I’m sure you’ve heard this one a thousand times since A-Rod came back, that Tex is now seeing more fastballs, which is supposed to explain why he broke out of his slump. Well, it’s simply not true. Check out this post from the Statistician Magician blog:
“Last night, on the ESPN broadcast of the Yankees/Rangers game. Rick Sutcliffe said that Mark Teixeira has been getting more fastballs since Alex Rodriguez came back from a torn labrum.
I know that I have written about this before, about how Tex was a great hitter and was going to get hot about that time anyway, as he does every single year. But now I have some evidence.
Dave Allen over at The Baseball Analysts wrote a good piece questioning whether or not Milton Bradley was in fact getting balls out of the strike zone called against him more often.
So I posed a question, and asked him if he could tell me if Tex had actually been seeing more fastballs since the return of ARod.
His response:
“Joe, yeah that is very easy to check with the pitchf/x data. It looks to me like before May 8th Tex was thrown 288 fastballs out of 479 pitches, about 60%. Since May 8th he has seen 167 fastballs of 287 pitches, 58%. He has seen fewer fastballs since A-Rod has been back, but the difference is small.”
Another thing we’ve heard repeated a zillion times lately, which turns out to be totally false. At least we didn’t hear it from Tim McCarver this time.
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0 Responses to Repeat the Lie Until it Becomes the Truth
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TIQ IQ
How dumb can some fans (writers) be, haven’t they paid attention to the games? In one game he was getting nothing except “Soft Stuff” but, that was because of the pitcher. If your best pitches are soft stuff…that’s the stuff you throw, right? Although, if I remember right, that pitcher had a good FB also but, it’s all in “what works that night”.
Giardi has been asked about the return of A-Rod and Tex heating up and I think he has never bit… the truth is all players go cold and get hot. Tex was starting to come around at the right time. Now that Jorge is back hopefully that will heat up Matsui… bating in front or behind shouldn’t matter (knock on wood).
We want there to be some tangible reason, something we can measure, but the real answer is probably that Alex coming back allowed Tex to simply relax a little bit.
Relaxed – psychology, could have been a reason. Logic and the law of averages could have been another. Tex is not a sub .200 hitter. The batter’s eye always seems to adjust back and forth during the season, in my estimation, Tiexiera started seeing the ball and that is how you can bomb a curve or FB like he did in the last series.