Sports: A Game Of Inches

We are four humble men who love sports, but hate sports commentary. Peter Gammons is our hero and John Madden is our enemy. If you were to ask us our purpose, our answer would be simple: "We are forever locked in Mortal Kombat for the souls of sports fans everywhere. Statistics are our science and 'the immeasurable character of men' is the obsolete religion of blind faith. Our job is to prove that God doesn't exist and that athletes are merely cold, metal machines with no hearts or souls."

Interesting BP article about catchers

I was reading some old baseball links I bookmarked over the past two years and came across this analysis of catchers and thought it would be interesting to share.

BP concluded that

"...we should abandon the idea of catchers developing more slowly, and recognize that the physical demands of the position will tend to reduce both the length of their peaks and the length of their careers"

This data just reinforces why Russell Martin, who caught 151+ games each of the past two seasons, has seen his ISO fall from .176 to .116 to .052 and his speed score drop from 5.2 to 4.0 to 3.6 since 2007.

1 comments:

Adam Kaplan said...: I have always been thinking about writing a post about why catchers tend to suck at hitting even though you would think they do the most analysis about pitchers and hitting and ball placement and what not but I've been too busy/lazy to actually do so. I don't know if this is the main reason but I'm sure all that stress catchers on their body doesn't help any. Although it would surprise me either if this was the causal factor.; June 5, 2009 at 5:27 PM