Lookout Landing

Hot.

I wouldn't be gay with Felix

But I would have a sex change and be his woman if he wanted.

Jordan of Boise - April 22, 2008 reply

eeh

Dude’s never look right once they have sex changes.

Win.

BrianL - April 22, 2008 reply

That sort of looks like Bretticus

and I can just hear his voice saying, “Ladies…”

that is Brett

too dark

Eyebrows - April 22, 2008 reply

My King Felix baseball card collection is growing nicely.

Long Live the King.

Felix's curve is evil.

He has excellent control of it, and it appears to be so unhittable batters don’t even swing. Look at the StS% numbers.

Llewdor - April 22, 2008 reply

And wow does his slider own righties

fhwew

I thought this was going to be a Robert post.

Carry on.

Look below

Robert - April 22, 2008 reply

I posted this in one of my fantasy leagues

Red Rockets, Felix is just an amazing pitcher to you. To me, Felix is the reason why the sun shines a little brighter every morning. The reason why flowers smell a little sweeter. The reason why there isn’t a bullet currently lodged in my frontal lobe.

Robert - April 22, 2008 reply

I should stress that we're still working with a really limited sample of pitches

Buzzkill

ningwers - April 22, 2008 reply

Allow me to lift the mood

You have succeeded, sir.

Hehehe

ningwers - April 22, 2008 reply

I also believe you mean a fighter jet made of biceps

Where do you even find a picture like that?

People on LL come up with the weirdest stuff.

whatever, man - you're the weird one

Tony S - April 22, 2008 reply

jetfighter cake?

Tony S - April 22, 2008 reply

Both of those are slightly odd.

But not nearly as strange as the bicep plane.

Whatever man

they make harnesses that can hold at least 40 midgets.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=qRuNxHqwazs

Dear Jesus I am dying laughing right now

LL wins.

seattlesundevil - April 22, 2008 reply

Watch these videos now

http://youtube.com/watch?v=t-3qncy5Qfk&;feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKKxPtP6XjQ

if you want comedy gold, watch this one

Tony S - April 22, 2008 reply

Wow

at first I thought they had planted a retarded person into the competition.

The host is high.

F'nA's - April 22, 2008 reply

Eyebrows - April 22, 2008 reply

You love biceps?

Uhh, okay.

OlSalty - April 22, 2008 reply

If they're Felix's

Jeff I remember you had some forewarning of Bedard's last scratching

Any hints you can give us on whether he’s gonna be down for a while or whether he’ll be starting sometime this week?

Don't know anything new, will have to ask

He's eligible to come off the DL, I know that.

That's a function of time though

Exactly. It doesn't mean he's healthy, or that he will start. Just means he's eligible to.

0.0%

Strikes looking on the Change-up to RHB. Weird. Thing must look like a beach ball coming out of his hand.

PLU Tim - April 22, 2008 reply

It's only a sample of 12 strikes so far

but, yeah, I don’t like that pitch to righties anyway.

Congrats to Graham

... on the late tie. Wow that have been a tough one if your a Reds fan.

coasty141 - April 22, 2008 reply

I feel so bad for L'pool fans...

We didn’t deserve that at all.

Graham MacAree - April 22, 2008 reply

I hope Liverpool go through. Chelsea were poor tonight.

That said, I hope Chelsea win the league for obvious reasons.

EnglishMariner - April 22, 2008 reply

Arsenal could have beaten either team today

not that I’m bitter or anything. But seriously.

And I hate this part of the season, because I have to now decide whether I’d rather see the mancs or chelsea win the league. That’s like choosing between liver and tripe for dinner.

mmm tripe.

Tripe is gross

If you ever go for Pho with Vietnamese people make sure you read the menu carefully before ordering.

Tripe :-(
Beef Tendon :(

bluemax - April 22, 2008 reply

Yes...your frustration makes me stronger!

This season has been far from perfect, but when you step back and look at it, there’s a beauty to it.
I’m not stoked to see man u win the league, but there are worse teams out there…

I'm having a hard time seeing the beauty right now

but that’s only because of my white hot hatred for Cristiano Ronaldo and Man Utd.

I was just talking about this at work

some players are so freaking good that your hatred grows and grows, but at some point it drops off.
It is pointless hating Cristiano Ronaldo. I really, really hated Kobe Bryant and then he ripped off 5 games of at least 50 or whatever it was. I kept watching because seemingly every quarter, he’d do something jaw-dropping. I still dislike him, and I’ve always disliked the Lakers. But seriously- jaw-dropping.

Pedro Martinez is the best baseball analogy. He always beat the M’s, he played for the Red Sox, he seemed like a douche, I don’t know. But after a while, I just couldn’t hate him – he was too good to hate.

And yes, I finally got there with Thierry Henry. That took years.

I only hate Cristiano Ronaldo

because he plays for Man Utd. If he played for Real, Barcelona, Inter, or any team that doesn’t stand between Arsenal and a championship, I would worship him. He’s an unbelievable player. He just happens to play for the team I hate more than any other in the Premiership.

As it is, though, I just miss the days of the Martin Keowns and the Tony Adamses, guys who would deck a Cristiano Ronaldo after the first time he did nine stepovers at the halfway line, just to make a point.

