Thursday Rockpile: Street closing again, traffic delays expected

Without getting into drops in velocity (Corpas experienced some of that last year), which can certainly make someone feel like they’ve lost their mojo, there are ways to quantify one’s “losing his swagger.”

The composition of swagger is undefinable, but as a person who has felt an extra bounce in the step from time to time, I’ll define it like this: It’s a moment of good feeling after having accomplished something satisfying, where the good feeling sometimes inexplicably exceeds what should be derived from the accomplishment. Being unable to explain the abundance of good feeling can be caused by a variety of things, among which are overestimating the long term impact of the accomplishment, or overestimating the factors that a person contributed to the successful accomplishment.

All of that said, what Corpas’s problem can be summed up by the last part: People overestimated the accomplishment of ’07, and definitely overestimated the factors that caused it. All of that can be summed up rhetorically/anecdotally by saying that he “lost his swagger.” But it can also be quantified.

For instance, among the things that helped Corpas have such swagger in 2007was an extremely low rate of line drives hit off of pitches: 14.3%. That is a very good rate. Unfortunately it rose 8% in 2008, and is similarly high this year. That eight percent used to be groundball outs, now they are line drives to various parts of the outfield. Part of that is bad luck, part of it may be location (which can be plotted on a chart and is quantifiable, but may have more to do with physical mechanics than mental swagger).

Well, hell, here’s the velocity info: Another factor that helped the swagger in 2007 was Corpas’s fastball, which was faster and used more often than last year and this year. In 2007, his fastball was thrown at 93.1 MPH and 76% of the time. The velocity dropped to 92 MPH last year, and 91.1 MPH this year. Similarly, the rate at which he used the fastball dropped (wisely, probably), but his other pitches haven’t been as successful.

So, while you are correct that Manny Corpas has “lost his swagger,” you may find that “statheads” will agree with your assessment, but enjoy using statistics to explain it. There’s also a difference between advanced metrics like wOBA or VORP, and looking at plain old average velocity rates and pitch selection. Both are things you have to want to look up. However, the latter is understood without any introductory course, and can be a quick way for one person to quantify what another person intuitively understands by watching.

and nobody else is an idiot… well, there’s STILL one in the room…

sacked that particular person in a high school game.

She didn’t say anything about people from Oklahoma.

I like everybody else just jumped in on the assumption it was a serious comment, only realizing later that maybe it was only half serious.

Just for the record, I like many Indianans, I’ve got a few friends from there here who I rib about their state. Now the Quebecois, that’s another story. Don’t even get me started on my gross generalizations about them.