Results tagged ‘ Minnesota Twins ’
Kansas City 3, Boston 1, and so on
Now and again you’ll run across analysis of a squad or an individual that is “good, but not too good,” strong but not outstanding, of high quality but not about to blow you away. Last night (and this morning), two squads got wins, both unusual, though not so unusual that it would blow old marks away.
Kansas City against Boston, to start (or finish, as it was). On account of rain, that matchup would not start for almost two and a half hours past normal. Almost four and a half hours would go by without a finish. (Although, this is Boston of which I talk. Four and a half hours is not so bad for a loss in its fifth bonus inning, if you think of how long Boston-NY marathons can go.)
Plus, Arlington’s local squad won against Twins, and how. Put it this way–Twins got six runs, but lost by two touchdowns (including points following, but no two-point plays). A high mark for that day’s champions? No. In fact, it’s just two-thirds of its historic scoring mark! Nor is its hit total a squad high, as said run mark had not as many hits.
So, what did MLB.com talk about today? Fascinating facts from Monday, obviously, but random writing too. It’s surprising how many kids of guys playing today must work through a disability. I don’t want to mock any such family, but if I put my mind to it, it’s almost too simplistic or common in “family spotlight” olds. Not non-olds. Olds. That’s what it is now.
Sorry for sporadic blogging. Hard to know what to post about. Possibly this URL will put prompts up again?
Liriano’s No-No
Oh what a game
Francisco Liriano
Whose no-no had no-nos
Walks are rarely good ideas
And yet he
And the Twins defended
For a sweet win that would please
(Even without total ease.)
The fates have smiled
On lucky Liriano–
A no-no! There were no
Such great moments on the mound
This season
Left the White Sox wasted
The Twins were unwelcome, both teams had been struggling
But then on Chicago’s home ground
He got them to fly out, he got them to ground out
There wasn’t a hit to be found.
Speaking as a Chicagoan, I’m
Still very thrilled this was Francisco’s time!
He stopped the Sox from producing knocks, Francisco Liriano
Threw the year’s first no-no
Though you could find a fault
With some pitches, Sox cleaved the air
They were not worth their salt
Gardenhire didn’t pull him or call a halt.
Twins fans felt great in their frigid state, all hail to Liriano
Who has thrown a no-no.
How many innings? Nine.
He mowed them down, he shut them off
His pitching’s mighty fine.
All of the Sox had to go
Back down the line
He put on a marvelous show
Tonight was his night to shine.
Oh sad the bat
That faces Liriano
Whose no-no will, though no
One would say that it counts for more
In standings
Still stand out forever
With the many games before.
(Even beyond the box score.)
Let’s hear it for
Francisco Liriano
Whose no-no (I know no
One’s going to disagree)
Was awesome.
What a happy moment
Down at the Cell all their hitting skill weakened
The White Sox did not stand a chance.
From infield to outfield, Minnesotan goodness
Was fighting the home team’s advance.
He pitched with speed, he pitched with force
Setting them down, a matter of course.
Once in a while the fates will smile
On guys like Liriano.
Guys like Liriano
Suddenly hit the press
And fans cheer out with all the pride and joy that they possess.
None of the White Sox could hit–they were a mess.
When Liriano had it–he’d just impress.
What a scene, what a joy
What a lovely sight
When the Twins are the big sensation.
Even if it’s nothing much
Only this one night
It’s still a cause for celebration.
For now I just wanna see
A tremendous game, don’t you?
It’s a Central clash; neither great but both
In full view.
There’s no roof, they just played under open air.
Twenty thousand? It could be better.
But it must have ruled for those who made it there.
As days go, this one was red-letter.
It’s not just the best there is
Who put on this kind of show
Lightning can strike for the best and the worst
And now Liriano…
…Now at the Cell,
They put the “miss” into “Comiskey,” didn’t really prove their worth
Though you can’t tell
From just one game, tonight at least they stood back and let him excel
Clear as a bell, they fell
Francisco pitched so well!
ZACK Non-Attack
Unless the opposing pitcher is on your fantasy team, there’s really almost never a bad time for your team to get hits. There are times when it would be really, really nice for them to get hits, and then times when it’s not so important, but hey, the more the merrier. Fantasy aside, can we therefore conclude that it is always good for your team to get hits, and always the best course of action to root for them to do so?
No, we cannot. For we also appreciate the home fans we see in broadcasts of no-hitters we switch to, who start cheering for the visiting pitcher at the end of the game–tacitly rooting against their own batters. But when does the “end of the game” begin? When is it acceptable to switch your allegiance?
