There are two things I suspect every pitcher who ever stepped on a major league mound have in common: They all said, at some point:And they all failed to imagine Aroldis Chapman.
[b]Nike Air Max Plus Tn Wholesale[/b] .Ive thrown it up near 100 mph sometimes, Roger Clemens once boasted. But, little man, if you throw it 97 down the middle its going to go a long way.This is absolutely true. Major league pitchers threw 1,206 pitches this year that were between 96.5 and 97.49 mph, that were in the middle third of the strike zone vertically, and that were in the middle third of the zone horizontally. Major-league batters hit .350 on those pitches. They slugged .613. They homered on 1 in 17 of those pitches. They hit, as a league, almost exactly as Miguel Cabrera did the year he won his second MVP award.Almost every pitcher is bad when he throws the ball there, no matter how hard he throws it. Noah Syndergaard, when he throws it right down the middle, has allowed a .543 slugging percentage in his career. Dellin Betances has allowed a .556 slugging percentage. Andrew Miller,?.484; Chris Sale, .515; Madison Bumgarner, .529; Max Scherzer, .562. Even Clayton Kershaw, who Ive written is the king of down-the-middle excellence, has allowed a .399 slugging percentage on such pitches, 100 points higher than his opponents have slugged against him overall. Mariano Rivera was only nine points better than Kershaw, at least in the years after PITCHf/x was introduced in 2008.Then theres Chapman (note -- all numbers are regular season only). In his career, batters have slugged .311 off his pitches down the middle. This year, it was .231, as he threw 106 pitches down the middle without allowing an extra-base hit. When its a fastball down the middle, batters slug .317. When we talk about the best pitch in baseball -- Chris Archers slider, or Kershaws curveball or Felix Hernandezs changeup -- we might include Aroldis Chapmans pipe shot.Consider: Chapman has thrown 554 pitches down the middle in his career, and batters have swung and missed at more than a third of them. Its not just the highest whiff rate in baseball, no other active pitcher is higher than 26.5 percent, and Chapmans whiff rate is more than five standard deviations from the mean. I mentioned this to Dan Brooks, of Brooks Baseball, and he responded: ?Stephen Hawking has a 160 IQ?, which means Chapman is better at getting whiffs in the middle of the zone than Stephen Hawking is smart.? (The IQ scale is based on standard deviations, where the population mean is set at -- actually, forget it. Just trust Dan.)??Consider, as well, that hes roughly as tough to hit when he throws it down the middle as when he throws it anywhere else in the strike zone:Most baseball skills actually require a whole bunch of subskills working together. You cant just be fast to be a good outfielder. You must be fast and have a quality arm and know how to track a baseball and be able to hold on to it. You cant just be a big, strong guy to hit homers; you must be able to hit breaking balls, fastballs, inside and outside pitches, to identify pitches and adjust as you go. You cant just have a good curveball or a good slider to strike batters out; you must have multiple pitches to keep hitters from sitting on your primary pitch. If youre blessed enough to defy this last rule, like Mariano Rivera was and Zach Britton and R.A. Dickey are, you must still put the ball close to where you want it to go. (Down the middle when Britton throws it: .502 slugging percentage; R.A. Dickey: .541.) The inability of each player to master every facet of the game is what keeps balance in the game, what makes scouting reports useful.Even pitchers who throw as hard (or nearly as hard) as Chapman have to do more than right down the middle, just right there down the middle. The hardest-throwing pitcher of the PITCHf/x era is not Chapman, but a reliever on the Atlanta Braves named Mauricio Cabrera. A 22-year-old rookie this year, Cabrera has averaged 101.1 mph with his fastball in his short career, more than 1 mph faster than anybody else has averaged and nearly 7 mph faster than the median pitchers heat in 2016. Cabrera is fine -- he had a 2.82 ERA in the majors this year -- but he hasnt been dominant. He struck out fewer batters per nine innings in 2016 than hundreds of other major league pitchers. He struck out exactly as many batters, in exactly as many innings, as Tim Lincecum did. And when he threw the ball right down the middle, batters hit it. Not hard, to be fair, but they whiffed about half as often as they have on Chapmans fattest strikes.Same goes for two pitchers whose perceived velocities, based on how close to the plate they release the ball, are faster than Chapmans. Carter Capps has a 20 percent whiff/swing rate and a .589 slugging percentage allowed on pitches down the middle. Jordan Walden: 16 percent, .540.So Chapman has a singular ability to make mistakes in the middle of the zone and not just live but thrive. This raises the question of why Chapman isnt even better than he is. That sounds absurd -- over the past three years he has the third-lowest ERA in the game, the eighth-lowest WHIP and the highest