2011 MLB Season

[MalaCloudy Black]

Also, right now the winningest team in all of baseball is .. the Indians. Followed by the Phillies. Still early in the season and all, granted.

[Guest JukeboxHero]

The Indians have been on a roll, but I can't help but think that it won't last. I've followed Cleveland sports all my life, so I'm being cautiously optimistic about them. I'm enjoying it while it lasts, basically.

What I like about the team is that they don't have a huge star or standout player, really. You can't really pin the team's current success on one guy. There's no one great player, just team full of guys who are playing really well.

[Hickey]

The Indians have been on a roll, but I can't help but think that it won't last. I've followed Cleveland sports all my life, so I'm being cautiously optimistic about them. I'm enjoying it while it lasts, basically.

What I like about the team is that they don't have a huge star or standout player, really. You can't really pin the team's current success on one guy. There's no one great player, just team full of guys who are playing really well.

That's kind of like the '96 Yankees or the '02 Angels. Nobody was a big star at the time. They were just solid teams that worked well together.

[Lowerdeck]

And Cleveland steals one off Daniel Bard, who already has four losses. Ouch.

Though not as bad as what Marlon Byrd took on Saturday night... jeez.

[Toe]

Bautista showing 2010 slugging performance was no fluke

The story of the 2011 season isn't lowered offense or great pitching. It's the man whose performance mocks those overall trends: Jose Bautista. The 30-year-old outfielder, whose 54-homer season seemed like a stone fluke in the vein of Davey Johnson's 43-homer 1973, has started 2011 with a rush separating himself from the great one-year wonders in baseball history. His six weeks of slugging dominance puts his name in in a group few players have ever joined.

Bautista hit two more homers Saturday, running his planet-leading total to 18 in a bit more than a quarter of the season. With Toronto having played 46 games thus far, that means Bautista projects to hit 63 over a full season (he had 14 in his, and the team's first 46 games a year ago).

Yet Bautista's start is actually a little more impressive than even that, because he has played in just 38 of the Blue Jays' 46 games. Yes, he's been the most valuable player in baseball by more than a win's worth of value (his WAR of 4.3 is a third better than Matt Joyce's 3.0) and he's sat out nearly 20 percent of the season. He's not quite the crazy dead-pull hitter he was a year ago, already with one homer to center and one to right this season, after hitting 53 of his 54 to left a year ago. (Data courtesy Hit Tracker Online.)

Bautista leads the AL in all three slash categories and in two of the three Triple Crown ones, though his 31 RBIs trail Boston's Adrian Gonzalez by 10. Bautista has driven in just 13 teammates this season, a mix of limited opportunities (he has batted with 108 runners on base, just 94th in MLB), fear (he has drawn walks in 40 percent of his PAs with runners in scoring position) and performance (he is batting .207 and slugging "just" .552 with RISP, compared to .364/.467/.909 with the bases empty and .538/.586/.962 with a runner on first).

It's hard to know what to do with those numbers. On one hand, it's a stark split. On the other, the sample sizes are so small as to be almost meaningless. It's less that I see an unclutch player and more that I wonder if there's some substantial difference in how Bautista is being worked in different situations. He does seem willing -- as players such as Frank Thomas and Barry Bonds were at their power peaks -- to let bad pitches go by and take his walks if he's being pitched around. That's a key step, and it will be interesting to see if that continues should the league stop pitching to him entirely.

This is already happening, to some extent. No player in MLB is seeing a fewer percentage of pitches in the strike zone than is Bautista, at 36.7 percent. Just four players are under 40 percent, none of the others below 39 percent. (At his most dominant, from 2002-2004, Bonds never saw fewer than 40 percent strikes in leading the league each year.) He's adjusted by being that much more selective, dropping to the bottom 15 in pitches offered at (37.2 percent). The 18 homers, the 30 other hits? Picked up on fewer than 300 swings. What Bautista does when he swings gets most of the attention, but it's his willingness to wait for something hittable -- the silences between the roars -- that are making it all possible.

I did some work for the current edition of Sports Illustrated looking at the relationship between strikeouts and home runs throughout the game's history. We know that the two are related, the former a byproduct of the latter; Bautista has completely flipped that relationship. Through 2009, Bautista struck out 434 times while hitting 59 homers, a ratio of a bit more than 7-1 that is right in line with what the rest of MLB was doing during his career. Over the last two seasons, as strikeouts have risen and homers have fallen, Bautista has posted ratios of 116/54 and 21/18. This isn't Bonds riding the crest of a wave in 2001, with global HR/FB near all-time highs. This is a guy bucking the trend of lowered offense, boosting his HR/FB over 20 percent then over 30 percent in a league that's dipped from 8 percent to 7 percent, while swinging less and doing more when he swings. He's doing all of this at 30, after being an afterthought through the age of 28.

