Baseballin’
Jacob deGrom pitched a beautiful game tonight. 15 strikeouts. He also got a couple of hits and an RBI because, you know, he’s deGrom and that’s what he does.
Crazy good. I hope the rest of the season is like this for him and he gets his third Cy Young.
BASEBALL YAY
YAY we finally got to watch the Mets play today!
…And they lost. Which is unusual for them in their first game of the season.
But maybe that means the rest of the year will go well, huh?
…huh?
BALLBASE
You may have noticed (or not, depending on how much of a baseball fan you are, haha) that I posted nothing about opening day yesterday.
That’s because the Mets didn’t play.
The Mets didn’t play because they were supposed to play the Nationals.
And the Nationals have five players quarantined due to COVID.
No COVID cases at all throughout all of Spring Training for any team, but right before the seasons starts…of course.
So yeah, great start. They might play tomorrow, though!
Edit: nope, that whole series is getting delayed. They’re playing their first game on Monday against the Phillies.
I already miss baseball so freaking much
YAY, Freddie Freeman won the NL MVP award. Super well-deserved. Freeman is definitely in my top five favorite players.
Here’s a video compliation of him being awesome.
Tweetball 2020
So like everything else this year, baseball got all screwed up by COVID. But there were still some Twitter highlights, at least. Here’s a list!
Originally tweeted by Cara Jeffrey (@cara_jeffrey) on May 1, 2020.
My Plans: 2020:
Originally tweeted by MetsKevin11 (@MetsKevin11) on May 19, 2020.
Mets fans only fans who get nervous with a 5 run lead in the 9th
Originally tweeted by Marc Luino (@GiraffeNeckMarc) on August 19, 2020.
The Mets just hit a walk-off at Yankee Stadium.
What a strange year.
Originally tweeted by Anthony DiComo (@AnthonyDiComo) on August 29, 2020.
It turns out all these “Schitt’s Creek” headlines are about the Emmys, not the Mets’ postseason chances.
Originally tweeted by Mike Puma (@NYPost_Mets) on September 21, 2020.
Last night: He’s day-to-day with a stomach bug
This afternoon: He’s receiving some fluids at Hospital for Special Surgeries
Tomorrow: 15-day IL
Sunday: Jed Lowrie
Originally tweeted by Blueshirts Breakaway (@BlueshirtsBreak) on October 2, 2020.
Win probability off the charts!
Originally tweeted by Tampa Bay Rays (@RaysBaseball) on October 25, 2020.
Uggggggggggggh.
Mets, oh my god, that was such a fitting end to a very rough season.
Anyway.
Look at how pretty Calgary is! Time to enjoy it for the next few days before everything dies and the temperature drops below zero. And stays like that until May.
Annnnnnd the Mets have COVID
Of course. At least they weren’t the only ones to get it. Or the first.
Hopefully those that have it will only have mild symptoms and will recover fully!
Perfect
I’m not a very lucky person, but I am damn lucky when it comes to pulling perfect cards in Out of the Park. I don’t remember when I got OOTP 20 (I had OOTP 18 first; that’s the one I used for my fake Canadian League Baseball simulation), but I looked it up and found that I got my first perfect card (Scherzer) on December 14th of last year. Since then, I’ve gotten and additional five perfect cards.
Here are my dudes:
I’m pretty proud of my little perfect card collection, not gonna lie.
(Especially Scherzer.)
Quaker
This is super interesting.
I was one year old when this happened, so I obviously don’t remember it, and I don’t think I’ve ever read or heard too much of the details, either. I think the most fascinating part of this is how calm everyone seemed to be in the stadium. Maybe Californians have a different response to earthquakes than most people because of where they’re located, but it seems like if this had happened anywhere else, it would have been chaos.
BASEBALL 2019
HELLO NERDS!
So I’m in major baseball withdrawal and there’s not really an easy way to fix it, but let’s pretend we can by doing that little baseball analysis thingy that I’ve done for the 2016, 2017, and 2018 seasons, but now let’s do it for 2019!
A reminder of what this analysis is, since it’s been more than a year (I think):
At the end of the regular baseball season, you can see how many wins each team got out of the total number of games they played, and then rank the teams by their performance (who had the most wins, the second most wins, etc.).
What I want to do is see how this “real” data correlates with how many wins each team would get if they scored their average number of runs per game in every single game they played. For example, if the Phillies score an average of 4.78 runs per game, how many of their games would they have won by scoring 4.78 runs in each of those games?
(Yes, I know you can’t score a fraction of runs in a single game, but just pretend you can, huh?)
The process:
- Record each team’s average runs per game (I’ll call this “RPG”) (from here).
- Sort teams from highest to lowest RPG.
- Now, if a team A has a higher RPG than team B, that would mean that A would win every game they play against B. So the next step was to figure this out for each pairing of Team A versus Team B.
