Baseball

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

A wild weekend but alas, no whacky endings with four way ties or anything like that.

The Yankees-Rays game was a tense classic, won in the Yankees at-bat of the game 1 to 0.

The Red Sox overcame an early 5-1 deficit to win 7-5. So both teams advance to the wild card game, which due to the Red Sox having won the season series, will be held at Fenway Park in Boston on Tuesday.

The Mariners and Blue Jays fell just short.

============

As for the National League West, it did come down to the last game but the San Francisco Giants held out and won the most games in franchise history at 107; the LA Dodgers will be going to the one game wild card after a 106 win season-- most wins ever for a wild card team, and second best record in all of baseball. There they will face the red hot St. Louis Cardinals.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

[Nonc Hilaire]

How far off third was he? Hopefully some fan caught the whole play.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

How far off third was he? Hopefully some fan caught the whole play.

Boston was shifting the infield to the right side the left-handed hitter-- one could see the second basemen, Christian Arroyo, playing in shallow right field at the beginning of the video.

So no one was holding Arozarena on 3rd, he was half way down the line.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

The Dodgers-Giants NLDS was great, went all five games; but ended on a controversial check-swing call

Checked swing. A checked swing or check swing occurs when a batter begins to swing at a pitch, but stops in the middle of his gesture, realizing that the pitch is out of the strike zone. The umpire then needs to rule whether the batter interrupted his swing in time, which is usually determined by whether or not the bat crossed the plate.

Did he commit? Did the bat cross the plate? I don't know but as sour way it is to end the series, I don't think it was an egregious call or all that meaningful. Against Scherzer, hitters put something like a .120/.160/200 batting line in those situations where they are down by two strikes. There was a non-zero chance something happened, but there is also a non-zero chance checked swings don't work in your favor.

I thought Giants manager Gabe Kepler said it best when he said something like, "the call was bad but it wasn't what cost us the game."

Logan Webb of the Giants pitched excellently in the series, and has quite a slider.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

In other series:

Rays unbelievably lost to the Red Sox 3 to 1-- there was some unusual happenings in that series too.

The Braves beat the Brewers 3 to 1

and the Astros beat the White Sox 3 to 1.

Last night was the first game of the ALCS between the Astros and Red Sox, which the Astros won 5-4.

Today should be game 2 (of seven) of the ALCS and game one of the NLCS between the Dodgers and Braves.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

avpxsR2wH7s

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Last night the Atlanta Braves won the world series over the Houston Astros 4 games to 2 in the best of seven.

[Nonc Hilaire]

Last night the Atlanta Braves won the world series over the Houston Astros 4 games to 2 in the best of seven.

Thank you. It is now two days later, and this is the first news I have heard of this.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

Last night the Atlanta Braves won the world series over the Houston Astros 4 games to 2 in the best of seven.

Thank you. It is now two days later, and this is the first news I have heard of this.

Sorry-- I know, easy stuff to look up even if living under a rock.

==============

I set out to post about the whole playoff run but the way the Yankees were knocked out this year just bummed me out in a way baseball hasn't in a very long time.

I wasn't expecting them to win it all this year or even move past the division series. (And there is no whining about a world series drought for us Yankee fans-- at least this Yankees fan.)

But it was some combination of how they exited against Boston in Fenway Park; how much they underperformed their talent; and the core of this team getting closer to aging out of contention that was just amounted to disappointment and made it hard to get into all the playoff games.

Since I pretty much dropped the American League after the Yankees loss, I watched a good deal of the NL playoffs which were fun.

The Braves were a really fun team to watch and it was made better chatting about the NLCS with a Dodgers fans who was on the verge of meltdown from the first pitch of each game.

[Nonc Hilaire]

I’ve always lived under a rock with respect to sports. It did not make my local paper’s online edition sports headline. MSM news viewership has cratered.

