The Brewster

So here’s fun little bit.

If you were paying attention a bit ago, you know I’ve learned that the game logs have some zones I was unaware of—specifically “S” zones. They are labeled S1, S2, and so on until S 7, and S8. Doing a touch of research, The numbers represent areas of the outfield just above the walls, starting with “1” being down the left field line, and going around the fence to “8” being the right field line. Which is interesting because when I look at those, I find they represent fly ball outs that would have been home runs if not for the defender.

Which makes my ears perk up.

Meaning that my cool little script, which is still kinda cool after all these years, is missing just a little bit of mojo. I shall need to figure out how to add this into the old PAA metric.

While I’m not sure how to do that properly right now, I can still use the output to gather a little data. So that’s what I’ve done. The question, of course, is: how many times has a BBA outfielder saved a home run for his pitcher? (Or to turn the tables, how many times has a batter been robbed?)

The answer is that, at the time of this writing (May 10, 2065), thirteen different fielders have robbed twelve different hitters of home runs. Charlotte and Long Beach fans have watched their pitchers be saved twice, so far. Bikini fans are the only ones to see their hitters robbed more than once, and they’ve had it happen not twice, but thrice (twice to rookie Hector Jimenez).

I’m not sure what to make of it all (the data is quite small, after all), but for the fun of it, here are the instances of outfielders who have robbed hitters of homers. I did do a quick run of looking at the ranges of center fielders who did the deed, and as you might expect, it’s a collection of the better ranged guys out there.

I suppose that the main takeaways are that these things actually exist, and that on the basis of a tiny bit of data, they are another advantage of fielding well-ranged outfielders.

M	D	Inn	Half	PitchTeam	Pitcher	BatTeam	Batter	Zone	Fielder	OF
4	5	8	1	CHA	Kelly Calhoun	CPF	Dan Morris	S3	8	J. Bedreddin
4	7	7	2	SFB	Augusto Gonzalez	VAL	Juan Silva	S5	8	J. Sitton
4	8	1	2	CCJ	Ian Tolley	CBH	Santiago Rodriguez	S4	8	E. Reyes
4	9	3	2	TWC	Jerry Stone	CHI	Jeff Feagin	S3	8	B. Peyton
4	20	2	2	CHA	John Miller	LV	Roberto Hampton	S2	7	J. Trujillo
4	22	7	2	JAX	Rich Tidwell	NO	Mario Romero	S4	8	J. Hernandez
4	26	8	1	LBC	Yurochka Erenkov	POR	Roberto Compton	S5	8	K. Al-din
4	27	5	2	HAW	Harry Spurlock	BIK	Abhijana Swamy	S4	8	C. Sanchez
4	30	8	2	MTL	David Uribe	JAX	Isoruko Takimoto	S7	9	J. Marzuq
5	1	2	2	LOU	Roberto Rodriguez	BKP	Hector Garcia	S7	9	G. Canales
5	2	7	2	POR	Cheslav Evgrafov	BIK	Hector Jimenez	S7	9	B. Fredrick
5	7	3	2	NSH	Eric Stevens	BIK	Hector Jimenez	S2	7	C. Cramer
5	7	4	1	LBC	Nicodemus Tzannetakis	YS9	Tony Bunce	S1	7	P. Vargas

Always happy to take away a Krill HR.

very very cool. did not know that those zones existed