Category: Sports

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Here Come Your Nuts!

I went to Modesto this past Friday to watch my first Single-A baseball game between the local Modesto Nuts of the Seattle Mariners organization and the San Jose Giants, creatively named after their parent organization, the San Francisco Giants. The environment reminded me of a mid-season high school football game, complete with inexpensive food vendors, large groups from local church and youth sports organizations, and season ticket holders who maintain conversations from several rows away. There are angry dads, town heroes, and four-dollar hot dogs. I adored it.

The local sponsorships were charming. Here’s one I’ll never forget, repeated each time a Nuts pitcher struck out an opposing batter:

This strikeout is brought to you by Aspire Public Schools. Don’t strike out on your education; enroll in Aspire Public Schools todayyyyy.

Another, when a Nuts batter walked:

Nice take! Donatello’s Take and Bake!

I purchased a hat with one of their mascots, Wally the Walnut, on the front.

I heard good-hearted banter about the players and a couple of mean-spirited comments from fans directed towards the umpires that led to a guy in front of me nearly being ejected. Instead, the umpire thought the chirping was coming from a bench, and one of the Nuts’ coaches got tossed.

I kept score as usual. Heading towards the gate after the game, I saw a small group of kids against the fence along the left field line where the Giants players were walking. A six-foot-seven-inch Bryce Eldridge, the top pick by the Giants in the 2023 draft, towered over them. I walked over on a whim and, once all the kids had balls autographed and selfies secured, asked him to sign the scorecard along his batting line.

As with many experiences this past year, I regret not jumping at the opportunity earlier. I had immense fun watching baseball in such a casual environment, with each part driven by the community. I’m eager to return to Modesto and visit San Jose to see the Giants play at home. Minor League Baseball reminds me of my time playing in town ball leagues around Minnesota at the end of high school, and it more appropriately embodies what baseball can mean to a city. It sends me back to the nostalgic times I never experienced when baseball was the country’s pastime.

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Making MLB Team Scatter Plots

You may have seen any number of scatter plots on the internet that show data comparisons among players or teams in a given league. These are part of my daily experience on the /r/baseball community, and I finally decided to scratch my statistical presentation itch by making my own. This post isn’t to cover what statistics to compare, just the process I’ve settled on for now to turn a table of comparisons into precisely-designed charts suitable for sharing on the internet.

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I Just Learned What BBCOR Means

In early high school, I remember all the hubbub about requiring metal baseball bats to align to the BBCOR standard. Given the pronunciation of this (“Bee-Bee-Core”), I always assumed it was a regulation about what specific materials must be used to make the bat. That’s only true insofar as the standard actually defines a material property.

BBCOR stands for “Batted Ball Coefficient of Restitution”. In other words, the standard tells you how elastic the collision between ball and bat is allowed to be. This standard was designed to dull metal bats in an effort to protect pitchers, the most likely players to be grievously injured by a batted ball. It was adopted by the NCAA in 2011, and most youth leagues that I’m aware of followed their lead. I used BBCOR-certified bats throughout high school, and continue to do so in my adult league.

You can read through the NCAA protocol for BBCOR, where the most fascinating part is the testing procedures starting on page 5. There is a table defining what the moment of inertia must be a distance of 6 inches from the knob of the bat—where the batter grips the bat—to ensure the bat isn’t “too easy” to swing. Then they use a ball cannon—that’s the term they provide—with a muzzle velocity of at least 150 mph which imparts spin at a rate of less than 10 rpm to fire fresh baseballs at clamped-down bats.

They perform six consecutive valid trials to measure the restitution of the bat using three sensors placed along the trajectory of the ball (which must be accurately placed to a tolerance of 0.005 inches.) After all that, the average measured BBCOR must be no more than 0.500.

I loved reading this, and I now want this to be a physics problem in some college class.

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Playball for Terminal

I came across the javascript terminal app Playball. It’s fun and slick, and I’m enjoying using it. It gives you a way to view MLB Gameday data from the terminal, and it’s beautifully done.

When you first run the app after installing it via npm, you are greeted with the day’s schedule, and the box scores of any games.

Keyboard navigation hints are shown at the bottom of the window at all times, so you can easily look at scores from previous days, or check out the schedule in the future. You can jump back to the current day at any point. Navigating any screen can be done with either the arrow keys or vim keybindings.

Standings are available as well, following the same format you would see in the MLB app.

The gameday stream is excellent. It provides a complete boxscore up top, a left pane containing information about the at-bat, and a right pane with all play-by-play information. All of the colors can be configured to your liking, and I’m particularly a fan of the occupied bases diagram.

After watching a Snazzy Labs video about terminal apps, I’ve been thoroughly enjoying using the terminal more. I lost that part of my computing life when I switched to macOS, but it’s delightful to reenter the fold.

Playball is a fun project that is actually useful because it takes away all the cruft and clutter of a web app, stripping it down to present the core information in a highly readable way with no loss of functionality. Give it a shot.