I think all the propaganda has made everyone’s rock a lot bigger. Normally big news is sidelined or ignored. I wonder what the excitement level was in LA.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

T3g817xLvDU

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

EfhTPGSy1aM

[noddy]

which cunnigly sorta explains baseball a bit for a cricket viewer.

i did play a season of baseball when i was a little tacker, so im not completely lost with it.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

A little MLB propaganda

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I don't know how much it's changed in the last decade, but the London Mets I saw weren't so impressive.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

DY283rzWvUc

[noddy]

I don't know how much it's changed in the last decade, but the London Mets I saw weren't so impressive.

that dude is a second tier cricketer aswell, so its a fluff piece.

Their have been a couple of guys that tried to swap between the games but It appears impossible to go the pro level in either without growing up with it.

Somewhere around 85 mph it stops being about see ball, hit ball reflexes and becomes instinctual response that defies easy explanation.

with both cricket bowlers and baseball pitchers the pro hitters have grown up watching the deliveries and have a second sense of where the ball is going the moment it leaves the hand, just from the body shapes involved.

I know in cricket when they put eye monitoring trickery on the best hitters they watch the hand, then instantly move their vision to where they think its going to bounce, then track from there, already in position to hit the ball they predicted upon release.

all the second tier guys just rely on hand eye coordination and track the ball the entire length of the pitch, so you can trick them with a fast ball.

its impossible to hit a 90+ mph ball without that second sense and a lifetime of doing it.

--

baseball is 10 mph faster, the seams on the ball are bigger so it moves more in the air and the bat is smaller, so a cricket guy just isnt capable of reading the throw well enough to get near it

a cricket ball is a bit harder and heavier and the bowler is legally allowed to attack your body, head or toes , wherever they feel like, so a baseball guy just doesnt have the instinct or techniques available to deal with all that - a cricket bowler will rarely ever put the ball in the typical baseball strike zone.

[noddy]

DY283rzWvUc

thats crazy

[noddy]

j_lvQaXBac8

these 2 are proper pro level hitters but it seems the pitching is primary school level.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

The baseball in England I saw was at about the level of an instructional league club here in the states. In some ways better, in some worse. It was hard to gauge because it was so raw.
And many of the players were foreigners- Mexican, most by way of Spain...or Australian or South African-- places with some baseball presence in the commonwealth.

A quick reading of wikipedia suggests that "Baseball is a growing, minor sport in the United Kingdom, with an estimated 3,000 (baseball only) participants in 2011[1] rising to over 22,000 (combined) softball and baseball participants by 2016.[2]"

I know MLB thinks there is a lot of growth potential. They are supposedly seeing it in the Netherlands, in Germany and Italy. At least, those countries are becoming better at the international level.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

I don't know how much it's changed in the last decade, but the London Mets I saw weren't so impressive.

that dude is a second tier cricketer aswell, so its a fluff piece.

Their have been a couple of guys that tried to swap between the games but It appears impossible to go the pro level in either without growing up with it.

Somewhere around 85 mph it stops being about see ball, hit ball reflexes and becomes instinctual response that defies easy explanation.

with both cricket bowlers and baseball pitchers the pro hitters have grown up watching the deliveries and have a second sense of where the ball is going the moment it leaves the hand, just from the body shapes involved.

I know in cricket when they put eye monitoring trickery on the best hitters they watch the hand, then instantly move their vision to where they think its going to bounce, then track from there, already in position to hit the ball they predicted upon release.

all the second tier guys just rely on hand eye coordination and track the ball the entire length of the pitch, so you can trick them with a fast ball.

its impossible to hit a 90+ mph ball without that second sense and a lifetime of doing it.

--

baseball is 10 mph faster, the seams on the ball are bigger so it moves more in the air and the bat is smaller, so a cricket guy just isnt capable of reading the throw well enough to get near it

a cricket ball is a bit harder and heavier and the bowler is legally allowed to attack your body, head or toes , wherever they feel like, so a baseball guy just doesnt have the instinct or techniques available to deal with all that - a cricket bowler will rarely ever put the ball in the typical baseball strike zone.

As you said, you played some baseball at a point, so you are a bit familiar with it.

I was surprised when I saw my first cricket ball, it was incredibly heavy in comparison and, of course, the seams were one of those things that threw me off. It's something that just didn't cross my mind-- it was just an abstract thing until I held it and had no actually clue how it worked.

