A Saber-Slanted Baseball Community

In a recent SI article, Joe Posnanski (in an exchange with Bill James) speculates that Texas Rangers President Nolan Ryan's opposition to pitch counts stems in part from his frustration over being put on a strict pitch count in 1987. Just how bad was Ryan's 1987?

I love Zack Greinke. I love Joe Posnanski. JoePo decided to write about Greinke for the upcoming issue of Sports Illustrated, and the article is already available online. Why are you still reading what I'm writing? Here's a teaser: "The riddle was posed by Greinke himself: What do you follow, your mind or your arm? 'Sometimes my arm wants to throw a hard fastball,' he says, 'but my brain doesn't want to throw it that hard.' 'Who wins the clash between your brain and the arm?' reporters once asked him. 'I dunno,' he said."

Joe Po once again makes me jealous my team doesn't get such great beat writing. Today he put up an interesting piece on what tends to happen by every count in a plate appearance. It would be even cooler with a look at what type of pitch is thrown most often (anyone feel like doing that?), and it's certainly fairly in line with anecdotal wisdom and homework we could all do ourselves. But, Posnanski did it himself and, as a bonus, it comes with Posnanski writing. What I find most interesting is that it may make more sense to swing on the first pitch than I realized. Hitters apparently OPS 52 points higher on the first pitch than they do on successive pitches. A lot of that, of course, is that hitters should only swing at first pitches than can actually hit. . . The second interesting tidbit is how close averages are between a 1-0 count and an 0-1 count. There's also a couple interesting old scout tidbits of wisdom in there that are, at the very least, intriguing baseball talk. Part II Here