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Wednesday, May 27, 2009
 
keepin it real
i haven't paid attention to baseball this year, but i saw this in rotoworld:

Then the Rockies did extremely well and the A's gave up too much for just one year of a player who has never played at a superstar level outside of Coors Field. Manny Corpas owners should be disappointed if Street is in the deal, as Street would likely close for the Rockies. Smith would jump right into the rotation. Gonzalez could be a candidate to play left field or even center for a year, but everything that happened in 2008 suggests that he needs more minor league time.


Rotoworld is irresponsible with its analyses. The A's didn't give up too much. A talented hitter at a good price is hard to find. add that the player plays good defense, runs well, and doesn't miss time and you've got real value.

carlos gonzalez, granted, is the kind of player who can succeed in colorado, but he was not gonna make it in oakland.

greg smith is a guy. from his numbers it appears he is a sinkerball pitcher. again, this is the kind of player who succeeds in colorado, but he's not of outstanding value.

2 things:

1. it appears the rockies are finally figuring out what types of players succeed in altitude.

2. can someone please make a website that says what *pitches* a player throws!

huston street is of course huston street and is very talented. but he's an injury risk. and he's a reliever. omg you can just see his arm breaking off in that baseball card they have in his picture! that pitching motion. is terrible.

that is all.
Comments:
found this:

Question: What pitches are you throwing at this point?

Greg Smith: Fastball – two-seam and four-seam – a cutter, a curveball and a change-up.

...now i *don't* think he'll succeed. it appears he relies too much on breaking pitches. maybe the rockies *aren't* figuring it out, after all.

they should hire me.
 
this thing seems alright:
http://brooksbaseball.net/pfx/

for now, this is there:
http://gd2.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/year_2009/

supposedly, the raw data has a lot of inaccuracies. i've downloaded 2008, but haven't played with it yet.
 
ok this is totally awesome. pitch fx.
 
supposedly pitch type is highly inaccurate. some of the tools correct pitcher by pitcher though and recategorize. but yeah. pitchfx data is pretty fun. it's awesome MLB is making it relatively easy to come by so far.
 
hey josh, question... i'm taking C++ this summer, so i was wondering if there was a way to read baseball info off the web, maybe from that site gd2, and storing on my comp for manipulation by some statistical software or language? i guess adam may know too.
 
yeah - i totally recommend the mlb.com data if you're interested in pitch-by-pitch data that's updated regularly. it's nice and clean in xml format. i'm sure there are some C++ xml libraries out there, but i don't have experience with any myself. i use a python library called BeautifulSoup myself. have fun!
 
oh. and for stats, everyone and their mother (including adam) recommends the R project these days for doing stats and making pretty pictures and whatnot. i haven't tried it out yet, but i plan to.
 
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