Kyle Bland

Caught Woo’s minor league rehab in Everett. Rehab starts are dope

Well now I want to see the spin data on a stock car hurtling through the air at 120+ mph after a crash

This baseball game is like the NHL forcing an outdoor game in Tahoe. Just a terrible decision

Very true

God speed. We keep floating the idea of a puppy, and it always ends up feeling like madness

Box Score: Yandy Diaz *crushes* 2 HR

Reality:

His single-lap pace is unreal

8/1/25 Rangers @ Mariners Win Probability chart. The game had 2.9 wins worth of Win probability change and had a biggest swing of 84% in win probability within an inning

I'm being told that a 3rd game was also incredible tonight

8/1/25 Yankees @ Marlins Win Probability chart. The game had 2.5 wins worth of Win probability change and had a biggest swing of 92% in win probability within an inning

8/1/25 Pirates @ Rockies Win Probability chart. The game had 1.3 wins worth of Win probability change and had a biggest swing of 99% in win probability within an inning

Two incredible games tonight!

Maybe people can forgive the Astros, now that they’ve found Jesús

Did your team acquire a star for cheap? How fantasy relevant are those prospects you're getting back? Let Nick and Sporer tell you live!

Top-3 on my Swing Acceleration proxy (using Speed and Length as presented by Statcast)

YouTube video by Driveline Baseball Understanding Batter Perception Through Analytics with Stephen Stutton Brown | R&D Podcast Ep 110

ICYMI, I hopped on the Driveline R&D podcast to talk about the new Statcast bat tracking metrics and what they can tell us about pitching. www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZyQ...

Despite being an active Oriole just 3 hours ago, Seranthony Dominiguez is now pitching for the Blue Jays against the Orioles in relief

The 8 on his uniform is upside down

a man in a blue shirt and tie is pointing at a bulletin board with a lot of papers on it . ALT: a man in a blue shirt and tie is pointing at a bulletin board with a lot of papers on it .

It goes all the way to the top!

Introducing Non-Competitive Rate: The New Old-School Eye Test Pitching Stat Waste not, want not.

This was using continuous likelihoods to be a bit more granular, but I looked at it using our new Non-Competitive Rate stat (which is a binary “was this not even close or not”) and found a similar breakdown: Clase elevated, not the worst/an outlier

pitcherlist.com/introducing-...

Nerds: they’re just like everyone, just more confusing

Here's the Top-15 leaderboard. When you *already suspect* someone might be cheating, it's easy to find video validating that, but it isn't nearly as obvious when you are only looking at pitch-level data. There are plenty of legitimate players with even more extreme differences.

Distribution of First-Pitch Ball+HBP likelihood / Non-First-Pitch Ball+HBP likelihood for relievers

Percentiles for First-Pitch Ball+HBP likelihood / Non-First-Pitch Ball+HBP likelihood

Looking at our sample, the median pitcher had a modelled first-pitch Ball+HBP likelihood almost 1:1 with their other pitches (1.04x). The highest value is nearly double (1.85x). Clase is Top-15, at 1.361x (~90th percentile)

I'm defining "reliever" here pretty arbitrarily as any pitcher who averages fewer than 30 pitches per appearance. I also only looked at pitchers with 500+ pitches, so there was at least some sort of sample size. This gives a list of 159 pitchers for 2025.

Given the news today, I'm looking at outputs from our PLV model. Specifically, which relievers have higher first-pitch Ball+HBP% likelihoods relative to other pitches they throw.

TL;DR: Emmanuel Clase has a higher relative first-pitch Ball+HBP likelihood, but he isn't an outlier (or even top-10).

He has all the speeds!

Guaranteed to be the position player pitching in a blowout

Didn’t realize you and my 2-year-old travel to so many of the same places

Oh. OH.

Marking DE midterms and one of the students has decided to call their function 4. As in, "Let 4 = 4(x) be defined as ..." and so on. The value of 4 is not involved, they're just using the numeral as their function symbol. I .... don't feel entirely safe.

An AI slop factory apparently tried to rewrite our article about AI not replacing workers en masse, but hit the paywall... so just summarised the paywall. If this is the robot that takes my job I'll be v embarrassed

Nintendo need to make a mythologically-accurate Tanooki Suit Mario. Cowards