There was no touch. I tried to get a good split-finger grip on the ball and then mimicked tossing it like a baseball, but noticed at the size and hardness it would be a real pain on the elbow to throw it like a baseball.

--------------------

As for the top tier players, I bet in both sports eyesight for the top offensive player is off the charts

Louis J. Rosenbaum had been the team ophthalmologist for the Phoenix Cardinals football team, but in 1992, David Epstein explains (in The Sports Gene), he was brought in to work with the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, and he met with an unexpected problem:

The players were literally off the charts.

[...]

The trouble was that Rosenbaum used commercially available Landolt ring charts, which tested visual acuity down to 20/15. Nearly every player maxed out the test.

When Tommy Lasorda asked him to predict which minor leaguer would thrive in the major league, he didn’t have the players’ baseball statistics, but he did have the vision testing data from his other tests:

He chose a minor league first baseman with outstanding scores. The player was Eric Karros, a mere sixth-round pick in the 1988 draft. By ’92, though, Karros was starting at first base for the Dodgers and won the National League Rookie of the Year award. It was his first of thirteen full seasons as a major leaguer.

The following spring, Rosenbaum returned to Dodgertown with a custom-made visual acuity test that went down to 20/8. Given the size and shape of particular photoreceptor cells, or cones, in the eye, 20/8 is around the theoretical limit of human visual acuity.

[...]

This time, the player whose vision tests stood out to Rosenbaum was Mike Piazza, a lightly regarded catcher.

Piazza had been picked by the Dodgers five years earlier in the sixty-second round of the draft, the 1,390th player taken overall, and only because Piazza’s father was a childhood friend of Lasorda’s. Nonetheless, Piazza would make good on Rosenbaum’s prediction. He won the National League Rookie of the Year in 1993 and went on to become the greatest hitting catcher in baseball history.

Over four years of testing, and 387 minor and major league players, Rosenbaum and his team found an average visual acuity around 20/13.

[...]

Major league position players had an average right eye visual acuity of 20/11 and an average left eye visual acuity of 20/12. In the test of fine depth perception, 58 percent of the baseball players scored “superior,” compared with 18 percent of a control population. In tests of contrast sensitivity, the pro players scored better than collegiate baseball players had in previous research, and collegiate players scored better than young people in the general population.

In each eye test, pro baseball players were better than nonathletes, and major league players were better than minor league players.

“Half the guys on the Dodgers’ major league roster were 20/10 uncorrected,” Rosenbaum says.

[...]

In the Indian study, out of 9,411 tested eyes, one single eye had 20/10 vision. In the Beijing Eye Study, only 22 out of 4,438 eyes tested at 20/17 or better.

[...]

Seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds in a Swedish study had average visual acuity around 20/16.

Ted Williams, the last man to hit .400 over a major league season, used to insist that he only saw ducks on the horizon before his hunting partners because he was “intent on seeing them.” Perhaps. But Williams’s 20/10 vision, discovered during his World War II pilot’s exam, probably didn’t hurt either.

About 2 percent of the players in the Dodgers organization dipped below 20/9, flirting with the theoretical limit of the human eye.

[...]

When Laby and Kirschen studied U.S. Olympians from the 2008 Beijing Games, they found that the softball team had an average visual acuity of 20/11, outstanding depth perception, and better contrast sensitivity than athletes from any other sport.

Olympic archers also had exceptional visual acuity — they scored similarly to the Dodgers — but not particularly good depth perception. That makes sense, Laby says, because the target is far away, but it’s also flat.

Fencers, who must make rapid use of tiny, close-range variations in distance, scored very well on depth perception.

Athletes who track flying objects at a distance — softball players and to a lesser extent soccer and volleyball players — scored well on contrast sensitivity, which is “probably set at a certain ability you’re born with,” Laby says.

[...]

In a study of catching skill among Belgian college students, some of whom had normal depth perception and others who had weak depth perception, there was little difference in catching ability at low ball speeds. But at high speeds, there was a tremendous difference in catching skill.

[...]

A clever follow-up study by an international team of scientists recruited a group of young women, all with normal visual acuity but some who had poor depth perception and others with good depth perception. Each woman had a catching pretest — in which she had to snag tennis balls shot out of a machine — followed by more than 1,400 practice catches over two weeks, and then a posttest. The women with good depth perception improved rapidly during the training, while the women with poor depth perception didn’t improve at all.

