Author Topic: The Bryce Harper Compendium (2012)  (Read 190139 times)

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Offline madj55

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Re: The Bryce Harper Compendium
« Reply #450: May 28, 2012, 11:52:02 AM »
The one time I went I got Wil Nieves, Garrett Mock, and Saul Rivera...

Offline JCA-CrystalCity

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Re: The Bryce Harper Compendium
« Reply #451: May 28, 2012, 11:58:49 AM »
.287   .376   .525, .901 OPS, 6(2B), 3(3B), 4HR, 11RBI, 14BB, 19K, 2SB

Somewhere in heaven, Tony C is wishing him better luck.

Offline Smithian

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Re: The Bryce Harper Compendium
« Reply #452: May 28, 2012, 12:02:57 PM »
one other time we got Stammen, Detwiler, Storen, and the old 1B coach (can't remember his name).
It was Riggleman's bff Dan Radison, aka "Rad Dog".

Offline MarquisDeSade

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Re: The Bryce Harper Compendium
« Reply #453: May 28, 2012, 12:05:02 PM »
Someone should get CSA to add him to their next signing event in July.  I'd drop a C-note for a Harper autograph.

Offline UMDNats

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Re: The Bryce Harper Compendium
« Reply #454: May 28, 2012, 11:19:44 PM »
His wOBA (.382) is second on the team, behind LaRoche (.390).

What's interesting is that Harper is listed as having a -5.0 "baserunning" value so far, which I can't seem to understand as he has taken a ton of extra bases and stretched some singles into doubles. Can someone who is more stat-savvy (JCA?) explain that? I know the baserunning stuff is pretty new, but it seems out of whack with my mindfacting.

Edit: I was looking at fielding, not baserunning. Sorry! His baserunning is listed at 1.5, which is first on the team and close to the league leaders.

Offline Coladar

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Re: The Bryce Harper Compendium
« Reply #455: May 29, 2012, 12:27:28 AM »
His wOBA (.382) is second on the team, behind LaRoche (.390).

 What's interesting is that Harper is listed as having a -5.0 "baserunning" value so far, which I can't seem to understand as he has taken a ton of extra bases and stretched some singles into doubles. Can someone who is more stat-savvy (JCA?) explain that? I know the baserunning stuff is pretty new, but it seems out of whack with my mindfacting.

I'm hoping the negative for that stat is actually a good thing. But I have zero, less than zero actually, knowledge on what the hell a baserunning value is.

Seems to me, bottom line, in as few games as Harper has played, that steal of home plate on Sunday Night Baseball should give Harper an infinite baserunning value right now.

Offline UMDNats

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Re: The Bryce Harper Compendium
« Reply #456: May 29, 2012, 12:42:28 AM »
I'm hoping the negative for that stat is actually a good thing. But I have zero, less than zero actually, knowledge on what the hell a baserunning value is.

Seems to me, bottom line, in as few games as Harper has played, that steal of home plate on Sunday Night Baseball should give Harper an infinite baserunning value right now.

Yea, I made a mistake reading the stats, so disregard what I said.

Offline Sharp

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Re: The Bryce Harper Compendium
« Reply #457: May 29, 2012, 08:01:29 AM »
Yea, I made a mistake reading the stats, so disregard what I said.
Yup.  That atrocious fielding looks about right too, doesn't it :|

Offline houston-nat

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Re: The Bryce Harper Compendium
« Reply #458: May 29, 2012, 10:47:40 AM »
Any reason this is still a 1st HR watch?

Offline Kevrock

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Re: The Bryce Harper Compendium
« Reply #459: May 29, 2012, 11:52:39 AM »
5th HR watch.

Offline houston-nat

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Re: The Bryce Harper Compendium
« Reply #460: May 29, 2012, 12:00:27 PM »
5th HR watch.

20-HR season watch :stir:

Offline Tyler Durden

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Re: The Bryce Harper Compendium
« Reply #461: May 29, 2012, 12:04:52 PM »
He's hit 4 homers in about 100 at bats.  If he gets another 400 over the course of the rest of the year, he should be at right around 20 by the end of the year if he stays at his current pace.

Online Slateman

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Re: The Bryce Harper Compendium
« Reply #462: May 29, 2012, 12:20:59 PM »
He's hit 4 homers in about 100 at bats.  If he gets another 400 over the course of the rest of the year, he should be at right around 20 by the end of the year if he stays at his current pace.

Honestly, I wouldn't be surprised at more. He's basically adjusted to the way the league pitched him. They saw he could hit the fastball, so they went offspeed. He's taking that to left and working walks, now they don't know what to do with him.

He's going to start crushing the ball. Crushing like Stanton, only better. He's going to be the best hitter on the team by the end of the year.

Offline Smithian

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Re: The Bryce Harper Compendium
« Reply #463: May 29, 2012, 12:38:36 PM »
Bryce Harper is manbearpig.

