The Padres needed Adam Eaton to step up, and he did. Three out of four in LA is real nice. Now it’s off to San Francisco. Damn Brewers didn’t cough up Barry Bonds’ 700th homer so most likely we’ll have to suffer through that. My strategy is to plate 6 or 7 runs in the top of the first tonight, then serve up a two-out solo shot to Bonds. Let him do his thing, and then beat the Giants. Hey, it could happen.

In other news, with Khalil Greene out for the year, and now Sean Burroughs and Rich Aurilia unavailable, the Padres went out and traded for Alex Gonzalez. This is the older Alex Gonzalez, who has played with the Blue Jays, Cubs, and Expos. He comes to San Diego hitting .229/.265/.374 on the year. Gonzalez, Ramon Vazquez, and Dave Hansen (!) will be manning the left side of the infield for a while. Mark Loretta won’t be getting much rest.

Home, Home on the Range Factor

The other day I mentioned that Padre outfielders have much better range factors than Padre infielders. Got some good responses:

Range factor isn’t normalized — it’s merely the number of balls per game
that someone gets to. Not a percentage of balls hit to them. So basically, what
your chart tells us is that the Padres have a bunch of fly ball pitchers.
And aside from [Brian] Lawrence, that’s true.

Interesting. The Pads are 10th in the NL in groundball/flyball ratio. Here’s how the NL teams rank in terms of G/F ratio, infield range factor, and outfield range factor:

      G/F  IFRng  OFRng
StL    1      2     15
Atl    2      3      6
Ari    3      6     13
Col    4      1     10
ChN    5     16     14
NYN    6      4      1
Mtl    7     10      3
Pit    8      7     12
SF     9      5      8
SD    10     11      4
Hou   11     15     16
Fla   12     12     11
Mil   13     14      5
Cin   14      8      2
Phi   15     13      7
LA    16      9      9

Some teams down toward the bottom end of the G/F ratio spectrum have pretty large disparities in terms of infield and outfield range factor. Along with the Padres, there are the Brewers, Reds, and Phillies. On the flip side, other teams that serve up a higher percentage of flyballs than the Pads have similar rankings in both range factors: see Houston, Florida, and Los Angeles.

Looking at the teams closest to the Padres in G/F ratio, this time using actual values:

      G/F  IFRng  OFRng
SF   1.25   5.58   2.24
SD   1.21   5.32   2.27
Hou  1.19   5.21   1.93

Hard to draw any meaningful conclusions from that mess. The Astros have a bunch of fly ball pitchers, but their outfielders get to fewer balls than any other team in the NL. How about another angle:

     OFRng   G/F  IFRng
NYN   2.28  1.30   5.58
Cin   2.27  1.12   5.43
Mtl   2.27  1.26   5.43
SD    2.27  1.25   5.32
Mil   2.27  1.18   5.26

I dunno. Here we’ve got a bunch of teams with nearly identical outfield range but widely diverging G/F ratio and infield range. What we really need is a massive amount of historical data, a plan, and way more time than I have. But the impact of a pitching staff’s style on distribution of defensive range is a fascinating question. We’d probably need to look at strikeout rates as well.

Another reader noted the lack of left-handed pitchers on the Padres staff, which might help explain why Mark Loretta’s range factor isn’t as negatively impacted as Sean Burroughs’ or Khalil Greene’s. The idea is that with more right-handers on the mound, fewer grounders are pulled to the left side, hence the lower range factors. This reader also pointed out that Burroughs and Greene have pretty solid zone ratings, although he shared my suspicion of that metric.

I guess what I’m really trying to say is that we still don’t know a lot about how to measure defense. What else is new, right?

Aki the Ant Slayer

This is for Padre fans who aren’t in San Diego and who don’t really get to watch the team play very often. One of the great things about watching Aki Otsuka on television is listening to Matt Vasgersian yell things like "suraida!" when Aki strikes out a batter.

For all the play that Greene has gotten as a ROY candidate, no question Otsuka has made an impact in San Diego. He is very animated on the mound, and obviously quite popular among teammates and local media alike. Otsuka also is a bit of a ham, being featured in one of the more amusing television promos where he sings a song in Japanese to the befuddlement of his teammates.

More recently, Otuska has done a great ad for a local pest control company where he’s sitting at a picnic table and spots some ants working their way across the spread. Without missing a beat, our hero stands up, grabs a bat, and proceeds to smack the bejeezus out of said ants. Salad everywhere. Then at the end, Otsuka again bursts into song, this time alongside a team of uniformed ant slayers crooning the company theme song.

Point? No, not really. I guess if you need one, it’s that baseball is supposed to be fun. It’s not about steroids, or throwing chairs at fans, or forcing a team to play home games in two different locations that are nowhere near one another. Okay, yeah it is. But it’s also about a guy whacking salad all over a picnic table in the name of slaying ants, and then bursting into song.

That, my friends, is the game of baseball I know and love. Now let’s go beat the Giants this weekend…