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"Double Plus"
If you were ever relegated to right field in little league, you might not think of it as a premium skill position. Still, the number of left-handed hitters in the majors neutralizes the difference in fielded balls between right and left. Last year, right fielders made 9,416 plays for outs, and left fielders 8,644. That’s about 9% more plays, and …
Continue Reading →While Ryan and I were talking on the latest episode of The Pool Shot, it dawned on me that one of the biggest roster question marks heading into Spring Training was the battle for the 5th starter spot. I’m not the quickest learner, apparently. Considering where we were a year ago as The Grand D-backs Experiment was underway, it’s …
Continue Reading →Depending on how you look at it, the D-backs will only pay substantially over the major league minimum for sixteen players in 2016. One of them is Bernard Gilkey — and his is not even the lowest figure. The way things stand, the D-backs payroll is not very top heavy, despite the large commitment to Zack Greinke; the second-highest …
Continue Reading →If you follow the D-backs and saw the news earlier this week that MLB is considering raising the bottom of the strike zone, you probably had the same initial thought that I did: that could hurt the D-backs more than any other team. If you’re a FanGraphs reader, you worked through the excellent August Fagerstrom’s excellent post identifying the pitchers …
Continue Reading →A little more than a week ago I told you that Welington Castillo is a bad pitch framer. He’s more or less average at the other, more traditional parts of catching – namely blocking and throwing. People have talked about him being good with the pitchers and that they like working with him and I can’t really speak to …
Continue Reading →Just being perfectly honest, you don’t really need to read this post. If you’ve seen the headline, you know all you need to know. It was fun, though, to use batted ball velocity data to pick apart David Peralta‘s better success against lefties in 2015, and I think enough of that to rely on it to figure out some …
Continue Reading →Yesterday I wrote a lot about Paul Goldschmidt as a possible Hall of Fame candidate. If you didn’t read the full installment, I’d suggest going back and taking a gander. Today things won’t be so long and exhaustive. Let’s keep it short because that’s what Double Plus Fridays are all about anyways (at least in theory).
I decided to …
Continue Reading →The D-backs look like a good team right now. No, they probably aren’t the 116 win 2001 Seattle Mariners good, but that’s okay — I’m pretty sure some other team won the World Series that year anyway. Right now, I like the team’s chances of making the playoffs. But that doesn’t mean they couldn’t be better.
With little left on …
Continue Reading →I still have dreams where I believe it’s not real. It’s usually 3am, I’m in a sweat and I’ve just awoken from a dream where the Diamondbacks were really bad again. Then I see the alarm clock, I feel my toes in the sheets, I catch my breath and remember: yes, that really happened.
The “that” in the sentence above …
Continue Reading →Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk of you again
Because a trade softly creeping
Hit its bombs while I was tweeting
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of “Trumbo”…
Okay, weird. The D-backs have a kind of front-office-by-committee, and I’m on record saying I think a starter-by-committee pitching staff would be a good idea. Now, the new uniforms unveiled by the team last night need enough mannequins to fill a conference room — and they look like they were designed by a committee. Or a committee of committees? Say …
Continue Reading →We’ve never seen anything like Aroldis Chapman. Once upon a time, Billy Wagner seemed like a once-in-a-lifetime unicorn, a lefty closer who could regularly hit 100 mph. I once heard a report that a right-handed closer — Billy Koch — once hit 104 mph on a radar gun, a legend so unbelievable that I never expected to see that …
Continue Reading →Maybe you saw it. The Inside the ‘Zona 2015-2016 Offseason Plan came out on Wednesday. It included a few trades – two for relievers. Neither of those relievers was Aroldis Chapman even though he’s expected to be traded sometime in the next two weeks or so. The Reds are pretty determined to move him (and Todd Frazier and maybe some …
Continue Reading →A couple of weeks back, Ryan and I spent the better part of a week in Scottsdale talking baseball and taking the marvelous action that is the Arizona Fall League. Salt River’s games have wrapped up for the season as they won’t be playing in the AFL championship, and with the seasons of Arizona’s prospects officially finished (aside from those …
Continue Reading →News of the trade that sent Daniel Palka to the Minnesota Twins for catcher (?) Chris Herrmann seemed to cause a bit of stir Tuesday afternoon. After all, it was the first trade of the offseason and everyone’s looking for a headline. The deal certainly caught Diamondbacks fans by surprise. And Palka was a guy they’d heard plenty about given …
Continue Reading →Yesterday, the third and final installment of the Diamondbacks Top 30 Prospects was released. Dansby Swanson grabbed the top spot ahead of familiar names Aaron Blair and Braden Shipley. Fellow 2015 draftee Alex Young came in fourth and Brandon Drury rounded out the top five. Ranking Young ahead of Drury wasn’t easy, but it came down to the value …
Continue Reading →@ryanpmorrison
Congrats to @OutfieldGrass24 on a beautiful life, wedding and wife. He deserves all of it (they both do). And I cou… https://t.co/JzJtQ7TgdJ, - Best part of Peralta’s 108 mph fliner over the fence, IMHO: that he got that much leverage despite scooping it out… https://t.co/ivBrl76adF,
RT @OutfieldGrass24: If you're bored of watching Patrick Corbin get dudes out, you can check out my latest for @TheAthleticAZ. https://t.co/k1DymgY7zO, - Of course, they may have overtaken the league lead for outs on the bases just now, also...
But in 2017, Arizona ha… https://t.co/38MBrr2D4b,
- Prior to the games today, there had only been 5 steals of 3rd this season (and no CS) in the National League. The… https://t.co/gVVL84vPQ5,
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- #Dbacks' 2018 1st round pick Matt McLain hit .203/.276/.355 as a freshman at UCLA last year. This season? A tidy li… https://t.co/yM48j1ebrr,
- RT @OutfieldGrass24: Who's that under the radar player who you are banking on to break out this baseball season? Someone who's not regularly in the headlines?,
- Just say "plague" already https://t.co/qkcwY2Omub,
RT @wickterrell: You can certainly argue that he already has broken out, but I'm expecting massive things from Ramon Laureano this y… https://t.co/ejJPu9AEnd,
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