Offline JCA-CrystalCity

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Re: The Bryce Harper Compendium
« Reply #464: May 29, 2012, 12:50:50 PM »
truth - I'm not up on the baserunning stat on FG. 


Offline Fan037

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Re: The Bryce Harper Compendium
« Reply #466: May 29, 2012, 12:53:59 PM »
Give him whatever he wants to re-sign.  And throw in Kristina Akra. :mg:

Offline JCA-CrystalCity

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Re: The Bryce Harper Compendium
« Reply #467: May 29, 2012, 12:58:15 PM »
Houston - :rofl: at the Oyster Burns comment.

Offline houston-nat

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Re: The Bryce Harper Compendium
« Reply #468: May 29, 2012, 01:03:52 PM »
Houston - :rofl: at the Oyster Burns comment.

:bow:

I also like the comment from "Bryce Harper Birthers".

Offline BH34Natural

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Re: The Bryce Harper Compendium
« Reply #469: May 31, 2012, 09:41:43 PM »
http://diamondhoggers.com/2012/06/01/the-baseball-show-rob-miech-the-last-natural-bryce-harper/

This is a great listen, interview with the author of the Bryce Harper book that came out this week. Nice spot at the end talks about Harper being a National long-term and lots of Harper stories you could only hear from the author

Offline tomterp

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Re: The Bryce Harper Compendium
« Reply #470: June 01, 2012, 02:13:23 PM »
Bryce Harper's Brain is a Neural Net Processor
 
by Ben Lindbergh, Baseball Prospectus.


http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=17211

Quote
There’s something weird and wonderful about the distribution of pitches seen by this season’s two most exciting under-21-year-olds. David Golebiewski pointed it out the other day using information from Inside Edge, and I wanted to see whether PITCHf/x data would show the same thing. It did. That was the only excuse I needed to write about Bryce Harper and Mike Trout, neither of whom can make a move on a baseball field without leaving a trail of article topics behind him.
 
Here is a list of the hitters who’ve seen the lowest percentage of fastballs this season, combining four- and two-seamers and not counting cutters (classifications courtesy of Harry Pavlidis):
 
Name   Fastball %
 
Bryce Harper 43.4
Ike Davis   43.9
Bryan LaHair 45.1
Dan Uggla 46.1
Alfonso Soriano  46.3
Josh Hamilton 46.6
Pedro Alvarez 46.7
Brandon Belt 47.1
Justin Morneau 47.9
Yonder Alonso 48.2

Bryce Harper is seeing fewer fastballs than any other hitter. Think about that. Pitchers have collectively decided that it’s a better idea to throw fastballs to every established slugger than it is to throw fastballs to Harper, a 19-year-old rookie with four career home runs. Maybe it’s because his reputation as baseball’s next best player preceded him, or maybe it’s because the scouting reports said he could catch up to anything (or that he'd struggle to lay off breaking balls, though according to Kevin Goldstein, there wasn't any widespread concern that that would be a weakness). Josh Hamilton is five spots below Harper on the list. Hamilton is a former MVP who is Paul Konerko’s batting average away from leading the AL in the traditional Triple Crown stats and has hit as many home runs in a single game this season as Harper has hit in 30, and pitchers have thought, “Yeah, I want to try to sneak a fastball past this guy” more often when facing him than they have when facing Harper.
 
That’s surprising, but it’s not shocking, since it’s hard to be shocked by anything Harper does. This is shocking, at least to me:
 
Name Fastball %
1...4
5. Mike Trout  69.9
etc.

That’s the list of hitters who’ve seen the highest percentage of fastballs this season. For the most part, the hitters who see the most fastballs are the ones who can’t hit fastballs over the fence. The highest 2011 home run total of any player in the top 10 in fastball percentage is six (a two-way tie between Callaspo and Jeter). Mike Trout is right next to Jamey Carroll on this list, which is probably the only list in the world on which those two players would appear side by side.
 
Mike Trout is not a hitter who can’t hit a fastball over the fence, but he’s being pitched like one, which is extremely strange. Trout’s 135 plate appearances as a 19-year-old didn’t go quite as smoothly as his first 134 plate appearances as a 20-year-old. Maybe major-league pitchers remember last season’s stats but haven’t read any prospect rankings, in which case they might be thinking, “Okay, this guy is roughly as good as Robert Andino” when Trout comes to the plate. Maybe they stick comic books inside their advance reports and read them while they pretend to prepare. Or maybe they’re terrified of putting anyone on ahead of the middle of the Angels’ order, which could help explain why Izturis and Callaspo, who often hit behind Trout, are two of the few hitters who’ve seen more fastballs than he has.
 
Regardless of the reason, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess it isn’t going to last. Trout’s slugging percentage is .521, which is higher than Harper’s. He won’t always outslug Harper, but he might always be able to slug .521. There aren’t any other .500 sluggers on that list, and once the league learns that that’s what Trout is, he won’t be on it either.
 
