosby has a four game hitting streak of his own after doubling this afternoon against a righty starter. He’s batting .400 with 3 doubles and a pair of walks – good for a 1.071 OPS, raising his season’s OPS to .737. The kid is hot!

With the news that Fautino de los Santos is headed to the minor league DL with a sore elbow and a rough five games (5.87 era) to start the season, Ryan Sweeney batting under .200 with no extra base hits over the last 11 games and Gio Gonzalez off to a slow start (5.00 era and a k/9 of only 7.0 after posting an 11.1 last season) I think it is becoming clear that Kenny Williams swindled Billy Beane. In the history of A’s baseball, the Danny Haren trade will be remembered as Mark Mulder part two and times two, having returned twice the players and possibly twice the talent that Mark Mulder did, while our much beloved Nick Swisher will be remembered in the same breath as the bulldog, Tim Hudson. Is it a karma thing? Does Billy Beane not have the attention span to deal with two trades at once? Does his shit simply not work with fan favorites? I don’t know, but I think one thing is clear – devo felt like writing a silly article this Sunday afternoon.

We all love fastballs. It is the pitch we drool over – we are always excited to watch the pitchers who crank up the heat, who bring the mustard, throw cheese, gas and/or smoke or who fire BBs, pills or seeds. It is also the pitch pitchers rely on the most. Pitchers throw a lot of fastballs. A lot of them.

Of the 142 pitchers included in this study, only 21 did not throw a fastball the majority of the time. Twelve of them replace those fastballs with cutters, which are basically fastballs with a little extra movement, so only nine pitchers rely on the slow stuff or the breaking stuff most of the time. Most of these guys, bottomed out by John Smoltz at 44.9%, are not that far off the pace. Two guys are, though. One is obvious – Tim Wakefield, who relies on his knuckler, to the tune of 82.6% -- the other, perhaps not as much. The New York Mets’ Jorge Sosa throws his slider 52.3% of the time.

One of these pitchers is not like the others, one of these pitchers just doesn’t belong. Three of these guys throw slightly harder than my grandmother and Litsch’s fastball is a couple of ticks below average. Sosa, though, throws a good, above average speed fastball – he just relies on his slider an unprecedented amount.

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