strikeouts-per-nine-innings rate -- but there is seemingly no defense against his pitches. He can throw fastballs down the middle and turn the entire league into Jeff Mathis. How have two pitchers been even better than him at preventing runs? How have Pat Neshek and Mark Melancon and six others been even better at preventing baserunners?The key is that there is, in fact, one way to beat him: ball one. Chapman can throw a fastball right down the middle and get away with it as long as hes ahead in the count. Put him behind the count, however, and hes barely better than the league as a whole. Heres Chapmans OPS allowed in pitchers, batters and even counts in his career, and the leagues overall numbers in the same time period:When Chapman is ahead in a count and he throws a pitch down the middle, batters isolated power -- slugging percentage minus batting average -- is .036; when batters are ahead, its .300. When hes ahead and he throws a pitch down the middle, batters hit .270 on balls in play; when hes behind, its .444. His home run rate goes up by a factor of four. He still gets plenty of swinging strikes, but he becomes nearly hittable.The difference is that when hes behind in counts, he throws fastballs 93 percent of the time, which might as well be 100 percent of the time for a batter trying to guess whats coming. Batters can ignore his slider and sit on the heater, take a big swing and connect enough to do damage.When Chapman is ahead in the count, he still throws more fastballs than most pitchers do, but he throws the slider often enough -- roughly one in four pitches, plus a few changeups -- that batters have to expect something other than a fastball. The difference between knowing the fastball is coming and suspecting the fastball is coming makes all the difference.What makes Chapman so great is that his fastball is unhittable, no matter where he throws it. But what makes his fastball unhittable, no matter where he throws it, is that he has a slider that batters have to take seriously when they fall behind in the count. And what makes batters have to take that slider seriously is that he locates it well ...... right off the corner, low and away to lefties and down and in to righties, where good sliders find their purpose.Surprise! This was about his slider all along. And Pedro Martinez was right all along.
[b]Air Max Plus For Sale Cheap[/b] . Ouellette, from Montreal, already has three Olympic gold medals since joining the team in 1999.
[b]Nike Air Max Plus Wholesale[/b] .S. -- Nikolaj Ehlers registered a hat trick for the third straight game and Jonathan Drouin had a goal and five assists as the Halifax Mooseheads hammered the host Cape Breton Screaming Eagles 10-1 on Tuesday in Quebec Major Junior Hockey League action.
[b]http://www.cheapnikeairmaxplus.com/[/b] . Hey!" The lower tier of the School End of Queens Park Rangers Loftus Road was packed solid with a very festive-sounding Chelsea choral section in this particular part of South Africa Road London, W12. LOS ANGELES -- Candace Parker watched video of herself in every game the Sparks played against Minnesota this season.She didnt like what she saw.Parker brought a different mentality into Game 3 of the WNBA Finals, leading an aggressive charge from the opening tip in the Sparks 92-75 victory Friday night that put the franchise on the brink of its first championship since 2002.That was a product of me being non-existent in every game we played Minnesota this year, Parker said.She scored 24 points, Nneka Ogwumike added 21 and the Sparks took a 2-1 lead in the best-of-five series.Weve worked too hard to get to this point and just be there, Parker said. We had a game plan of just going to the basket and being aggressive.The Sparks can close out the Lynx with a victory in Game 4 on Sunday.Los Angeles built a 22-point advantage in the opening quarter when it shot 60 percent in the game played at Galen Center on the Southern California campus, down the street from their home court at Staples Center.Its all on the want to of Nneka Ogwumike and Candace Parker to start the game. Their want-to was on `10, Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve said. Im not sure what we were expecting when we started the game but it wasnt that.Parker and Ogwumike were especially devastating in a 2 1/2-minute sequence in the first. They combined to score 12 straight points with Ogwumike hitting consecutive 3-pointers and Los Angeles taking a 21-6 lead.I didnt see it coming, a clearly peeved Reeve said. They won the persistency battle. We didnt rise to the occasion. We were soft, we were feeble.Rebekkah Brunson and Sylvia Fowles led Minnesota with 14 points each. Lindsay Whalen added 11, and Maya Moore had nine points and seven rebounds. The Lynx had 13 turnovers.Theyre extremely good converting those turnovers into points, Moore said. If you give that much of a lead to a great team, its going to be really hard to come back.The Lynx cut the deficit to 48-40 at halftime, outscoring the Sparks 10-0 to end the second.Youre not going to sustainn that, Sparks coach Brian Agler said about his teams initial intensity, but I also think a lot of that had to do with Minnesota.