Bautista isn't Bonds. He's Joe Hardy. He's Roy Hobbs. He's come out of, if not nowhere, a shadowy past we don't completely understand -- "the Pirates," as they're known -- to do something completely unprecedented in baseball history. Players have made leaps before, as the great sluggers of the 1990s did. Players have come into the league and played at Bautista's level, as Thomas and Albert Pujols did. Players have even had one completely insane season, like Bautista's 2010, then regressed to a lower level of performance.

For someone to be a non-entity through six seasons and 2,000 plate appearances, then become the most dangerous hitter in baseball? We have no precedent for that, which is why I spent the winter -- from November in Phoenix to March in print -- insisting that he couldn't repeat his '10 season. This is watching Babe Ruth throw a shutout in 1918 and knowing he'd become the all-time leading home-run hitter, or watching the Boston Braves get swept in a July 4 doubleheader and seeing the 1914 world championship team forming. Jose Bautista couldn't have gotten arrested two years ago, and now he's the biggest story in baseball. Forget analysis, breakdowns, your favorite team, your fantasy team, who said what about whom back in January. When Jose Bautista comes to the plate, people stop and they watch. He's making the 2011 season for baseball fans.

Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/writers/joe_sheehan/05/23/jose.bautista/index.html#ixzz1NHeziAaA

That story is from Joe Sheehan and can be found here : http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/writers/joe_sheehan/05/23/jose.bautista/index.html?sct=mlb_t12_a1

Bautista hit another home run yesterday. He was also intentionally walked twice. The Blue Jays need to get Adam Lind back soon. He was on a hot streak when he went down, and having a run producing left handed hitter behind Bautista could give Jose a few more chances to drive the ball.

Edited May 24, 2011 by Toe

[Lint]

So I went to my first minor league game today. We were supposed to go to the IronPigs (Phillies AAA team) last night, but it was rained out, so a friend and I went to the double header today. the 'Pigs lost both games, but I had a blast. If I loved closer to the Lehigh Valley, I'd probably go to more IronPigs games then I would Phillies games

[GhostMachine]

So I went to my first minor league game today. We were supposed to go to the IronPigs (Phillies AAA team) last night, but it was rained out, so a friend and I went to the double header today. the 'Pigs lost both games, but I had a blast. If I loved closer to the Lehigh Valley, I'd probably go to more IronPigs games then I would Phillies games

I like minor league ball because its more...intimate, I guess....than major league ball. That is, its easier to get good seats at minor league games and you're generally closer to the players when they're at bat if you get seats behind home plate.

Hope you picked up a program.

Edited May 25, 2011 by GhostMachine

[gunnar hendershow]

I've enjoyed the Aberdeen Ironbirds games I've attended, it's real intimate. Feels much more like old-time baseball. Right down to the lack of offense.

[Lint]

Yea...this was the first time I've been to an IronPigs game, but I really enjoyed it. Game 2 of the double header there was abour 200 people in the park, so me and my friend Alex moved down and we were literally right behind homeplate for game 2

[GhostMachine]

Funny thing is, the local minor league team here moved to another county almost a decade ago. When they were here they were a Blue Jays farm team for over two decades, White Sox for a long time before that (Tony LaRussa actually managed them for a while when they were a White Sox farm team). But in the time since they've moved they've been Blue Jays, Cardinals, Diamondbacks and Cubs.

[sahyder1]

Reds/Phillies are in the top of the 16th right now on ESPN2. The teams have already used 40 players.

[zero]

We're one out away from a double-header!

[Lint]

good lord this game is still going on?! i turned this off at like 9pm..

[sahyder1]

good lord this game is still going on?! i turned this off at like 9pm..

I was just telling Zero the same thing on twitter. I watched the start of this game. I was getting ready to go to bed and had already shut off the TV but saw someone mention on twitter that the game was still going on twitter.

[zero]

And the first base ump just completely blew that call. Hannigan was safe by a fucking mile!

[Lint]

good lord this game is still going on?! i turned this off at like 9pm..

I was just telling Zero the same thing on twitter. I watched the start of this game. I was getting ready to go to bed and had already shut off the TV but saw someone mention on twitter that the game was still going on twitter.

yea I was just getting ready to go to bed when I saw Zero post here//thought I'd see hwta it was ad saw that this game is still going on. good lord..

[gunnar hendershow]

I had time to attend the Orioles-Royals game, go to a bar and watch Game 5 of the NBA Western Conference Finals, come home and get ready for bed, and right before I crash I find out the Reds-Phillies game is still going on. Goodness.

[sahyder1]

Nice work from Baez. Five innings of 1 hit ball in relief. He just got pinch hit for though.

Edit: ESPN just said that Cliff Lee who is scheduled to start the day game tomorrow has already gone home so the Phillies have one less guy to play with.

Edited May 26, 2011 by sahyder1

[Maxx]

I had time to attend the Orioles-Royals game, go to a bar and watch Game 5 of the NBA Western Conference Finals, come home and get ready for bed, and right before I crash I find out the Reds-Phillies game is still going on. Goodness.

I ate a grinder and wrote about Punky Brewster. :/

[Lint]

Wilson valdez is pitching...and he's shaking off the catcher...

Edited May 26, 2011 by Lint6