September, 2009 | The Baseball Zealot

9/29/09 Linescore of the Day: Jay Bruce

jay-bruce-jc-423 Jay Bruce slugged his 21st and 22nd homers and knocked in five runs in Tuesday’s triumph over the Cardinals. Meanwhile, Bruce has made some adjustments since returning from an eight-week disabled list stint with a broken right wrist. Since being activated on Sept. 14, he is batting .375 (12-for-32) with four homers and 12 RBIs. He’s batting .224 for the season. After avoiding the long ball virtually all season, Joel Pineiro was reached for three homers Tuesday. Jay Bruce hit a three-run shot in the second inning and a two-run jack in the sixth, and Joey Votto added a solo homer in the third. Pineiro had not given up even two homers in a single game all year, and had been reached a total of seven times in his previous 30 starts.

Jay Bruce 2 for 4, 2 HRs, 5 RBIs, 2 runs, REDS BEAT REDBIRDS 7-2

9/28/09 Linescore of the Day: Andy LaRoche

Pirates Cubs Baseball Andy LaRoche had a career day against his old mates, the LA Dodgers, in the last game in Pittsburgh for 2009. LaRoche was 5 for 5, with six runs batted in, 2 doubles, 2 homers, & 1 single, were among his hits. LaRoche said, he knew he was seeing the ball well when he singled his first time up against Hiroki Kuroda. Truth be told Andy has been seeing the ball well lately, hitting .368 over his past 14 starts, in that span he’s gone deep five times, driving in 13, while hitting safely in each game. His five home runs are more than he hit in the first half of the season. He finished his most reason series against the Dodgers going 10 for 18.

Andy LaRoche 5 for 5, 2 2Bs, 2 HRs, 6 RBIs, 4 runs

Nationals will charge you less to watch them lose in 2010

With the season they had, this had to be coming. The Washington Nationals have lowered their ticket prices for many of their seats.

Here’s President Stan Kasten with the spin:

The Nationals are committed to providing a top-notch, affordable, fan experience for all guests. We are pleased to lower prices on over 3,300 seats, including over 2,000 in the lower bowl, and will continue to offer season ticket plans for as little as $10 per game. We thank our fans for their continued support of the Washington Nationals as we continue to build towards a winning ballclub in the Nation’s Capital.”

More details at The Biz of Baseball

Pujols sets NL assists mark

Tired of hearing about Albert Pujols’ prowess with the bat? Little exasperated with Albert Pujols leading the league in most meaningful offensive category in the NL?

Maybe this story will cheer you up (but probably won’t).

Today, Pujols set the National League record for assists for a firstbaseman with 181 passing Mark Grace’s record set in 1990.

In typical fashion, Pujols was quite humble, passing the credit on to his teammates:

"That’s good," Pujols said of the record. "That will tell you that our pitchers are keeping the ball down and keeping me busy at first."

…and a bit sheepish as well…

"I also made an error that cost us the game right there," Pujols said. "That’s part of the game. It just gave me a bad hop and that’s it."

Fall and Winter Ball dates to put on your calendar

For some baseball fans the season doesn’t end when the World Series is concluded. Bus Leagues Baseball provides us the dates (via MLB’s Winter League page) for Fall and Winter League Baseball to put in your calendar.

October 9 – Mexican Pacific League Opening Day
October 9 – Venezuelan Winter League Opening Day
October 13 – Arizona Fall League Opening Day
October 16 – Dominican Winter League Opening Day
November 7 – Arizona Fall League Rising Stars Game
November 20 – Mexican Pacific League Second Half Begins
November 23 – Arizona Fall League Championship Game
December 13 – Dominican Winter League All-Star Game
December 21 – Dominican Winter League Regular Season Ends
December 30 – Mexican Pacific League Regular Season Ends
February 2 – Caribbean Series Begins
February 8 – Caribbean Series Ends

TBZ’s intrepid co-blogger, Teddy Ballgame, usually makes it down south to catch some Arizona Fall League action. As a result, we get some pretty good coverage of the prospects down there.

Teddy, mark your calendar!