[b]Nike Air Max Plus Sale[/b]. . They experimented there for a while and finally got a group that was working.It didnt last long.With their former and current league MVPs leading the way, the Sparks dominated inside. Parker and Ogwumike helped Los Angeles to a 52-32 advantage in the paint.Parker and Ogwumike had nine rebounds each, helping the Sparks to a 29-24 edge on the boards.Essence Carson added 16 points, and Alana Beard finished with 15 for Los Angeles.The Lynx made a run in the fourth quarter, outscoring the Sparks 11-2 to close to 81-71. Los Angeles answered with eight straight points to go up 89-71. Parker hit a layup and fed Ogwumike on a fast-break sandwiched around baskets by Beard.We just didnt have enough consecutive possessions on both sides of the ball to create enough of a run, Moore said.Minnesota is seeking its fourth title in six years. The Lynx evened the series with a 19-point victory in Game 2 on their home court.ALL-WNBALeague MVP Ogwumike was the only unanimous pick for the all-WNBA first team, receiving 39 first-place votes and 195 points from the media panel.New York center Tina Charles was second with 38 first-team votes and 193 points. Guards Maya Moore of Minnesota and Sue Bird of Seattle, and forward Elena Delle Donne completed the first team.Forwards Angel McCoughtry of Atlanta and Breanna Stewart of Seattle were selected to the second team along with guards Diana Taurasi of Phoenix and Jewell Loyd of Seattle, and center Fowles.PURPLE ONELynx F Natasha Howard scored six points, but made a bigger statement with footwear. She sported the purple symbol associated with the late singer Prince on her white shoes.McCARVILLE INJURYLynx F-C Janel McCarville hurt her back and didnt return.UP NEXTGame 4 is Sunday night at Staples Center.
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There are two things I suspect every pitcher who ever stepped on a major league mound have in common: They all said, at some point:And they all failed to imagine Aroldis Chapman. [b]Nike Air Max Plus Tn Wholesale[/b] .Ive thrown it up near 100 mph sometimes, Roger Clemens once boasted. But, little man, if you throw it 97 down the middle its going to go a long way.This is absolutely true. Major league pitchers threw 1,206 pitches this year that were between 96.5 and 97.49 mph, that were in the middle third of the strike zone vertically, and that were in the middle third of the zone horizontally. Major-league batters hit .350 on those pitches. They slugged .613. They homered on 1 in 17 of those pitches. They hit, as a league, almost exactly as Miguel Cabrera did the year he won his second MVP award.Almost every pitcher is bad when he throws the ball there, no matter how hard he throws it. Noah Syndergaard, when he throws it right down the middle, has allowed a .543 slugging percentage in his career. Dellin Betances has allowed a .556 slugging percentage. Andrew Miller,?.484; Chris Sale, .515; Madison Bumgarner, .529; Max Scherzer, .562. Even Clayton Kershaw, who Ive written is the king of down-the-middle excellence, has allowed a .399 slugging percentage on such pitches, 100 points higher than his opponents have slugged against him overall. Mariano Rivera was only nine points better than Kershaw, at least in the years after PITCHf/x was introduced in 2008.Then theres Chapman (note -- all numbers are regular season only). In his career, batters have slugged .311 off his pitches down the middle. This year, it was .231, as he threw 106 pitches down the middle without allowing an extra-base hit. When its a fastball down the middle, batters slug .317. When we talk about the best pitch in baseball -- Chris Archers slider, or Kershaws curveball or Felix Hernandezs changeup -- we might include Aroldis Chapmans pipe shot.Consider: Chapman has thrown 554 pitches down the middle in his career, and batters have swung and missed at more than a third of them. Its not just the highest whiff rate in baseball, no other active pitcher is higher than 26.5 percent, and Chapmans whiff rate is more than five standard deviations from the mean. I mentioned this to Dan Brooks, of Brooks Baseball, and he responded: ?Stephen Hawking has a 160 IQ?, which means Chapman is better at getting whiffs in the middle of the zone than Stephen Hawking is smart.? (The IQ scale is based on standard deviations, where the population mean is set at -- actually, forget it. Just trust Dan.)