Same Old Same Old Same Old: Threading the 2013 World Series

[MFS62]

One of the announcers (Hersheiser on radio?) said that he has the lowest WHIP in major league history.

Later

[Frayed Knot]

0.829 for his MLB career - and 0.71 if you take away his 1st season as a starter, the only season where his WHiP was over 1.00
As a reliever he's given up 128 hits in 219 regular season innings with 284 Ks vs 26 walks (almost an 11/1 ratio) all while barely breaking 90-mph


BB-Ref lists the cut-off for such all-time records at 1,000 innings.
The leaders, not surprisingly, are a couple of dead-ball era guys, a few modern relievers, ... and some guy named Pedro
1) Addie Joss - 0.9678
2) Ed Walsh - 0.9996
3) Mariano Rivera - 1.0003*
4) Monte Ward
5) Pedro Martinez
6) Christy Mathewson
7) Trevor Hoffman

Uehara, with just 286 IPs under his belt and about to turn 39 on opening day 2014, is almost certain never to get there; making your MLB debut at age 34 will do that to you.
HIs WHiP in Japan over 1,500+ IPs was a more pedestrian 1.007



* Rivera finished with 998 hits against + 286 walks [1,284 W+H] in 1,283-2/3 innings pitched. IOW, [u:2l0061n9]exactly ONE MORE[/u:2l0061n9] base-runners than IP.
I like to think of the three consecutive hits that Murphy, Wright, and then Duda's game winner laid on him back in May as the ones responsible for him being unable to finish below a 1.000 career WHiP, but the judges will also accept: David Wright's game-winning double or Matt Franco's delirious single as legitimate answers.

[Guest Mets � Willets Point]

Just an idle thought about the two cardinal birds sitting on the bat on the Cardinals uniform. It occurs to me that it makes sense to have two birds since the Cardinals team name is plural. The other bird teams - the Blue Jays and the Orioles - do not to my knowledge have a logo or uniform design with multiple iterations of their bird.

For teams with non-ornothological nicknames, the Twins by virtue of their name are all but required to feature more than one (and less than three) guys:


The Red Sox also show a pair of socks:


Oddly, the White Sox have had several iterations of a logo with just one sock:


Can anyone think of any other team logos or uniform designs where the team name is represented in a plural fashion?

[G-Fafif]

Roger Angell is blogging the 2013 World Series, for goodness sake.

Beards are kudzu. Jonny Gomes�s beard�a brown frigate bird�s nest�is among the uglier sported by the hairy Sox this year, and when numbers of his teammates began grabbing it and ritually tugging on it upon his return to the dugout after his blast I was among a minority in the land who were hoping they�d pull it off. Gomes, a nice guy from Petaluma, California, has broad sloping shoulders and a pleasant, or O.K.-ish, everyday expression, but he�s shaved his head now, too, which doesn�t help, unless you�re eager to join the crowding recent hordes of the undead. C�mon, Jonny. Gomes�s isn�t the worst Sox beard�the title goes to backup catcher David Ross, whose unkempt cabbage includes a clashing streak of white that cascades over his chin�perhaps relic of a childhood moment when he ran into his grandfather in the narrow back hall outside the bathroom. The other catcher, Jarrod Saltalamacchia, has a raggedy garden-border growth, in keeping with the encircling back-yard shrubbery of his hair. Mike Napoli�s beard is thickest; Dustin Pedroia�s the weirdest, since it comes with his desert-saint stare and that repeated on-deck or between-pitch mannerism of opening and stretching his mouth into a silent O: a screech owl with laryngitis. I�m a gentle fellow, and intend no lasting hurts here. I admire Big Papi�s plunging mid-cheek parenthesis, which has been there for many seasons, of course, and now feels as familiar and locally reassuring as a statue by Daniel Chester French. I also offer praise for the angle-iron jawline wool sported by tonight�s Boston starter, Jon Lester: an aesthetic so clearly modelled on Gunnar Bj�rnstrand�s trimmed-down growth while he portrayed Fredrik Egerman in Bergman�s �Smiles of a Summer Night.� Can I ask a question? Where are the Red Sox wives or sweetie pies in all this? Have none of them spoken up�privately or in the Globe or in a thousand tweets�to protest this office fad? How does it feel to wake up, night after night, in immediate proximity to a crazed Pomeranian or a Malamute or an Old English sheepdog stubbornly adhering to the once caressable jaw of the guy on the nearest pillow? Doesn�t it scratch? Doesn�t it itch? Doesn�t it smell, however faintly, of tonight�s boeuf en daube or yesterday�s last pinch of Red Man? And what about the kids�how long can you keep putting them off with another recital of �The Three Little Pigs� or Edward Lear? Who does your husband/significant other think he is, anyway�Dostoyevsky? Brigham Young? Darwin? An Allman brother? Alexander Cartwright? Come on, guys, think this over. Time to grow up. And what if you lose in the end this week, beards and all? Is this a lifetime commitment? Hmmm. (Rubs chin.)