Cubs’ Harden taking off the rest of the season

Rich Harden and the Cubs have agreed that the right-hander will take the rest of the season off.

“He doesn’t want to pitch and we respect his wishes,” Piniella said. “I spoke with him briefly and he’s not going to pitch any more. He’s done a real nice job here and the staff has done a nice job of keeping him nice and healthy.”

In an email, my friend DonS explained his thoughts on the matter. He senses a little behind-the-scenes agreement between the two. Here’s his speculation:

The Cubs agreed to let Harden take the rest of the year off, in exchange for a promise. Under the secret agreement, Harden declares for free agency, the Cubs offer Harden arbitration and Harden turns it down, as promised.

That way, the Cubs get the draft choices that the present team gets when the free agent turns down arbitration and Harden gets the rest of the year off with pay and becomes a free agent.

Thoughts? Is DonS on track or just a conspiracy theorist?

Twins Complete Sweep of White Sox @ Cell

buehrle

They were the last three games I could go to at the Cell to see my White Sox play in 2009, Monday, Tuesday, & Wednesday nights against the Twins. The weatherman predicted rain, so I decided not to go. On Monday the rain held off, but the Twins bats did not, the Sox lost 7-0, Rob went to a Patio Party that night, but couldn’t persuade me to join him, glad I decided to stay home, the White Sox didn’t show up to play, so why should I show up to watch? Tuesday again looked like rain, Chuck was buying tix for his family on stubhub & wanted me to join him, I politely declinced. Again we lost, but this night we hit three homers, and lost by a score of 8-6.

I was determined not to go again on Wednesday, but then it hit me. This was the last game I could go to in 2009. I have a tradition that goes back nearly 40 years to September 28, 1969 when I first attended the last game of the season. After the game somebody tossed a baseball up to my father for me. As we were leaving the ballpark, Dad asked if I’d like to go to the players parking lot to see if we could get some autographs, I’ve still got that baseball proudly on display in my room, with just about everybody’s signature from that team on it. Since then I’ve taken off school to see the White Sox play their home closer, whenever possible I was there. I was there when Bill Melton hitting leadoff in order to bat more often hit a home run (# 33) off Bill Parsons to pass Norm Cash, and become the Home Run Champion of 1971, I bought a button of Bill Melton commemorating the event, which I’ve still got. But even if I couldn’t make it to the last game, I’d still venture out to the last game I could make.

So halfway through Wednesday I decided I would be going down to the Cell to see Mark Buehrle pitch. Mark Buehrle, who has been far from perfect since pitching his perfect game, seeing his record drop from 11-3 to 12-9, and his ERA rise from 3.28 to 3.84. But still, Mark was my guy, this was my team, I was going down there on the Red Line with hope of avoiding the sweep. It was obvious from the beginning Buehrle didn’t have it, he was yanked after giving up 5 runs, and we were down five to zip. I was hanging behind homeplate with Al, Anthony, & Dan, Dick & Bea, Caramel Corn Mike, Debbie, and bought a beer from BIG Bill (we talked a little baseball), my friend Adele saw me from her seats near firstbase, and called my cell. I joined Adele and her friends Tina & Kate, while visiting with them we managed to close the gap to 5-3, but then Tina & Kate went off to get some snacks & drinks, Minnesota put the game on ice with three runs in the top of the 7th. I returned to my normal spot behind home, the Sox closed to 8-6, but couldn’t quite pull it off. We talked about what we’d do if we were in charge, then we bid each other adieu, till next year, when we’ll all be back for another season of White Sox baseball, rooting for our team.

LET’S GO WHITE SOX!

I just love Baseball Reference’s new SHARE feature

Kudos to Baseball Reference again, this time for their “Share” feature that they just implemented in their stat pages.

The Share feature does what it implies… it allows people to share any stats on almost any Baseball Reference stat page in a variety of formats.

The formats available are html table, bbcode, a javascript widget, an html iframe, pre-formatted text, comma delimited file or just simply a hyperlink. Those baseball bloggers, forum posters and stat hounds who frequently cite baseball statistics will find this very useful.

