THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Sorry to post this here, but I don’t have tango’s email address
And it is sort of relevant (i.e., public references to sabermetrics):

You Can’t Measure America’s Grit
Hatred of sabermetrics comes to business and politics.
http://www.slate.com/id/2298086/

That article quoting Rasmus was a fun little read.

Very cool. Slowly but surely…

The Slate article was entertaining, too!

Thanks for the link. 

For email, at the top right corner of each page is a link that says “MAIL: You ask”.

Of course, Rasmus might be under the impression that his low BABIP is an indication that he’s hitting the ball poorly and not placing his hits well, or something like that. It doesn’t really matter whether he knows the number if he doesn’t also know what to do with it.

And now berkman too.
http://www.stltoday.com/sports/baseball/professional/article_b448cd06-6e06-5fa4-8d81-306109972c49.html

It is .167 this month, so he had a pretty good sense of it.

Is it a coincidence that Rasmus and Berkman are both Cardinal’s?

Of course, Rasmus might be under the impression that his low BABIP is an indication that he’s hitting the ball poorly and not placing his hits well, or something like that.

That might be the reason his BABIP is low… He’s not a pitcher.

kds#8: No coincidence; great point. Aren’t the Cardinals one of the first/only teams deploying Trackman? Isn’t Busch Stadium where they’ve been doing Field f/x type player tracking stuff for years before Sportvision? Knowledge flows through organizations.

I’m sure I said this before, but during ST my dad got to talk to Rasmus a lot and came away with the impression of “so much ability, so little confidence”.

I bring this up to add to another commenter’s point. The important thing is that CR understands the nature of BABIP and doesn’t misinterpret the information and start trying to overswing and revert to the “punching out right and left” Rasmus that hits without confidence.

He would do well to look to his right and see what leads to consistently higher than average BABIP (Holliday), and that hitting the ball very hard a good portion of the time.

If Rasmus can continue to put the pieces together, ha has all the makings of JD Drew. TLR might not like it so much, but he’ll be a very valuable player.

Rasmus’s UZR has also been up and down and he’s talked about some of the routes he’s taken and giving up on balls early. He’s still young and learning.