??Consider, as well, that hes roughly as tough to hit when he throws it down the middle as when he throws it anywhere else in the strike zone:Most baseball skills actually require a whole bunch of subskills working together. You cant just be fast to be a good outfielder. You must be fast and have a quality arm and know how to track a baseball and be able to hold on to it. You cant just be a big, strong guy to hit homers; you must be able to hit breaking balls, fastballs, inside and outside pitches, to identify pitches and adjust as you go. You cant just have a good curveball or a good slider to strike batters out; you must have multiple pitches to keep hitters from sitting on your primary pitch. If youre blessed enough to defy this last rule, like Mariano Rivera was and Zach Britton and R.A. Dickey are, you must still put the ball close to where you want it to go. (Down the middle when Britton throws it: .502 slugging percentage; R.A. Dickey: .541.) The inability of each player to master every facet of the game is what keeps balance in the game, what makes scouting reports useful.Even pitchers who throw as hard (or nearly as hard) as Chapman have to do more than right down the middle, just right there down the middle. The hardest-throwing pitcher of the PITCHf/x era is not Chapman, but a reliever on the Atlanta Braves named Mauricio Cabrera. A 22-year-old rookie this year, Cabrera has averaged 101.1 mph with his fastball in his short career, more than 1 mph faster than anybody else has averaged and nearly 7 mph faster than the median pitchers heat in 2016. Cabrera is fine -- he had a 2.82 ERA in the majors this year -- but he hasnt been dominant. He struck out fewer batters per nine innings in 2016 than hundreds of other major league pitchers. He struck out exactly as many batters, in exactly as many innings, as Tim Lincecum did. And when he threw the ball right down the middle, batters hit it. Not hard, to be fair, but they whiffed about half as often as they have on Chapmans fattest strikes.Same goes for two pitchers whose perceived velocities, based on how close to the plate they release the ball, are faster than Chapmans. Carter Capps has a 20 percent whiff/swing rate and a .589 slugging percentage allowed on pitches down the middle. Jordan Walden: 16 percent, .540.So Chapman has a singular ability to make mistakes in the middle of the zone and not just live but thrive. This raises the question of why Chapman isnt even better than he is. That sounds absurd -- over the past three years he has the third-lowest ERA in the game, the eighth-lowest WHIP and the highest strikeouts-per-nine-innings rate -- but there is seemingly no defense against his pitches. He can throw fastballs down the middle and turn the entire league into Jeff Mathis. How have two pitchers been even better than him at preventing runs? How have Pat Neshek and Mark Melancon and six others been even better at preventing baserunners?The key is that there is, in fact, one way to beat him: ball one. Chapman can throw a fastball right down the middle and get away with it as long as hes ahead in the count. Put him behind the count, however, and hes barely better than the league as a whole. Heres Chapmans OPS allowed in pitchers, batters and even counts in his career, and the leagues overall numbers in the same time period:When Chapman is ahead in a count and he throws a pitch down the middle, batters isolated power -- slugging percentage minus batting average -- is .036; when batters are ahead, its .300. When hes ahead and he throws a pitch down the middle, batters hit .270 on balls in play; when hes behind, its .444. His home run rate goes up by a factor of four. He still gets plenty of swinging strikes, but he becomes nearly hittable.The difference is that when hes behind in counts, he throws fastballs 93 percent of the time, which might as well be 100 percent of the time for a batter trying to guess whats coming. Batters can ignore his slider and sit on the heater, take a big swing and connect enough to do damage.When Chapman is ahead in the count, he still throws more fastballs than most pitchers do, but he throws the slider often enough -- roughly one in four pitches, plus a few changeups -- that batters have to expect something other than a fastball. The difference between knowing the fastball is coming and suspecting the fastball is coming makes all the difference.What makes Chapman so great is that his fastball is unhittable, no matter where he throws it. But what makes his fastball unhittable, no matter where he throws it, is that he has a slider