Beyond the Boxscore has an interesting piece up (look at me, reading sabermetrics) showing speed as a function of a player's ability to amass triples. The idea is that a player's ability to turn doubles into triples would be evident in that player's triples-to-doubles ratio; a high ratio means he's fast enough to manufacture triples where the average player won't. Whether it's all that good an indicator of a player's natural speed/baserunning ability, I don't know. But it's certainly a neat read, if only to be reminded of names like Luis Polonia and Mickey Morandini. Fun facts I learned:
* Lance Johnson won this thing in a landslide. This is about as surprising as Ron Artest landing in jail again. Put it this way... if they ever build a Triples Hall of Fame, they goddamn better name it after Lance. They should change the name "triple" to "Lance." Anyone who collected baseball cards in the early 90s should be familiar with his body of work. The guy did almost nothing besides land on top of the triples leaderboard every year. (Earning him a bold, italicized 17 in his yearly stat listings from Topps.) Anyway, even after the "era" adjustments to discount modern players, Lance came out a full point ahead. Whatever you can say about Lance as a ballplayer, he had the triples thing pretty well in hand.
* Cecil Fielder has a better ratio than Jody Reed! That's pretty hilarious, seeing as Fielder takes a dump bigger than Reed twice a day. Of course, Reed was a Green Monster specialist... meaning that for every double he may have turned into a triple, he probably turned two singles into doubles by virtue of scraping the Monstah with 306-foot pop-flies. So this isn't as wacky as it looks. But any excuse to discuss Cecil Fielder's bowel movements is OK by me. (Well, not any excuse. Photo analysis wouldn't be OK with me at all.)
* Any stat that slights the late, great American hero Ted Williams can blow me. Seeing as he's second to last on the list... commence the blowing!!! Seriously, what's with crapping on his legacy? Didn't his son do enough damage already? Besides, this guy was one of our troops. Doesn't BtB support our troops?????
* Lance Johnson won this thing in a landslide. This is about as surprising as Ron Artest landing in jail again. Put it this way... if they ever build a Triples Hall of Fame, they goddamn better name it after Lance. They should change the name "triple" to "Lance." Anyone who collected baseball cards in the early 90s should be familiar with his body of work. The guy did almost nothing besides land on top of the triples leaderboard every year. (Earning him a bold, italicized 17 in his yearly stat listings from Topps.) Anyway, even after the "era" adjustments to discount modern players, Lance came out a full point ahead. Whatever you can say about Lance as a ballplayer, he had the triples thing pretty well in hand.
* Cecil Fielder has a better ratio than Jody Reed! That's pretty hilarious, seeing as Fielder takes a dump bigger than Reed twice a day. Of course, Reed was a Green Monster specialist... meaning that for every double he may have turned into a triple, he probably turned two singles into doubles by virtue of scraping the Monstah with 306-foot pop-flies. So this isn't as wacky as it looks. But any excuse to discuss Cecil Fielder's bowel movements is OK by me. (Well, not any excuse. Photo analysis wouldn't be OK with me at all.)
* Any stat that slights the late, great American hero Ted Williams can blow me. Seeing as he's second to last on the list... commence the blowing!!! Seriously, what's with crapping on his legacy? Didn't his son do enough damage already? Besides, this guy was one of our troops. Doesn't BtB support our troops?????
Labels: baseball
posted by Jeff at
11:15 PM
1 Comments:
Very interesting, but don't underestimate how much that ratio is affected by idiocy. I've seen enough Hargrove-inspired idiots thrown out at third to know that it has to be a big part of the story.
By
Jesse, at 12:52 AM
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