Sweetie pies!

[G-Fafif]

Angell on Game Three:

A line-drive double in the bottom of the ninth, whacked by pinch hitter Allen Craig on the first pitch from the previously impregnable Sox closer Koji Uehara, set up the last scene of the opera. With Craig on second and Yadier Molina, who had singled, on third, John Jay hit a ground ball to second�not deep enough to deliver the slow-footed Molina, who was tagged out at the plate by Jarrod Saltalamacchia. The catcher, finding Craig approaching third base�he was slowed by an old ankle injury�fired there, perhaps in time to nail the runner, except that the ball went past the diving third baseman, Will Middlebrooks, and out into left field. Craig, scrambling to his feet again to head home, half-stumbled over the recumbent Middlebrooks before he could resume his gimping trip, and was out there, on the return peg�only he was not. Home-plate ump Dana DeMuth signalled �safe,� then pointed meaningfully to his colleague Jim Joyce, out at third, who had properly called the tangle an obstruction by Middlebrooks. Shock. Rejoicing. Horror-struck Sox pleading. Game over. Sorry, guys, but the obstruction rule, as entrenched as Marbury v. Madison, does not require evil intent by the obstructionist. Craig, who had reinjured his ankle while sliding and believed himself out, can be forgiven for not quite understanding all the excitement around him. Not quite believing it remains true for us all. I could not recall a game ever ending this way, and neither could Tim McCarver or Joe Buck, up in the booth. Another First Ever, then, right to the gizzard for all of New England. The Red Sox, returning to the field Sunday evening, might expect to find crime-scene tape surrounding home plate, third base, and much of left field.

[G-Fafif]

Angell on Game Two.

Good game last night, a certificate of the high-end excitement we demand in October. The imposing starters�sour-faced Boston veteran John Lackey and the Cardinals� tall, twenty-two-year-old righty Michael Wacha�scooted us through a quick five innings, with most of the fans� attention, I think, going to Wacha�s fastball, which comes out of his hand like an escaping barn swallow and slips, barely noticed, into the upper level of the strike zone. With a Sox runner aboard in the sixth, he chose a change-up, to David Ortiz, however, who deposited the ball just over the sill of the Green Monster, in left, for a shocking, reversing 2�1 Boston lead. The night�s main news was just ahead, an unravelling little run of Cardinals �lan and Sox mistakes in the top of the seventh: a one-out walk, a single, and�with a fresh pitcher, Craig Breslow, now dealing to the bottom of the order, shortstop Daniel Descalso�an astounding, scenario-changing double steal. Descalso walked, and when Matt Carpenter knocked a sacrifice, game-tying fly ball to left, the Bosox, on the instant, came apart. Jonny Gomes�s peg home, wide to the right, was misplayed by catcher Jarrod Saltalamacchia, allowing the ball to skip into foul ground, where it was snatched up by Breslow and flung wildly past third and into a left-field photographers� booth. Three�two, St. Louis, now�and 4�2 when the next batter, Carlos Beltr�n, hit a single. This was almost all, it turned out, but there was time for me to award some multiple medals and cheek kissings in the manner of a French Mar�chal. The daring front man in that Cardinals double steal was a pinch-runner, Pete Kozma, who had committed two errors while playing shortstop the night before: now he was back from Fort Ougadou. Beltr�n, it will be remembered, had banged up his ribs in that same game when he smacked hard into the bullpen wall: taped up and unexpectedly back, he delivered two hits and the extra run. Croix de guerres, also, please, for Carlos Martinez, an excitable twenty-three-year- old Cardinals reliever, who struck out two batters in the eighth, and to the Cards� manager, Mike Matheny, who left him in there to pitch to Ortiz, with a man aboard; Ortiz singled but to no avail. Everything in this spirited Series is now changed�unless it isn�t. When play resumes on Saturday, the Cards will be on home ground, with the better pitching and no designated hitters. The teams are tied, but the Cardinals� opportunism and the numbers of their kiddy participants�their closer, twenty-three-year-old Trevor Rosenthal, struck out the side in the ninth�make you feel as if they�re ahead.

[G-Fafif]

And Angell on Game One:

