Willihammer

Tonight's performer is an Oakland fan with a dog whistle!

Little known factoid that may or may not mean anything - in 2012, the Twins had a winning record in games caught by Drew Butera. He also had the lowest catcher ERA. I don't know if Butera is a particularly good framer overall but I think its possible he was better at framing the low strikes, esp. compared to Mauer, which would seem to be pretty important to a staff like ours.

@ JimH. See the discussion above about Gameday's display. Same rule applies to Foxtrax or any other graphical display of pitchf/x data. The data itself is accurate, its the 2d presentations that are limited.

Its not one umpire though. That parenthetical number by Pinto's name is total number of pitches caught - well over 5000. So we are talking about many umpires. If your answer is to swap out the whole system for robots, fine, but that's a separate issue. As long as humans are back there, their perceptions are going to be affected by catcher positioning and movement (among other things).

I assume its the same Sportsvision system in both leagues. Its certainly possible some parks' systems are out of calibration. I did quickly look up some gameday at bats in the two leagues, because I almost never look at Gameday's displays. At first glance, it looks liek there are differences in the MLB and MiLB versions. For example, compare these two intentional walks. Miguel Sano, from March 2013, top of the ninth. All 4 pitches appear to be just off the strikezone. New Britain vs. Trenton - August 26, 2013 | MiLB.com Gameday | The Official Site of Minor League Baseball Compare to this Miguel Cabrera intentional walk from Tuesday (bottom of the 7th): http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/gameday/index.jsp?gid=2013_09_17_seamlb_detmlb_1&mode=gameday#gid=2013_09_17_seamlb_detmlb_1&mode=classic Appears to be much more accurate.

The Gameday display may be off, but the data itself is accurate to within a half-inch (provided the whole system is calibrated correctly). Baseball Prospectus | Spinning Yarn: How Accurate is PitchTrax?

The Rock Cats had the 3rd best walk rate in the Eastern League. The Red Wings held the best in the IL. So I doubt the low framing score is due to the team staffs being especially wild.

I've noted before how, after putting down a sign, Pinto waits till the last, possible, moment before settling into position, sometimes bobbing back and forth when there's a runner on base. I wonder if its all that movement that's costing him strikes. Baseball Prospectus | Overthinking It: This Week in Catcher Framing, 9/20

Only if it gets there in the air. noob

Well we have a ROE, and a cueball single. I smell a run

999 has a much better ring than 1000 when you think about it

Dadgummit Chumelee

Well its a road game. You can't expect Hammer to know the ins and outs of every park

Hammer time!

http://i.imgur.com/iPjUQwM.gif

Is there like a Tommy John lasik surgery we can give to Plouffe? He is absolutely hopeless against a decent righthanded breaking ball it seems.

Piranha in his natural habitat

Single Error ???? Twins Baseball

Heh. Look at these fools in their multi-use parks. "Fine play by Sogard at the 70 yard line" lol

Oh I'm glad you asked. For Halloween I'm going to dress up as Kurt Cobain and go as Trevor Plouffe after getting rugburn in the O.Co bullpen

Moar cowbell!

Pretty easily but if you struggle just get yourself a metrodome

Sorry Gardy, my unlucky number is 1000. Go As! edit: D'oh!

And DRS does the same, as I understand it, but then DRS takes the added step of figuring out how many extra bases are being saved or lost, and factors that in. As you say, UZR does not. And so, consistent with Dewans article here, guys who play deep generally score about the same as the shallow guys in terms of UZR, but because they are saving these base advancements, they outperform in DRS: [TABLE=width: 500] [TABLE=width: 452] Player Position DRS UZR Span Shallow[TD=align: right]2 [TD=align: right]9.7[/TD] [/TD] Revere Shallow[TD=align: right]-6 [TD=align: right]-1.9[/TD] [/TD] Fowler Shallow[TD=align: right]-4 [TD=align: right]-1.5[/TD] [/TD] DeJesus Shallow[TD=align: right]-5 [TD=align: right]2.3[/TD] [/TD] Rasmus Shallow[TD=align: right]11 [TD=align: right]9.6[/TD] [/TD] Saunders Shallow[TD=align: right]4 [TD=align: right]7.2[/TD] [/TD] Jones Shallow[TD=align: right]0 [TD=align: right]-4.2[/TD] [/TD] Jay Shallow[TD=align: right]-11 [TD=align: right]-6.7[/TD] [/TD] Ruggiano Shallow[TD=align: right]-6 [TD=align: right]-3.2[/TD] [/TD] Shallow Total[TD=align: right]-15 [TD=align: right]11.3[/TD] [/TD] Difference[TD=align: right]-26.3 Jackson Deep[TD=align: right]6[/TD] [TD=align: right]-0.9[/TD] [/TD] Lagares Deep[TD=align: right]24 [TD=align: right]17.6[/TD] [/TD] Pagan Deep[TD=align: right]-8 [TD=align: right]-4.7[/TD] [/TD] Blanco Deep[TD=align: right]4 [TD=align: right]7.2[/TD] [/TD] De Aza Deep[TD=align: right]-18 [TD=align: right]-4[/TD] [/TD] Hicks Deep[TD=align: right]2 [TD=align: right]-7.1[/TD] [/TD] Deep Total[TD=align: right]10 [TD=align: right]8.1[/TD] [/TD] Difference[TD=align: right]1.9 [/TABLE] [/TD] [/TABLE] Am I understanding this correctly? Is there any reason to use UZR instead of DRS, for outfielders?

Its been mentioned here a number of times how the Twins outfield defense ranks at or near the bottom in defensive metrics like UZR. Well, to UZR, a catch is a catch is a catch. A ball that otherwise would go for a triple counts the same as one that would otherwise go for a bloop single. So maybe the outfield D hasn't cost this team so many runs after all, because they are better positioned to save the extra base hits at the cost of a few extra singles. edit: nevermind, that's not right. UZR uses weighted average run value for each zone, so theoretically UZR would reflect any advantage or disadvantage of good positioning