Enter the ZACK, a new statistic that hopes to measure the acceptability of rooting for a no-hitter against your own team. This is the first version of the formula, so the scale of some of the numbers involved might be off. Feel free to give feedback.
ZACK is derived from four variables: ZACK=Z*(A+C+K). Each of these letters stands for a different question that a fan might implicitly consider on these occasions:
Z is for Zone? (Where am I?)
A is for Accomplishment? (How far along is this game?)
C is for Crucial? (Is this an important game to win?)
K is for Killed? (Are we getting killed out there?)
Here’s how you compute these…
Zone. We take as our baseline being actually present at the game; if you’re at the game, Z=1 so it won’t make a difference when you multiply it by the sum and you can move on to A. If you’re not at the game…
…but you’ve been paying attention (through any chosen medium) from the start, Z=3/4
…but you’re been paying attention for a while, Z =2/3
…but you just started paying attention because someone has alluded to what’s going on, Z=1/2 (You may think that this should be strange for a game involving “your team”, but perhaps they’re only “your team” in the league you don’t care about quite as much and you’re busy watching a different game.)
…but you just started paying attention because someone has explicitly told you what’s going on, step away from the computer (or open a new tab), and give that person a stern talking-to from me.
Accomplishment. The editors of MLB.com apparently believe in a “bright line test” after the fifth inning or so, allowing live look-ins after a specific point in the game. I do not; no inning should be disproportionately important. (If the correct answer to the question posed at the end of the second paragraph is “the seventh inning, period”, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.)
So, my first principle in ZACK is that each inning is equally important. Therefore, A=8 at the beginning of the game, and increases by 1 for every out recorded by the opposing pitcher, whether that out comes in the first inning or the ninth. (Well, actually, I didn’t consider extra innings. Maybe A should go up by 2 for every out beyond the twenty-seventh!)
However, I can appreciate that completing a half-inning may have more subjective value than just three outs. So, A increases by an extra 1 for every half-inning completed. (The A value for a game could go 8-9-10-12-13-14-16 through the first two innings if all the batters go down in order.)
Subtract that original 8 from your A value if your team has gotten on base through other means.
Crucial. This is the hardest to calculate, and the one that might need the most fine-tuning. I apologize in advance.
The first thing to do is see if your team has either clinched a playoff spot, or been eliminated from playoff contention. If so, C=9. Go directly to K. If it hasn’t, continue below. However, if the value that you get from continuing below is greater than 8.5, use C=8.5 instead.
Okay, so your team is still in some sort of race; it’s either leading the division or the wild card by x games, or it’s x games out of the division or wild card (consider whichever case makes x smaller–usually you’re closer to the wild card than the division title). If you are playing the team chasing you by x games/in first by x games, go to the next paragraph. Otherwise, take x/2 and go to the next paragraph.
Okay, so the number you got from the paragraph above, which is either x or x/2? To this, add the number of months remaining in the regular season; +5 in April, +4 in May, +3 in June, +2 in July, +1 in August, 0 in September. (If this is October and your team has not clinched or been eliminated, you have other things to worry about than ZACK.)
Okay, now you have C. Unless this value is greater than 8.5, remember, in which case C=8.5.
Killed. K increases by 1 for each run, beyond the second, your opponents have scored.
I originally considered tweaking this, as your team is not necessarily getting killed out there even if your opponents have scored more than two runs. However, I think the novelty factor of watching your team score without getting hits offsets this.
All right, we’re done! Multiply Z*(A+C+K) to get your ZACK score, and then root away.
What’s that? You’d maybe like an example or two to help with the numbers and stuff? That’s fine.
For a couple of examples, we will take two games last night; the Twins game against the Royals I attended (you will never guess who was pitching for the Royals. Never. At all), and the simultaneous Cubs game against the Astros. Both the Twins and Cubs qualify as “my team”.
First, let’s get Z and C out of the way, as we can do that early for both teams. (I suppose in late September C could change while the game is going on, if another team loses/wins at the same time; again, if this will dramatically alter your result, you have other things than ZACK to worry about at this point.) I was at the Twins game, so Z=1 there, but the Cubs were already losing by the time I started glancing at the scoreboard, so Z=2/3 there.
C for the Twins? They entered the game with a 5.5 game lead over the White Sox, so x=5.5. They weren’t playing the White Sox, so 5.5/2= 2.25. It’s September, so that’s all there is to do to find C.