Before long, Trout will start seeing fewer fastballs. When he does, we shouldn’t forget that for the first 100-plus plate appearances of his age-20 season—which might also be a Rookie of the Year season—pitchers pitched Mike Trout like they pitched a 34-year-old Juan Pierre, the shambling corpse of Chone Figgins, and Jamey Carroll, who hasn’t homered in almost four years.
 
Because I wasn’t sure what to make of all this, I asked a pro scout with an AL team if he could explain why Harper has gotten so much more respect from opposing pitchers. His theory makes a lot of sense:
 

Blind conjecture: People hear or think “Bryce Harper” and they immediately think, “power that we’ve been hearing about since he was 12.” People hear Trout, they think, “speed, defense, hit.” I think his pop is underrated.
 
What the scout is describing sounds a lot like the association fallacy. Trout bats leadoff, and he plays a fine center field, and he steals a lot of bases. Players who do those things typically don’t hit for a lot of power, so when pitchers see him doing those things, they might mistakenly assume that he isn’t a threat to hit for extra bases. In most cases, that wouldn’t be the worst generalization to make. In Trout’s case, though, it’s a bad one, because anything most players can do, Trout can do better. That’s what makes him Mike Trout.
 
There’s one more thing I want to mention about Bryce Harper’s first month.
 
Take a look at these two tables. The top table tells us how Harper hit each pitch type from his arrival at the end of April through the first half of May. The bottom table gives us the same breakdown for the second half of May. Both samples just over 60 plate appearances. “Breaking” combines sliders and curves. “Fastball” combines fastballs and sinkers. “Offspeed” is everything else: changeups, cutters, splitters, knuckleballs, screwballs, and probably that thing Vicente Padilla throws. BAcon and SLGcon are batting average and slugging percentage, respectively, on pitches put in play.
 
(complex chart omitted)

The first thing to notice is that Harper has made pitchers work much harder in the second sample of 60-something plate appearances, in part by chasing fewer pitches outside of the zone. The second thing to notice—which I put in pretty colors so you couldn’t not notice it—is that Harper seems to have adapted to big-league breaking balls after about two weeks. Some guys go entire careers without figuring out how to hit breaking balls. If the book against Harper was that he was vulnerable to breaking balls, the book can be burned. He’s now a breaking ball-resistant strain of superstar.
 
When I was a freshman in college, only a little younger than Harper is now, I played Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 64 every day, which I assumed was what my orientation advisor meant by being social and seeking out new experiences. Gradually, my dormant grammar school Smash Bros. skills came back, and I got really good at using Donkey Kong’s down aerial attack.* None of my friends knew how to avoid it, and for a while, it couldn’t be beaten. Naturally, I used it all the time. And the more I used it, the more often they recognized the move as soon as the animation started. Once that happened, they could not only avoid it, but exploit it. From that point on, it was just another tactic that worked some of the time, but not all of the time. After a few more fruitless years of trying and failing to bring DK’s down aerial attack back, I graduated with an English degree.
 
*I know that it’s called a down aerial attack because there’s a wiki just for Super Smash Bros., and the down aerial attack has its own page. Anyway.
 
If Harper has learned to hit breaking balls, then pitchers have lost their down aerial attack, and they’ll have to try something else besides refusing to throw him fastballs. These are the sort of adjustments and counter-adjustments we see every young hitter make, but because Harper is so talented, he might be making them at an accelerated pace.
 
These are very small samples we’re dealing with. In his first couple weeks in the majors, Harper went hitless against breaking balls, and in his second couple weeks in the majors, he destroyed them. That doesn’t mean he was a terrible breaking ball hitter before, or that he’s an incredible one now. It might just mean his luck turned, or that he got hot and could be about to go cold again. But it might also mean that Harper is a T-800.
 
The more contact Harper has with humans—particularly humans who throw baseballs—the more he learns. Now we'll see whether the league can learn anything about him.

Online zimm_da_kid

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Re: The Bryce Harper Compendium
« Reply #471: June 01, 2012, 07:53:27 PM »
babe ruth was god and he sent us brye harper to be jesus

Offline Kevrock

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Re: The Bryce Harper Compendium
« Reply #472: June 01, 2012, 08:44:05 PM »
@ Tom.

Wow. Great article.

Offline Dixon Ward

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Re: The Bryce Harper Compendium
« Reply #473: June 01, 2012, 11:16:54 PM »
very cool article. thanks for sharing.  :thumbs:

Offline JCA-CrystalCity

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Re: The Bryce Harper Compendium
« Reply #474: June 02, 2012, 12:47:33 PM »
babe ruth was god and he sent us brye harper to be jesus

That name was already given to Strasburg by none other than Tony Plush.   Bryce is Joseph Smith.