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Oh and btw, the hole over 2B is still eating baseballs ... 3 more Pop Up HRs to second this season. Once again ... why only over 2B?

The top photographer overall is Derek Thorsen, who won 7 of the 10 photo contests he was involved in, for a total of 2188 points.

Jacobdegrom earned their team 77 tokens for the only photo to crack the 300 point barrier! #2 was 299 points (75 coins), for Marcelle Kebede of the Chicago Dirty Line Cooks:

mmolb.com/watch/688a33...

So it appears that there were 17,596 Geomagnetic Storm games (across LL and GL). I still have a few stray ones that broke my multitude of REGEX filters, but not enough to feel confident announcing the Photog Of The Year:

Newmarket Autumn Wind Vipers's Jacobdegrom Morel!!

mmolb.com/watch/688bd9...

Aurora Photos! The other big thing this season was the explosion of tokens thanks to our shutterbug players. It's been a difficult road to get the good data for the pics, but I am currently running a script that I think can get me SOMETHING to work with! Let's judge some photos, shall we?

Fernando Gates threw 1 meatball, gave up a HR to dead center, and thought "I gotta call my therapist about this". Fernando took that call from the showers:

mmolb.com/watch/689092...

But that's beat when Jago Grimes did the same, and 3 pitches later, the batter went too!

mmolb.com/watch/68911f...

Imagine your 3B booting the 1st pitch grounder, then getting the boot for "Not Looking Excited Enough". Poor Amy Bench went straight to the bench for a game that started of poorly for the Industrial Union Ants & got worse every step of the way.

mmolb.com/watch/6891ac...

A storm happens after a pitch/event, so it's impossible to lose a pitcher before a single pitch. But i can find 22! times that the starting pitcher was tossed after a SINGLE PITCH. Here's a few special ones:

One of the biggest flavors of S4 that pitchers fell victim to was the ejections! All told, we tracked 38339 ejections. 19531 were pitchers; 13119 were starting pitchers. But a question was asked of me ... who threw the least pitches in a game before getting the hook? Let's find out, shall we?

Lulu is only 3rd in the league with 192 IP. Sure. But Lulu gave up 23 Earned Runs THE ENTIRE SEASON, for an obscene 1.07 ERA. That's better than any record breaking season in MLB. It's more than a half run better than the NEXT BEST PITCHER. 13 CG, 9 SHO & of course a no hitter. How did she lose 3?!

Those 2 pitchers are STRONG. But I've also already warned you about the one that's just that GOOD. The very top of the #mmolb pitching mountain is rarified air, and it's also unfair. It's time to review the Monster of all Monsters, Truckasaurus herself, Lulu Stephenson.

mmolb.com/player/6844e...

The general accepted rule of thumb is that a 100 MPH fastball reaches a batter in 375 to 400 milliseconds. MILLISECONDS! I can't even find a calculator online that will believe 177 MPH is possible to tell me how fast that would be. There are very few #mmolb pitchers up here, but ... WOW.

That is, of course, Carolyn Goldstein. Carolyn once again settled for the 2nd fastest pitch this season. And the 3rd. The 5th. The 6th, 7th, 9th, 10th (two), 12th (two), 14th, 15th and 19th fastest pitches too.

Think about these for a sec. Sorry, i mean faster than that!

mmolb.com/player/68410...

That was thrown, of course, by last year's original TLL author Carol Keuchel. Carol was a closer ... UNTIL Day 240, when the Frederick Late Night Alchemists dropped her in the starting rotation! Be very afraid, Coleoptera League.

mmolb.com/player/68425...

Then there's the other big name.

This season, the Anime Arms up top have stretched the tail SO long that it wouldn't even be worth it to show you the diff. We had 184 pitches thrown in the 140s. We had 47 pitches thrown in the 150s. We had 6 pitches thrown in the *160s* ... AND ONE FASTBALL @ 177.7 MILES PER HOUR. ⚾🤯

So 139.8 MPH for the top HBP doesn't sound TOO bad, right? After all, it's slower than the top speed pitch last season, which happened to be the original TLL. Yeah well .. Let's talk Pitch Whales and Whale Tails. Last season, I made a separate chart for the top 100 pitches b/c they were hard to see

First AB: Strikeout, looking.
Second AB: Fielder's choice, P to 3B. Oakley hit the ball RIGHT AT Lugubrious! I'm surprised it wasn't just flung right back at Oakley, but Lugubrious is a murderer who doesn't forgive ..
3rd AB: Oakley is sent another Toledo Love Letter, a 106.7 Sinker.

