posted on Saturday, September 20, 2008 3:03 AM
by
Jim
Scoreboard!
If you followed
my Twitter from Kansas City Friday, you might've seen me mention the awesome scoreboard at Kauffman Stadium. Allow me to sing its praises some more. Take a look at the in-game display:
It's about as close to a stadium giving me a laptop, because it has just about everything I need:
No. 1: The lineup for the batting team is standard, but the defensive alignment and next three hitters for the team in the field isn't. That's incredibly useful.
No. 2: Since I keep score at ballgames, the scoring of the last play underneath the batting team's lineup is incredibly useful for when somebody stands up in front of me and I can't tell if a hitter struck out swinging or looking.
No. 3: I don't think I've ever seen a scoreboard with OPS. Now I have. Sometimes that column isn't there, but since on-base percentage and slugging percentage are always noted, OPS is often redundant. For some hitters, it uses that slot for another stat (like Jose Guillen having 40 doubles, which I didn't know).
No. 4: It has everything you need to know for a pitcher -- radar gun, pitch count and ball/strike counts. The only thing it lacks is pitch identification, which the Yankee Stadium scoreboard does. But if you know what a guy throws, that's not necessary.
No. 5: When a hitter comes up for the second time, the personal information drops out, replaced by a log of what he's done on the evening.
The best thing is that it never changes, saving the promotional stuff for between innings instead. That's what frustrates me about the U.S. Cellular Field displays. They have two scoreboards, and yet sometimes neither of them offer any information about game, instead announcing birthdays, anniversaries and other Sox-o-grams.
I'm not sure if Kauffman Stadium is my favorite in all of baseball, but it was by far the best value in spite of an archaic scoreboard. Now, if they can update the plumbing in the restrooms, I won't be able to find a damn thing wrong with it.
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Since my post on Nick Swisher is buried a little bit now, I thought I'd bump
a great question by onlysoxfaninboston:
i was looking at his home/road split and its quite dramatic, 0.887 ops
at home vs 0.595 away. 0.927 vs 0.473 after the all-star break. was
wondering if you had thoughts on that.
The biggest discrepancy between home and away is in the home run column. He's hit 19 of his 24 homers at U.S. Cellular Field, so my first thought was to compare his line drive rates home and away.
Unfortunately, those don't seem to exist. So I did the next best thing and went to HitTracker and
didn't see anything fishy there. Eight of his homers are either classified as "just enough" or "lucky," but that's only a third of his total. Meanwhile, Jermaine Dye can say the same for nearly half of his (15), and he has hit exactly 16 homers each home and on the road.
Furthermore, Swisher's walk-to-strikeout ratio is virtually the same despite the wild differences in other categories. That doesn't seem to rule out any extreme cases of seeing the ball far better at The Cell compared to everywhere else.
So this is all a very longwinded way of saying, "I haven't the foggiest." But if anybody else has better guesses or different ideas, I'd love to hear 'em.
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Briefly:*Mark Buehrle was victorious
Friday night despite pitching on short rest. I was surprised to see him take the mound, and Gavin Floyd is right behind him in the Cavalcade of Three-Day Rest Stars.
Mark Gonzalez has the who, what, when, where, and why, and
The Cheat answers the "huh?"*Phil Rogers says
Orlando Cabrera is worth keeping around:
Another question—why let Cabrera walk away?—remains perpetually in the on-deck circle.
Draft picks aren't mentioned once, and
this isn't the first time.
*Ozzie Guillen went back to the drawing board for
a pick-me-up speech:
"I tell them no matter what we do for 150 games, people aren't going to
remember that. People are going to remember what you do from today to
the last day of the season," Guillen said. "Then they're going to say
they had a bad year or a good year or a great year. That's all they'll
remember. They're not going to remember July or August. They're going
to remember what's going on between today and the rest of the days.
Pain heals. Chicks dig scars. Glory ... lasts forever.