The Cubs are actually farther out of the wild card race than they are the division race. Taking the “mere” 19.5 games by which they trail the Reds, we have 19.5/2=9.75. This is greater than 9.5, so C=9.5 for the Cubs. (That is to say, we’re not worrying too much, playoff wise, about the outcome of this game. Might as well root for a no-hitter.)
So, at the beginning of the game, the Twins’ ZACK was 2.25+8=10.25, and the Cubs’ was (2/3)*(9.5+8)=(2/3)*17.5=11.67. Here’s what happened through the first few innings…
Am I on the right track? There’s a lot of room for improvement, but I feel like this is a good start.
By the way, I’m not going to give you a cutoff value for acceptability, except that I’m pretty sure it’s greater than 14. Beyond that, it’s an issue that each fan must struggle with alone.
Also, although it should be obvious, don’t bother with ZACK once your team has already gotten a hit! Then, just sit back, enjoy, and hope the barrage continues for enough runs that Matt Capps can’t blow it.
Jays 2, Twins 1, Indians 1, Rays 0
Nobody owns 2010 and nobody will, but young bats also stand with arms as standouts so far. It’s an individual activity, hitting. Or pitching, actually, though an ally must catch. Throwing without pitching also can’t occur without an ally, or can’t occur in a good way. If you blow it, if you plural blow it, it’s still going down as a flaw with a particular individual, though choosing is now and again arbitrary.
That choosing is a hard task; it can’t occur in a vacuum. Not that far into finding out about a sport, you find out about its most dazzling days, find out what has a quick shorthand to pin down how good it was. And it’s a long, long way from that day until you could obtain a job and say what was, or was not, a hit.
If anything is a hit, without doubt, it’s a hit that soars far. Fair and out of play, into distant stands, for a hit and a run to boot. Such was on display from Toronto, slug and slug again, and in particular from a youth. That said, Tampa Bay too hit and got runs; 11 runs, to just 9 hits. Hitting, obviously, is not your only way to build a scoring opportunity. But Toronto was too strong, smacking 20 hits, 8 going far out. If anything’s obviously a hit, it’s that sort of blast.
Right?
Actually, no. You can fight, saying a ball did go out, against a ruling that it didn’t. And what’s lost in that fight, you don’t gain in confusion following that loss–it’s not hard to claim that it wasn’t fair, in a splashy first-paragraph blurb, but it is hard to say that what you’d want still wouldn’t stop you from losing.
But if any squad shouldn’t complain about quirky ballparks, it’s our Twins that can’t. Not following a hit off a catwalk, prompting complaints from Maddon. Who’s crowing about moving outdoors now?
…Probably our Twins, still. That’s a pity.
So it’s Tampa Bay, again, that was flirting with historic futility. From what I saw (look-ins on MLB.com, I’ll admit, not all that much), this was similar to Jackson’s win–not as wild, but with many throws, and also finishing 1-0. Just having a run to work with can focus brilliant jobs, but if that won’t occur, with first and third full, why stay with Morrow?
But it paid off.
And so fans look towards morrows, trying to find out what this wacky August 2010 will throw us.
162 down; how will it go? Who knows?
For all I know–all I can totally know, that is, without just trusting assumptions, a group of facts that is not big–”living” is just falling. Coins thrown into a grid of dots, bouncing this way or that, landing at last in a roughly normal distribution. A coin or two will land on that distributions’ rim, but mostly it’s a big clump. In a suitably long run, laws of probability will drown out mild variation.
If you didn’t want to trust your cash to that, you could just flip it. It’s a similar story, just in microcosm. Half up, half down. That was how a playoff location was found not too long ago. With many trials, a statistician knows, you’ll play half away and half in your own stadium. Just as in a normal campaign.
I’d watch that. Four and a half innings in Michigan? Okay, stop for now and show up tomorrow for a following four-and-a-half. But what if a Twins rally cuts things short, cutting out bottom-ninth action? It wouldn’t truly go “half away, half not”. So that won’t work.
No, knowing you’d win half of all coin flips isn’t any consolation if you don’t win that which counts. And moping about cosmic futility isn’t any fun–joy is found through taking any sort of action. Not just physical action–arguing philosophy in your own mind wins against thinking that you lack any opportunity at all.
No coin will fly to pick a playoff location this fall. Matchup 163 got its spot thanks to win-loss totals, which in turn hail from action within stadia. And Bronx triumph allows it a bonus honor. Following 163–but not so far away as actual playoffs–that Junior Circuit champion squad, choosing its upcoming days to play, will try to show us again why taking action can pay off. And our TBD champions will try to thwart that. And nobody knows who will win.