- I used this logic for all pairings, then summed across the rows to get the “predicted” number of wins based on RPG alone. I ranked the teams according to how many predicted number of wins they’d get (“1” meaning the most, “30” meaning the least). Then I compared looked at how each team’s “predicted” ranking compared with their “actual” ranking.
How do they compare for the 2019 season?
The Yankees (highest RPG, “Predicted” rank of 1) would have won every game they played; Miami and Detroit both would have lost every game they played (lowest RPGs, “Predicted” ranks tied at 29). Poor Colorado did a lot worse in real life than they would have scoring their average number of runs per game. Coors Field effect, maybe?
The “Diff” column is calculated by taking the predicted rank minus the actual rank. Positive “Diff” numbers suggest teams did better than they would have had they scored their average number of runs in every single game. Negative “Diff” numbers suggest teams did worse than they would have had they scored their average number of runs in every single game.
Correlation of team rankings based on RPG-predicted games won and actual games won: 0.811
FUN!
Are You Ready for Some BASEBALL?!?
So Nate found this six-part series on the Seattle Mariners and it is absolutely enthralling. Only parts 1-4 have been uploaded so far, but the next installment involves ICHIRO which is really the first thing I can remember about the Seattle Mariners. Check out the vids here (I’ll just post them all here once they’re all uploaded):
(That third one is intense.)
Seriously, even if you’re not really a baseball fan, this is super interesting.
Spring Training!!!!!
FREAKING YAY I AM SO EXCITED FOR BASEBALL YOU HAVE NO IDEA
Baseball season = the warm, sunny, long-days part of the year. The best part of the year. I neeeeed.
Oh, Astros.
Freaking Astros. Why? Why did you cheat?
The Astros were probably my third favorite team. Springer, Altuve, Correa, Bregman – I liked all of them. Now I’m sad.
Edit: oh my god:
This season’s going to be rough for them.
Don’t trip the light fantastic! He’s had a hard enough life as it is.
Y’all, my mom is finally retiring this year (end of May, specifically). And since I have a semester off coming to me either this spring or this summer, Nate and I are planning on taking her to see the Redwoods (the same ones we saw back in 2015) as well as…wait for it…A METS GAME!
Yes, we are actually going to see the Mets in person. We’re not going to New York, but we’re either going to see them in Colorado when they play the Rockies or in San Francisco (*shudder*) when they play the Giants.
It’s going to be freaking awesome and we’re all so excited.
Woah!
I got a perfect Max Scherzer card in one of my Perfect Team card packs.
Nice.
Sorry, Scherzer is my favorite pitcher.
Congrats, Nats!
Okay, they earned that. Good for them!
I like a lot of Houston’s players, but Scherzer is great and I still dig Cabrera, so I’m glad they won it.
(Now let the Mets win it next year!)
Fakeball Postseason Coverage 2019 OMFG
So I’m an impatient bastard and I want my Canadian Baseball League World Series results NOW.
Thus, rather than simulate day-by-day (like I’ve been doing the whole semester), I just did everything today so that it was all done and we know who won the World Series!
So LET’S LOOK AT THE RESULTS!
[Edit: I’m uploading this blog from SeaTac, actually, and I just realized that I forgot to save the related images on my flash drive. So since I can’t remember the details off the top of my head, y’all are going to have to wait until I get back to Calgary for the rest of this blog. Stay tuned! This will be updated soon. Sorry!]
Tweetball
Hello, peeps.
So the Mets’ season officially ended yesterday. SADNESS!
As I’ve mentioned, Twitter is basically my baseball info hub, and most of my liked Tweets are baseball-related (the rest are math/stats-related, walking-related, or PRIMO MEME CONTENT).
So as a little tribute to the end of the regular season, I present the Mets’ 2019 season in Tweet form! Enjoy.
Bonus nonsense:
Canadian League Baseball: Week 25 Summary
The (fake) baseball season (and the real one too, I guess) officially ended today! Here are the final standings going into the playoffs:
Here are the batting/pitching leaders:
WOO!
ALONSO SMASH!
Such a cool moment.
That is all.
Okay, time to root for the Braves
So the Mets officially got eliminated from playoff contention today.
SAD TIMES.
But we can still live for the chance that Alonso beats Judge’s rookie home run record. He’s so close!
Canadian League Baseball: Week 24 Summary
The Canadian League leaders have been determined! Still waiting on a few in the National League, though.
All the simulation pitchers are getting hurt, so it’s probably a good thing the season is almost over.
Canadian League Baseball: Week 23 Summary
PLAYOFFS APPROACHETH
TEAMS ARE GETTING ELIMINATED FROM CONTENTION
HEARTS ARE BEING BROKEN AS WE SPEAK
Ahem.
Also, Simulation Jose Reyes got his 2,000th hit.
Canadian League Baseball: Week 22 Summary
We’re starting to see some teams eliminated from contention! It’s sad. Poor Vancouver. Hamilton’s killing it, though.
Eigenblogger 