[...]

Conversely, a 2009 Emory medical school study suggested that children with poor depth perception start self-selecting out of Little League baseball and softball by age ten.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

I don't know how much it's changed in the last decade, but the London Mets I saw weren't so impressive.

that dude is a second tier cricketer aswell, so its a fluff piece.

Their have been a couple of guys that tried to swap between the games but It appears impossible to go the pro level in either without growing up with it.

Somewhere around 85 mph it stops being about see ball, hit ball reflexes and becomes instinctual response that defies easy explanation.

with both cricket bowlers and baseball pitchers the pro hitters have grown up watching the deliveries and have a second sense of where the ball is going the moment it leaves the hand, just from the body shapes involved.

I know in cricket when they put eye monitoring trickery on the best hitters they watch the hand, then instantly move their vision to where they think its going to bounce, then track from there, already in position to hit the ball they predicted upon release.

all the second tier guys just rely on hand eye coordination and track the ball the entire length of the pitch, so you can trick them with a fast ball.

its impossible to hit a 90+ mph ball without that second sense and a lifetime of doing it.

--

baseball is 10 mph faster, the seams on the ball are bigger so it moves more in the air and the bat is smaller, so a cricket guy just isnt capable of reading the throw well enough to get near it

a cricket ball is a bit harder and heavier and the bowler is legally allowed to attack your body, head or toes , wherever they feel like, so a baseball guy just doesnt have the instinct or techniques available to deal with all that - a cricket bowler will rarely ever put the ball in the typical baseball strike zone.

As for swapping sports, and that secondary visualization/instinct about how the ball will act-- I think you're right that most of it is habituated and specialized at a young age that it's hard to cross over at equal professional levels.

Some years ago, the Pittsburgh Pirates signed two Indian kids who specialized in javelin throwing and had played cricket and tried to convert them into pitchers.

Both flamed out almost immediately. One actually joined the pro wrestling circuit; the other went back to India and is now coaching baseball.

I bet there are pitchers/bowlers- if caught young enough- could make the transition to some extent. Maybe at 15/16 years old.

[NapLajoieonSteroids]

DY283rzWvUc

thats crazy

yeah, this was the video I was looking for when I came across the propaganda piece above.

the story is really something else-- I don't know how hard he threw in his prime but he was just that good.

[noddy]

I was surprised when I saw my first cricket ball, it was incredibly heavy in comparison and, of course, the seams were one of those things that threw me off. It's something that just didn't cross my mind-- it was just an abstract thing until I held it and had no actually clue how it worked.

There was no touch. I tried to get a good split-finger grip on the ball and then mimicked tossing it like a baseball, but noticed at the size and hardness it would be a real pain on the elbow to throw it like a baseball.

--------------------

As for the top tier players, I bet in both sports eyesight for the top offensive player is off the charts

Louis J. Rosenbaum had been the team ophthalmologist for the Phoenix Cardinals football team, but in 1992, David Epstein explains (in The Sports Gene), he was brought in to work with the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, and he met with an unexpected problem:

The players were literally off the charts.

[...]

The trouble was that Rosenbaum used commercially available Landolt ring charts, which tested visual acuity down to 20/15. Nearly every player maxed out the test.

When Tommy Lasorda asked him to predict which minor leaguer would thrive in the major league, he didn’t have the players’ baseball statistics, but he did have the vision testing data from his other tests:

He chose a minor league first baseman with outstanding scores. The player was Eric Karros, a mere sixth-round pick in the 1988 draft. By ’92, though, Karros was starting at first base for the Dodgers and won the National League Rookie of the Year award. It was his first of thirteen full seasons as a major leaguer.

The following spring, Rosenbaum returned to Dodgertown with a custom-made visual acuity test that went down to 20/8. Given the size and shape of particular photoreceptor cells, or cones, in the eye, 20/8 is around the theoretical limit of human visual acuity.

[...]

This time, the player whose vision tests stood out to Rosenbaum was Mike Piazza, a lightly regarded catcher.

