Seattle Sports Insider

Checking In

Posted by

8/9/18

Hey amigos. Sorry for the absence. As per usual, it was health-related. So what else is new :- ) siggghhhhh..... like my T-shirt tells me, "Pain is your ally. Pain tells you that you have been wounded but you know what the best thing about pain is? It tells you that you are NOT DEAD YET..." - Vegeta

So obviously Marc-O is not dead yet, judging by his pain level. Of course there's a level of pain, namely Felix', that indicates you're still alive but might not be for much longer ....

And the A's can't continue their redonkulous 34-11 streak or they'll overtake Boston, right? At the moment the M's are lagging 2nd in a 5,000 meters, hanging 5 yards back and waiting for that lead guy to slow down a bit.

Coverage resumes tomorrow after K-Pax puts the M's back on track for the WC. Paxton vs Verlander, what more could you ask? Maybe a Seahawk preseason game .....

......

Brent Stecker has good coverage of Robinson Cano's first game at 1b, including video of a tough short-hop that he picked neatly. Dr. D wouldn't be believin' this storyline if he weren't seein' it with his own eyes.

BABVA,

Dr D

PS in the meantime, James had this interesting take on catchers:

In the articles section, someone commented on the paucity of catchers among the greats. In other player rankings, there seems to be disproportionately few catchers. Could the reason be that all the ranking systems don't take into account the difficulty of catching? Not sure what else it could be..

Asked by: manhattanhi

Answered: 8/3/2018

Yes, that's what it is. Catching destroys the body, leads to shorter careers and the hand injuries common to catching interfere with catchers maintaining the highest level of offensive productivity. Many of our systems that we create have difficulty adjusting for that, and many times we do in fact make inadequate adjustments for that, thus shorting catchers. You almost have to make two sets of rules; one for catchers and one for everyone else. This doubles the workload, so a lot of times we don't do it.

It's not obvious that this is unfair to the catchers. One can argue that catchers are simply different, and that there are both benefits and costs to this. For example, if you do any kind of study of players who have very long careers without hitting or very long careers while averaging only a few games a year. I know that I have generated lists like that, at times, and found that the top 50 players on the list were ALL catchers or 48 out of 50 were catchers.

That's a benefit to the catchers, as a group, right. . . that there HAS TO BE roster space carved out for catchers in a way that roster space is not carved out for other players. Nobody says that you have to know who your third shortstop is.

But while it is a benefit to one catcher it is a cost to another. CATCHERS are not being discriminated against; it is merely that different positions have different benefits. In saying that there are few catchers who qualify for greatness, we are discriminating against catchers; we are merely reflecting the actual realities of the game.

But in general. . ..we should make adjustments.

......

In other words, from a physical standpoint, it's probably good that Mike Zunino was rushed to the bigs. That's one good thing, at least.

Blog:

Dr's R/X

Tags:

Marco Gonzales

Seattle Sports Insider

Posted by

Add comment

Filtered HTML

Plain text

shout_filter