Twins 6, White Sox 4
En route to the Metrodome, we discuss whether our hometown hero is the best hitter right now. My friend thinks so, I don’t, but I don’t counter with some other guy. I just don’t know enough to judge yet.
The Twins’ fifth hitter doubles, scoring two. Nobody out. Goodbye, no-hitter. The White Sox pitcher needs forty pitches to get out of the first; the Twins pitcher needed seven.
In the top of the second, everything stops. Some Twins employee jogs into the outfield, picking up the first big, multicolored shore sphere which people were bouncing out beyond left field. This sort of thing is not permitted in the Metrodome. Once it is duly removed, the competition goes on. The White Sox score runs one by one, until in the middle of the fifth it is 4-3.
Some guy successfully proposes on the screen. The Twins go down one-two-three. To the sixth. Konerko singles, Pierzynski doubles, Getz connects, driving it deep to right. Cuddyer runs over, coming up with it. People cheer quite loudly, considering the visitors just tied it up.
But there’s lots of noise when Joe comes up in the bottom of the seventh. Before the pitch, the hit, the winning run, we cheer like we know how it will go. Once it does occur, my friend grins. I smile too.
With two outs in the top of the ninth, we get up once more. We keep shouting.
Somebody runs out into the outfield to pick up the second bouncy sphere to wind up there. It is the third or fourth, or higher, I’ve seen in just one night.
Then Wise grounds out to first.
Due to high winds, we’re told to use the revolving doors upon exiting. The Metrodome does not “push” me out like it so often does. It’s just this goofy feeling, nothing serious, but I hope I feel it in the future.
This Cap Is My Cap
This cap is your cap, this cap is my cap
Just snap in the snaps, one size fits all-cap
From the bright red visors to the ugly logos
This cap belongs to you and me.
As I was driving that ribbon of highway
I wondered if the game would go my way.
From the Motor City to Golden Valley
This land belongs to you and me.
Oh look, six runs is how far we’re trailing
The starting pitcher is clearly failing
I wonder if lazy fans are bailing
This lead belongs to you, not me.
I’ll save my writing that uses no e
For someone better than Kevin Slowey
Good thing we have phenoms nicknamed Joey
Could this ballgame belong to me?
We want lots of runs, we’re very greedy
The lead decreases, we feel less needy
That’s how we do it! Thank you, Joe Crede.
These runs belong to you and me.
And now it’s tied! Yes, you can compare us.
Thank you, Joe Mauer. Thanks, Brendan Harris.
The hats are thinking, If both teams wear us
There is no difference we can see.
So now we’re going to the tenth inning
Both teams are trying to do the winning
But the night is only just beginning
This night belongs to you and me.
They pulled ahead, oh yeah sure you betcha
It’s the fourteenth now, so time to stretch, yah
Look out you Tigers, we’re gonna catch ya
Scoring belongs to you and me.
But now things are getting somewhat tricky
Our last reliever is surnamed “Dickey”
This situation’s a little sticky
This rally is for you, not me.
Wake up the bats now! Hustle, don’t dally
We score one more run, is this a rally?
No–that proves to be the only tally.
This win belongs to you, not me.
I had no choice born into this nation
It often gives me exasperation
But that won’t stop me from celebration.
Morning belongs to you and me.
Bottom of the Seventh
Twenty-six, twenty-seven? They should be your prime, in sports terms. For the Metrodome, though, this is the end.
There were two outs in the bottom of the seventh when Nick Punto singled. Top of the order; Gomez singled too, though it looked like E6 to me. Bring in the lefty.
Someone out of left field, I guess, whose T-shirt seemed like it bore the retro Brewers logo, jumped into left field. Security removed him from the field. This didn’t get into the Press or Tribune–no sense giving him glory? Oh well.
Then up stepped our Joe, gloriously returning from the DL by homering in the first inning. He got hit, it turned out, but only following some dispute. Ron emerged from the dugout, provoking crowd cheers, while the scorer didn’t inform us of the hit-by-pitch (unlike the sixth inning, when we did see the “ruling” (everybody knew he’d gotten hit, why bother to put it up?) for the other Joe, Crede (who homered too).
Some supporter behind us told Justin to force retribution on the pitcher. Justin sent the first pitch he got over the floppy right-field “fence”.
Bring in the righty.
Only on the ride home did “four runs scored” sink in. I turned on one tiny light to see my pencil, noting Punto’s run on the thing I bought inside the dome. My beloved independent press sold out, now limited to one flimsy sheet telling us how to find the K/BB number (hint: divide Ks by BBs).
Then I turned the light off, riding into the suburbs.