Piazza had been picked by the Dodgers five years earlier in the sixty-second round of the draft, the 1,390th player taken overall, and only because Piazza’s father was a childhood friend of Lasorda’s. Nonetheless, Piazza would make good on Rosenbaum’s prediction. He won the National League Rookie of the Year in 1993 and went on to become the greatest hitting catcher in baseball history.

Over four years of testing, and 387 minor and major league players, Rosenbaum and his team found an average visual acuity around 20/13.

[...]

Major league position players had an average right eye visual acuity of 20/11 and an average left eye visual acuity of 20/12. In the test of fine depth perception, 58 percent of the baseball players scored “superior,” compared with 18 percent of a control population. In tests of contrast sensitivity, the pro players scored better than collegiate baseball players had in previous research, and collegiate players scored better than young people in the general population.

In each eye test, pro baseball players were better than nonathletes, and major league players were better than minor league players.

“Half the guys on the Dodgers’ major league roster were 20/10 uncorrected,” Rosenbaum says.

[...]

In the Indian study, out of 9,411 tested eyes, one single eye had 20/10 vision. In the Beijing Eye Study, only 22 out of 4,438 eyes tested at 20/17 or better.

[...]

Seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds in a Swedish study had average visual acuity around 20/16.

Ted Williams, the last man to hit .400 over a major league season, used to insist that he only saw ducks on the horizon before his hunting partners because he was “intent on seeing them.” Perhaps. But Williams’s 20/10 vision, discovered during his World War II pilot’s exam, probably didn’t hurt either.

About 2 percent of the players in the Dodgers organization dipped below 20/9, flirting with the theoretical limit of the human eye.

[...]

When Laby and Kirschen studied U.S. Olympians from the 2008 Beijing Games, they found that the softball team had an average visual acuity of 20/11, outstanding depth perception, and better contrast sensitivity than athletes from any other sport.

Olympic archers also had exceptional visual acuity — they scored similarly to the Dodgers — but not particularly good depth perception. That makes sense, Laby says, because the target is far away, but it’s also flat.

Fencers, who must make rapid use of tiny, close-range variations in distance, scored very well on depth perception.

Athletes who track flying objects at a distance — softball players and to a lesser extent soccer and volleyball players — scored well on contrast sensitivity, which is “probably set at a certain ability you’re born with,” Laby says.

[...]

In a study of catching skill among Belgian college students, some of whom had normal depth perception and others who had weak depth perception, there was little difference in catching ability at low ball speeds. But at high speeds, there was a tremendous difference in catching skill.

[...]

A clever follow-up study by an international team of scientists recruited a group of young women, all with normal visual acuity but some who had poor depth perception and others with good depth perception. Each woman had a catching pretest — in which she had to snag tennis balls shot out of a machine — followed by more than 1,400 practice catches over two weeks, and then a posttest. The women with good depth perception improved rapidly during the training, while the women with poor depth perception didn’t improve at all.

[...]

Conversely, a 2009 Emory medical school study suggested that children with poor depth perception start self-selecting out of Little League baseball and softball by age ten.

[/quote]

[noddy]

As you said, you played some baseball at a point, so you are a bit familiar with it.

I was surprised when I saw my first cricket ball, it was incredibly heavy in comparison and, of course, the seams were one of those things that threw me off. It's something that just didn't cross my mind-- it was just an abstract thing until I held it and had no actually clue how it worked.

There was no touch. I tried to get a good split-finger grip on the ball and then mimicked tossing it like a baseball, but noticed at the size and hardness it would be a real pain on the elbow to throw it like a baseball.

Yeh, they used to bowl faster in cricket, with more above 90 and several in the 95-100 but the sports science boffins worked out that just meant a shorter, more injury prone career and less fine control over movement in the air and off the ground.

all the fast guys get trained back to 85-95 now but are much better at moving it in all directions, ground and air, so they are now more difficult to hit than the straight up fast guys.

As for the top tier players, I bet in both sports eyesight for the top offensive player is off the charts

their is a real hard skill ceiling thats fascinating , and Im sure a big part of it is that - some guys will tear up local competitions and just look clueless when its international level playing.