World Series opening games can feel like a sunny day at Camp 6, a deserved picnic where we enjoy the fabulous views we�ve attained and contemplate the last push to the summit, but all images of the sort flew away quickly last night, when the inept Cardinals gave up five runs in the first two innings at Fenway Park, in the course of an 8�1 pasting by the Red Sox. Jon Lester, the lefty Boston starter, struck out eight Cards over seven and two thirds innings, and David Ortiz knocked a home run and a single and a sac, driving in three runs: thrilling star material on a better night, but only satisfactory here. The Cards, the best defensive team in the National League, were stinko, with three infield errors, two of them by shortstop Pete Kozma. The pattern of the game became clear when the veteran Cardinal starter Adam Wainwright could only smile wanly after allowing a feeble pop by Stephen Drew to drop like a thrombosed dove at his feet, to begin the Sox� second. One never knows, do one, as Fats Waller said. [...] The Never Before moment arrived early, when Ortiz, the fourth Boston batter of the evening, hit a soft grounder to the right, where second baseman Matt Carpenter flipped to Kozma to begin a potential double play. When the ball came loose out there, second base umpire Dana DeMuth signalled that Kozma had held it long enough for the force, even though everyone in the northern hemisphere, including my watching fox terrier and I, could plainly see that Kozma had barely touched the toss with the tip of his glove. The out stood up, stare decisis�or would have in an earlier era of umpiric reasoning. Here, though, and to my amazement, five neighboring umps came circling in, like crows or undertakers, and, after consultation, DeMuthed the call�safe on an error, the out cancelled. Justice and common sense had prevailed (along with a snub to the possibility of instant electronic replay to decide such calls next year), but a part of me felt a twinge of loss. Umps should always be right, even when they aren�t. In their hearts, as Bill Klem said, they never missed a call.

[Guest Mets � Willets Point]

thrombosed dove

I call dibs on this for my band name.

[dinosaur jesus]

Can someone explain that bit about David Ross's grandfather? Did the old guy just give him a scare, or does he mean something a lot nastier than that?

[Frayed Knot]

Can I ask a question? Where are the Red Sox wives or sweetie pies in all this? Have none of them spoken up�privately or in the Globe or in a thousand tweets�to protest this office fad?

They think about protesting but then see the paychecks their guys bring home and quickly change their minds.

[Lefty Specialist]

Damn, Roger Angell is 93. Looks like he's trying to get all the adjectives and extra commas out of his system before he himself thromboses.

[G-Fafif]

Angell, Game Five.

Big Papi continued to astound, with a run-scoring double on his first pitch of the evening, two singles, and a line-drive out. He is batting .733 for the series�as against a cumulative .151 for the rest of the Boston hitters�and now sometimes gives the impression that he is stopping by to play in these little entertainments, in the manner of a dad joining his daughter�s fifth-grade softball game. When he came up to bat once again in the sixth, Cardinals� starter Adam Wainwright essayed some uncharacteristic little pauses and stutter steps on the mound, trying to throw off that implacable swing. It was like trying to disconcert winter.

[Guest Mets � Willets Point]

metirish wrote: What's his history?

Sports Illustrated has Koji's story.

[m.e.t.b.o.t.]

when m.e.t.b.o.t. isn't languishing on a dusty shelf waiting to once again be permitted to perform schaefer voting tabulations, ideally for an entire season for once, or successfully avoiding the grabby hands of increasingly larger male children, m.e.t..b.o.t. occasionally likes to peruse the internet.

today, m.e.t.b.o.t. happened upon an interesting graphic generated by a website called regressing, which is apparently an offshoot of the deathspiral sport news aggregator website.

in it it presented the performances of the boston red sock designated batter david ortiz in their historical context, relative other world series hitters throughout history, in terms of WPA. m.e.t.b.o.t. is delighted to see this type of analysis.

more intestingly, it caused m.e.t.b.o.t. to perform further research.

specifically, m.e.t.b.o.t. followed the reference material to baseballreference.com and clicked around for a specific player's hsitorical post season WPA. this player is noted for his performance when clutched. this player has a significant number of postseason appearances - 158 games in total. therefore m.e.t.bo.t. assumed some meaningful data must lie therein. the player in question had a career postseason WPA of +0.017, or +0.00011 WPA per postseason game - effectively, the player's influence on the outcome of a postseason game throughout his career is negligble.

that player is derek jeter.

m.e.t.b.o.t. found this to be interesting.

[Zvon]

Cardinals see no reason to run hard in the first. Why run hard when they are playing a perfect shift?

[Zvon]

love it.

[Zvon]

Boom! Love the sound of that ball hitting the green monster. It could all end tonight folks.

[Zvon]

ooo,choke.

[metirish]

That was very cool for Farrell to acknowledge McCarver during the in-game interview.

[Zvon]

Twas. Freese froze. How could he not be ready for a fastball there?

[metirish]

Wacha is getting clattered....or whacked I guess.

[Frayed Knot]

I had an inkling Wacha's bubble was going to burst tonight.
Not that I expected him to get trashed or anything, just that his near-perfect stretch was due to come to an end.

[Zvon]

Didn't want the Cards to win, but did want to see Wacha do well. Be fantastic even. But the Gods Of Baseball declare him pedestrian tonight.

[metirish]

Pedroia doesn't get cheated up there does he?

[Guest d'Kong76]

Fear the BIGPURPLE Papi

[metirish]

Victorino up again with the bases loaded....curtains

[Zvon]

Damn it's gonna end tonight. Boston finally wins it in Boston. Good story.

[Zvon]

There is something a lil appealling about seeing St. Lou getting ASSWHUPPED!
lil bit.

[metirish]

St. Louis needed to get some runs on the board right there....

[metirish]

Elsbury gets caught in a run down.......but runs, and runs and gets back to 1st.....terrible from St. Louis.