Game 1 - New Stats

How much does that running mistake by Rios in the 1st change the game? Chien-Ming Wang was not looking good the first couple innings leaving a few balls up and the Jays managed 4 hits in the first 2 innings. The Jays had a great chance to score first and grab the momentum, instead inning over and then before you know it back-to-back 2-out hits by the Yankees in the bottom half to give them the lead. After scratching across 1 in the 2nd the Jays bats went to sleep managing just 2 hits the rest of the way.

I loved seeing Gibbons being aggressive and hit and running with Zaun at the plate on the 1st pitch. Too bad the pitch was in the dirt and Zaun missed, but Scutaro managed to steal the bag anyway. With a pitcher like Wang who throws a lot of strikes and gets a lot of groundballs it makes a lot of sense, especially with the bottom of your order. Although the Jays have not been much of a running team under Riccardi/Gibbons I have found that Gibbons still likes to use the hit and run a fair amount with the right guys. The guys who I would expect to see it a lot from are Zaun, Eckstein, and McDonald.

As much as I hate seeing the Jays lose, as a baseball fan all I can ask for is a good game and a pitchers duel lasting just 2 hrs 31 min is exactly that.

I’ve decided to score all the games this season and in doing so I’ve got a couple of stats I’m going to take notice of in this blog. The first is what I’m calling Advances. I always found it strange that baseball scores a fly out that scores a runner as a SF, but moving a runner from 2nd to 3rd counts as nothing. So I’m going to term Advances (abbrev. Adv) to just those situations except its only an Advance in the case its a runner at 2nd nobody out and it can either be a fly ball or ground ball that advances him. If the batter manages to get a hit then I’ll coin it Adv+ since he moved the runner along without using up an out. If he fails to move the runner then its a NAdv. I’m not going to include Sacrifice bunts as anything since that is something the manager instructs him to do rather than the player taking it upon himself to move the runner, plus the Sac bunt already doesn’t count as an AB. And of course if the batter walks/HBP then it does not count.

The next is Web Gems (WG). I just thought it would be fun to keep track of, its just too bad Johnny Mac won’t be in their everyday. Yes it will be subjective and I won’t have the benefit of instant replay so it will all be first impression.

Sort of going hand-in-hand with this is Defensive Errors (DE). Basically DE’s are any play that reasonably should have been made but for one reason or another cannot officially be scored an error. For example, if the relay throw on the backend of a DP is off the mark there can be no error charged b/c you can’t assume a DP but everyone knows the runner would have been easily out. Enter the DE.

The final stat is Mental Errors (ME). This can be both bad baserunning decisions (ME (r)) (and I’m going to try and separate those made by the player and those by the 3rd base coach) and fielding (ME (f)). Again this will be rather subjective and what exactly qualifies will probably be a work in progress. Baserunning will consist of either the player getting thrown out by a long shot or getting doubled off on a fly ball/line drive that there was no need to be that far off the base. There is also the specific cases of something like running from 2nd to 3rd on a groundball hit in front of you. Defensively I’m thinking of things like players miscommunicating and letting a fly ball drop in, OF’s overthrowing the cutoff men, players forgetting how many outs, etc. Basically its the little things that often go unnoticed in the boxscores.

So with that here are the stats for the 1st game: (#’s in brackets are season total) I am going to include opponents in the list but I won’t have season totals for them.
Adv: Hill (1), Cano
Pitching Adv: Halladay (1), Wang
Adv+: Zaun (1)
Pitching Adv+: Wang
NAdv: Scutaro (1)
Pitching NAdv: Wang
WG: Cabrera 2, Giambi, Eckstein (1)
DE: Hill (1)
ME (r): Rios (1)