Just browse to the stat page you want to quote and click the “Share” link. Since Clyde Vollmer was born today, I’ll use his batting stats as an example. The “Sharing Toolbox” will then come up.

This is where the best feature comes up. Don’t want to display the CS stats? Not interested in the age of the player? Not to worry, BR has allowed for us to customize the display of the table by deleting columns or rows that you want.

Just click on the red X of any unwanted column or row and it won’t appear in the final result. There’s also a red X within an arrow on each row and column that will delete trailing ones.

In Vollmer’s case, I’m going to make his table a simple one with just homeruns and rbis. I’ll click on the red arrow on the rbi column deleting everything to the right of it. I then deleted every other column except Tm, Lg, HR, and RBI. Not being interested in per team stats I deleted every row below his career stats, too.

Don’t forget, stat tables in Baseball Reference allow you to click on stat column headers to sort by stat categories. In my example with Vollmer though, I’ll keep it in chronological order.

Once you get the stat table the way you want it, click on the format type you want. A window will then pop up giving you the code or link you need.

In the Vollmer case, I clicked html table and was given html code for a table.

Here is the result for Clyde Vollmer’s homerun and rbi totals for his career:

Year	Tm	Lg	HR	RBI
1942	CIN	NL	1	4

1946	CIN	NL	0	1
1947	CIN	NL	1	13
1948	TOT	MLB	0	0
1948	CIN	NL	0	0
1948	WSH	AL	0	0
1949	WSH	AL	14	59
1950	TOT	AL	7	38
1950	WSH	AL	0	1
1950	BOS	AL	7	37
1951	BOS	AL	22	85
1952	BOS	AL	11	50
1953	TOT	AL	11	74
1953	BOS	AL	0	0
1953	WSH	AL	11	74
1954	WSH	AL	2	15
10 Seasons			69	339

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 9/24/2009.

There you go. A reasonably good looking table that was easy to generate (probably easier than I made it sound). It’s easy enough to go into the code and remove the link to B-R but why be a tool? It’s the least I could do.

It should be emphasized that this feature works from almost any stat page in Baseball Reference. Splits, Game logs, team stats, you name it.

Oh managers pages too. I just used it in a recent post about Bobby Cox.

In this day and age when MLB is trying their best to lay claim to baseball statistics as a commodity, it nice to see Baseball Reference making it easy to share them. Keep up the good work, B-R!

Braves’ Cox will re-up then retire after 2010

Atlanta Braves manager Bobby Cox has agreed to a one-year extension but says he’ll plan to retire after the 2010 season.

"While I have decided that 2010 will be my last season in the dugout, I want to make it clear that we will all be working as hard as ever to win another world championship," Cox said in a statement.

While this statement sounds like the typical PR cliché, there’s no doubt in my mind that Cox really wants a World Championship for the Braves. Cox ranks fourth all-time and second among active managers in wins. He also ranks #1 in postseason appearances among all managers with 15.

Rk	Mgr	Yrs	G	W	L	W-L%	Plyof App	WSwon	PennWon
1	Connie Mack HOF	53	7755	3731	3948	.486	8	5	9
2	John McGraw HOF	33	4769	2763	1948	.586	10	3	11
3	Tony LaRussa	31	4762	2550	2209	.536	12	2	5
4	Bobby Cox	28	4335	2408	1924	.556	15	1	5
5	Joe Torre	28	4156	2242	1908	.540	14	4	6
6	Sparky Anderson HOF	26	4030	2194	1834	.545	7	3	5
7	Bucky Harris HOF	29	4408	2157	2218	.493	3	2	3

Provided by Baseball-Reference.com: View Original Table
Generated 9/23/2009.

Yet among all those postseason appearances, Bad Bobby Cox has only one World Championship to his name (when the Braves won it all in 1995). I’m sure in the back of his mind, he’d like to shirk the bridesmaid title.

Illowa APBA League convenes for All-Star weekend

I spent this past weekend with the Illowa APBA League as we had our All-Star get-together in Naperville, Illinois

Check out photos and summary of the festivities on The APBA Blog.

The Illowa APBA League is a 10-team keeper league that is in its 35th year of existence.