Love hurts!

Next AB, again one pitch, this time a flyout to LF. No time .. yet. But in the 3rd try, with equal parts murder & lust in Lugubrious' eyes ... PLUNK, a Toledo Love Letter up and in.

mmolb.com/watch/688f95...

They faced each other once more, 5 games later.

These star crossed lovers only met twice in S4. On the very 1st pitch, Oakley lined a single to RF. No big deal, but it ended up extending an inning where New Haven got extra runs from an error a Sac Fly. Lugubrious was clearly PISSED.

mmolb.com/watch/688f95...

Lugubrious is tied for the most prolific of TLLs; he pitched woo 13 times this season, including the 1st, 4th & 7th fastest HBP pitches. That #1 was a 139.8 MPH Sinker that plunked the other 1/2 of this couple; Oakley Andriuškevičius.

mmolb.com/player/6847c...

But why? Well, I have a theory.

There were also 123,054 HBP in LLS4. 1,206 of those were faster than 104.7 MPH, the top 1% of speeds. These ... are the Toledo Love Letters. There are crushers & crushees, pitchers & batters. One couple in particular I want to focus on. 1st, meet Lugubrious Oconnor:

mmolb.com/player/68435...

called the Toledo Love Letter! A TLL is a HBP where the speed of the pitch was in the top 1% of all pitches thrown in the Lesser Leagues. The very top continues to grow to insane values, but so few pitchers reach it! There were almost 2.2 MILLION pitches thrown in Lesser League S4.

I'd like to change it up a little bit & instead of a big chart, start with a story. You may remember that the fastest pitch of last season was a 144,7 MPH Cutter that ended up hitting a batter on the Toledo Love Letters. In honor of that, I have devised a #mmolb specific stat ...

WELCOME to the #mmolb Season 4 Weird Stat Tweetstorm where I amuse myself until I run out of momentum, and maybe a couple dozen people get a chuckle or two out of it all. Absolutely the best use of a Data Engineer's time on a summer Friday evening!

AND HERE WE GO!

1/x ...

A few teasers for the s4 Weird Stat Tweetstorm: 😀

"... the league might have a Selena Nicholls problem"
"Known murderer Lugubrious OConnor hates Oakley Andriuškevičius"
"The Fastball Whale keeps getting fatter while also continuing to grow his tail"
"Ejected in the first PA!"
"One Trick Pitcher!"

I tested out giving Kennedy "One Trick Pony" Schmidt some more Control items. This wasn't his only game w/ the new equip, but his most recent .. a CGSHO. The diff? He still pounded down & inside, but less often to the outside and instead ... a bit more dead middle or lower middle. He's just weird.

Of all pitchers in S4 who have thrown at least 500 pitches, the top *57* pitchers who have thrown the most of their pitches as a specific pitch type/zone location combination have all thrown SLIDERS. 42 of them throw the zone 13; 15 throw to zone 14 & guess what? Those 15 are all the ONLY RIGHTIES!

I've done some additional research on this. It turns out that Kennedy Schmidt is not the most Kennedy Schmidt of this. Meet Ulian Al-Masry, the reliever who is even more corner obsessed than Kennedy: 44.51% of their pitches go to that corner.

mmolb.com/player/6840f...

So this is new, I'm reporting on a weird player of MY OWN.

I noticed my recently recomposed pitcher only threw 1 pitch (slider). But I *also* noticed that a lot of his pitches hit the same zone; inside and low to righties. I mean, A LOT. Almost 40%! How is he getting away with this? :P

Update: With 1 game left to pitch in the 1st half of S4, Lulu Stephenson is still ridiculous:

12 starts, 103.1 IP (avg of 8.2 per game), 39H, 8ER, 186K, 44BB, 10-1 record wi/ 8CG, 6CGSHO ... 0.697 ERA.

Absolutely unparalleled. #2 is almost double her ERA.

mmolb.com/player/6844e...