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Joe Mauer Elected to Baseball Hall of Fame

From Anthony Castrovince on MLB.com:

The St. Paul, Minn., kid made good on his 2001 selection as the No. 1 overall Draft pick by his hometown Twins to become a six-time All-Star, five-time Silver Slugger, three-time batting champ and the 2009 AL MVP. He was a member of four division-winning Twins teams.

Though his catching career was cut short by concussions and five seasons as essentially a league-average first baseman complicated his Cooperstown case, Mauer made enough of an impact at his primary position to stand among the greatest to ever don the tools of ignorance. His .306 career batting average is tied for the sixth highest among catchers with at least 3,000 plate appearances, and his .388 on-base percentage is tied for third. He’s the only catcher with three batting titles, and his total of 44.6 bWAR during his 10 years as the Twins’ primary catcher from 2004-13 was by far the best at that position in that timeframe.

Joe Mauer was a huge part of my childhood and, as I am also a left-handed hitter with a tendency to hit to the opposite field, a baseball idol. He’s someone I can always hold up as an ideal of Minnesota: kind, humble, and driven.

I remember sitting in my long-term AirBnB in 2018 after moving to San Diego one September afternoon, watching what would be Joe Mauer’s final game in Minnesota. In his final at-bat he cracked shot to left-center field as he’d done so many times, and hustled out a double. To cap off the game, they introduced him as a catcher in the top of the ninth. He warmed up the pitcher, threw down to second, and caught the first pitch of the inning before being replaced. Despite being at the end of his career, and not having caught in five years, you could see the command he held behind the plate paired with the smoothest mechanics I’ve seen.

I cried then, and every time I see the clip I tear up.

It was only in the span of 2009–2011 when he won MVP and ended up on the cover of MLB: The Show that I realized he wasn’t just our hometown hero, he was nationally recognized. As a kid, it’s hard to understand what bleeds outside your world. But he was never a superstar because he was so reserved. With a few exceptions, his TV presence was for local commercials or focused on the Twins. He rarely spoke out. He led quietly by example for his entire career.

So, it was such a delight to see the people I read and interact with online largely getting behind his Hall of Fame candidacy, pushing for him to get on during his first stint on the ballot. Having that come true means more to him, I’m sure, than anyone Twins fans. But it still means a hell of a lot to us.

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Ohtani to Dodgers

Sarah Wexler, reporting for MLB.com:1I’ve never done a blogging “quote post” like this, but I’m toying with using this blog for a little more than just my Monday updates. We’ll see if it sticks, but I might as well use my own website’s capacity and see how it fits.

After a fervent sweepstakes, reigning American League Most Valuable Player Shohei Ohtani has agreed to terms with the Dodgers on a record-demolishing 10-year, $700 million deal, according to his agent, Nez Balelo.

This is incredible, ridiculous, and frustrating.

Incredible

No free agent in any sport has ever received a contract worth this much. It’s a huge play by the Dodgers, and a windfall for Ohtani who definitely has nothing to worry about financially. Time will tell whether the deal is good when considering Ohtani as a player long-term, but as a move they can leverage as marketing it’s likely going to pay for itself rapidly. Ohtani is a superstar across the world, particularly in Japan and the United States. Between the merchandise the Dodgers will sell and the butts in seats they’ll get even in the next two seasons, I have to imagine they know it’s worth the investment. If they can make some deep playoff runs, that’ll do even more.

Ridiculous

What the hell, Dodgers? Can you let any other team have a fighting chance? They really are become more like the Yankees than the Yankees in terms of throwing money at problems (while also annoyingly being quite good at developing their own players). The money in this deal is absurd and I can’t imagine being matched by any deal within the next decade.

Frustrating

With the Giants being my second team, it’ll be infuriating how much I’ll want to go to games when the Dodgers are in town so I can see Ohtani play, and it’ll also be infuriating as I sit here along with all the other Giants fans wondering how we can possible compete in the division now. It isn’t actually impossible—baseball is a strange sport, and the Dodgers still haven’t figured out their pitching situation—but boy is it tremendously disheartening at first glance. Why couldn’t he have gone to Toronto?

It’ll also be awful seeing the national networks and MLB fawn over him as a Dodger. It was charming and fun to see Ohtani do his thing in Anaheim because the focus was on the player. He was and is incredible, but it wasn’t part of a juggernaut team that doesn’t seem to have any particularly fun vibe. Now it’ll be in the context of the Dodgers, and MLB will be pushing the Dodgers hard every time they get a chance. I’m going to be sick of it very quickly, even though I’ll still watch every good Ohtani highlight that comes out in the next decade. He’s good, I just wish he could be good on some other team.

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    I’ve never done a blogging “quote post” like this, but I’m toying with using this blog for a little more than just my Monday updates. We’ll see if it sticks, but I might as well use my own website’s capacity and see how it fits.
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2023 World Series Review

The Texas Rangers won the World Series in five games over the Arizona Diamondbacks, and by the end it looked as inevitable as the 4–1 victory shows. I was fairly neutral going in—I have some connections to the Rangers via the Twins, but felt myself rooting for the underdogs in Arizona more often than not—and so my hope, as always, was for a tense series that went at least six games. That didn’t transpire, and viewership was down as the matchup was panned across popular sports media, but that hardly matters to me.

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