Friar Watch

Kevin Kouzmanoff has been on a hellacious tear lately, breaking out of his month long slump in a big way. We first noted his improvement 8 days ago, let’s take another look:

His On Base Percentage has already crossed his K/PA and his Batting Average is nearly there. What’s particularly nice is his batting […]

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Dan Fox has a terrific article over at Baseball Prospectus (subscriber only, pay the $5 a month!) where he analyzed over 40,000 pitches worth of Gameday data. Lots of interesting stuff in here, this article alone is worth the subscription.
One bit that I found especially intersting: He looks at the starting and ending […]

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Over at the Inside the Book Blog, Tango points to a very nice analysis of 5 Greg Maddux starts, focusing on how he pitches to left and right handed hitters and whether umpires give him the outside call.
In the comments Tango wonders whether there is a calibration issue with Gameday and left handed batters […]

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How individual umpires call balls and strikes is something fans love to debate. Let’s compare the umps from the last two Padre games: Joe West was behind the plate on 5/15, Ed Rapuano was the man who had to make the controversial call on the final pitch to Kouzmanoff on 5/16.
Joe West 5/15
All pitchers
Green […]

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Jake wasn’t his usual dominant self but he was still effective. You might want to refer back to the charts from his last start and compare them to tonight, there are some interesting differences.
Strike chart
Green = Swinging Strike
Blue = Called Strike

Jake had 8 swinging strikes tonight, 12 last week. No surprise, the Reds […]

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Here’s something I’ve been meaning to look at for a while. Check out Kevin Kouzmanoff’s strikeouts per plate appearance, contrasted with his batting average.

Some of us over at the Ducksnorts in game discussions noted a a few weeks ago that Kouz seemed to be having better at bats and the chart bears that […]

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Dan Fox of Baseball Prospectus has a great analysis of Phil Hughes’ May 1st near no-hitter. Dan uses MLB Enhanced Gameday data to break down each at bat and the game overall.
Fox touches on one aspect of the data that I’ve found interesting: identifying pitches.
You’ll notice that the first pitch to Lofton is recorded […]

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It’s a travel day for the Padres so let’s take a look at some of the great Padres blogs this week:
Ducksnorts has a nice roundtable discussion about the state of the Padres thus far. Lots of interesting observations here.
Gaslamp Ball tries to understand why Khalil Greene is so lifelike yet so uncanny. This […]

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Normally we focus on pitchers here but since there’s been a lot of talk about Kevin Kouzmanoff’s slow start I thought we could take a look at one of his at bats tonight.
In the fourth inning Adrian Gonzalez drew a one out walk and scored on Khalil Greene’s booming triple. Josh Bard then walked […]

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Special thanks to Padre fan Eric Schwarz for the swank new header graphic. Now it actually looks like a Padres blog!
Make sure you check out Eric’s site SchwarzTech for tech news and reviews. He’s got a sweet old school Padres color scheme going on right now.

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