Everyone says this, and yet

you had George Best – who nutmegged a defender, dribbled up a bit, then waited for the defender to get in front of him, and nutmegged him again.
How did Best, who was both even MORE of a show-off and played in the era when players were a ref would look the other way at a Tony Adams get-back-in-line punch, survive as long as he did? Did all the enforcers in the league decide to just buy him more booze instead?

Pretty much

and even though he was from the north of Ireland, there was probably a bit of “he’s one of us” xenophobia in there as well. In that era, a “foreign” player probably would have gotten the crap kicked out of him daily.

If Ronaldo was in a hideous accident and broke every bone he possesed

I would take a screenshot of his ruined body and put ‘Diving’ under it. Fuck him.

Graham MacAree - April 23, 2008 reply

You mean "diving cunt"

pdb - April 23, 2008 reply

The only obvious things I conclude from the colorful graphs

is that Felix has faced a lot more lefties than righties. And really keeps the ball on the outside part of the plate against them.

And that he attacks lefties with the change up and righties with the slider.

Any way to get the data from different counts? Like what is Felix’s 3-2 pitch data for lefties/righties? Or what is his first pitch data?

The lefty/righty thing is weird

so far he’s faced 54% more lefties than righties. For his career, it’s 9%. That’ll even out over time, even though managers will try to stack their lineups.

We do have access to the count data, but right now the samples are too small.

Although for the record

He’s 61% fastballs on the first pitch (18% curve).

Q: are you using the provided pitch types from MLBAM or categorizing them yourself?

Tracking first pitch fastball % could be interesting

as well as OPS allowed on 1st pitches.

I would guess that teams are warning their players to lay off the power curve. Just watch it go by and wait for a change up or fastball they can handle.

A little of both

I feel bad for pitchers....

This is just getting dumb. This is damn near to the point where every hitter will know what every pitcher throws, how hard he throws it and where he throws it in every possible situation. In 2025 every pitcher can throw like a 2001 Pedro Martinez and still have no chance.

PLU Tim - April 22, 2008 reply

So mix it up

Graham MacAree - April 22, 2008 reply

This is sarcasm right?

Pitchers will also know...

...what every hitter swings at, and how best to exploit his approach at the plate. It’s not like hitters have a monopoly on the new data.

ubelmann - April 22, 2008 reply

This is just not the case.

If you throw 70% fastballs, for instance, and so every player begins expecting a fastball 70% of the time, then you start throwing 70% changeups instead or 70% curveballs.

Felix doesn’t have to throw 60% fastballs, he does because it works.

Nothing has a chance vs Pedro in his prime.

Except maybe Bonds in his prime.

Well

they faced each other a lot over the years I’d imagine.
Although prime NL Pedro might have occurred before prime Bonds.
What do the H2H stats say?

Barry vs. Pedro.

43 PA, .333/.488/.576 (1.064 OPS), 1 HR, 3 2B, 1 3B, 10 BB, 8 K.

Where did you find this?

At yo momma's house.

Baseball-reference.

Linky.

...from Pedro’s perspective.

Or you can look at it...

Raul Mondesi’s .150/.150/.150 against over 40 PA is pretty hilarious.

ubelmann - April 22, 2008 reply

Gregg Jefferies, huh?

There's a name I haven't heard in a while

My God he was like the second coming during his rookie year. Nothing like a hot start for a NY prospect.

This surprised me

http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/pvb.cgi?n2=guilljo01&;n1=martipe02

Haha

Pedro got pwned by Randy Winn

Compare this to Pedro's career batting line against:

.210/.271/.329

Prime Pedro was 99-'01

I can’t even fathom his numbers in ‘99-’00.

430 IP, 597 K, 69 BB, 26 HR

I think my favorite stat was in ‘99 he had a .210 opponent’s average with a .344 BABIP.

And in 2000 In his six losses: 48 IP, 60 K, 6 BB, 30.

Fun from Wikipedia on that season:

-Martinez’s ERA in his losing games was less than the leading ERA total in the lower-scoring National League (Kevin Brown’s 2.58).

-Martinez’s first loss of the year was a 1-0 complete game in which he had 17 strikeouts and 1 walk.

Felix so far in 2008 is still behind pedros era+ for the entire 2000 season.
Not that fancy of a stat but still out of control.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/ERAplus_season.shtml

thepull - April 22, 2008 reply

~60% Strike looking on the curve.

That’s sick.

By the way

Putz is supposedly being re-activated today.

OlSalty - April 22, 2008 reply

PUTZ WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

BrianL - April 22, 2008 reply

didn't he throw that curve at 84?

just curious. Also, I’m surprised his avg FB is only 95, seems like its always hanging around 96 and jumping up to 98-99 here and again.

Bearskin Rugburn - April 22, 2008 reply

if Jeff counts both two and four seamer as simply a fastball

that would explain it. Felix’s two-seamer runs between 93-96 usually.

I know Fangraphs counts them as the same thing

Yeah, I'm not differentiating between 2-/4-seamers

Is his slider really that straight?

Mariner John - April 22, 2008 reply

No

this is another quirk of the pitch FX data. The pfz is the deviation from the theoretical flight of a ball with no spin. The less it breaks downwards, the higher the number. This is why fastballs tend to have high pfz, and curveballs are low (or negative). A value of zero in that plane means that it’s actually moving a fair bit as compared to a fastball. I still would’ve expected more in the pfx side though.

Can we have a game thread yet?

I need my sunshine and lollipops.

I'm waiting to post one until the community settles down

that diary was a disaster.