that batters have to take seriously when they fall behind in the count. And what makes batters have to take that slider seriously is that he locates it well ...... right off the corner, low and away to lefties and down and in to righties, where good sliders find their purpose.Surprise! This was about his slider all along. And Pedro Martinez was right all along. [b]Air Max Plus For Sale Cheap[/b] . Ouellette, from Montreal, already has three Olympic gold medals since joining the team in 1999. [b]Nike Air Max Plus Wholesale[/b] .S. -- Nikolaj Ehlers registered a hat trick for the third straight game and Jonathan Drouin had a goal and five assists as the Halifax Mooseheads hammered the host Cape Breton Screaming Eagles 10-1 on Tuesday in Quebec Major Junior Hockey League action. [b]http://www.cheapnikeairmaxplus.com/[/b] . Hey!" The lower tier of the School End of Queens Park Rangers Loftus Road was packed solid with a very festive-sounding Chelsea choral section in this particular part of South Africa Road London, W12. LOS ANGELES -- Candace Parker watched video of herself in every game the Sparks played against Minnesota this season.She didnt like what she saw.Parker brought a different mentality into Game 3 of the WNBA Finals, leading an aggressive charge from the opening tip in the Sparks 92-75 victory Friday night that put the franchise on the brink of its first championship since 2002.That was a product of me being non-existent in every game we played Minnesota this year, Parker said.She scored 24 points, Nneka Ogwumike added 21 and the Sparks took a 2-1 lead in the best-of-five series.Weve worked too hard to get to this point and just be there, Parker said. We had a game plan of just going to the basket and being aggressive.The Sparks can close out the Lynx with a victory in Game 4 on Sunday.Los Angeles built a 22-point advantage in the opening quarter when it shot 60 percent in the game played at Galen Center on the Southern California campus, down the street from their home court at Staples Center.Its all on the want to of Nneka Ogwumike and Candace Parker to start the game. Their want-to was on `10, Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve said. Im not sure what we were expecting when we started the game but it wasnt that.Parker and Ogwumike were especially devastating in a 2 1/2-minute sequence in the first. They combined to score 12 straight points with Ogwumike hitting consecutive 3-pointers and Los Angeles taking a 21-6 lead.I didnt see it coming, a clearly peeved Reeve said. They won the persistency battle. We didnt rise to the occasion. We were soft, we were feeble.Rebekkah Brunson and Sylvia Fowles led Minnesota with 14 points each. Lindsay Whalen added 11, and Maya Moore had nine points and seven rebounds. The Lynx had 13 turnovers.Theyre extremely good converting those turnovers into points, Moore said. If you give that much of a lead to a great team, its going to be really hard to come back.The Lynx cut the deficit to 48-40 at halftime, outscoring the Sparks 10-0 to end the second.Youre not going to sustainn that, Sparks coach Brian Agler said about his teams initial intensity, but I also think a lot of that had to do with Minnesota. [b]Nike Air Max Plus Sale[/b]. . They experimented there for a while and finally got a group that was working.It didnt last long.With their former and current league MVPs leading the way, the Sparks dominated inside. Parker and Ogwumike helped Los Angeles to a 52-32 advantage in the paint.Parker and Ogwumike had nine rebounds each, helping the Sparks to a 29-24 edge on the boards.Essence Carson added 16 points, and Alana Beard finished with 15 for Los Angeles.The Lynx made a run in the fourth quarter, outscoring the Sparks 11-2 to close to 81-71. Los Angeles answered with eight straight points to go up 89-71. Parker hit a layup and fed Ogwumike on a fast-break sandwiched around baskets by Beard.We just didnt have enough consecutive possessions on both sides of the ball to create enough of a run, Moore said.Minnesota is seeking its fourth title in six years. The Lynx evened the series with a 19-point victory in Game 2 on their home court.ALL-WNBALeague MVP Ogwumike was the only unanimous pick for the all-WNBA first team, receiving 39 first-place votes and 195 points from the media panel.New York center Tina Charles was second with 38 first-team votes and 193 points. Guards Maya Moore of Minnesota and Sue Bird of Seattle, and forward Elena Delle Donne completed the first team.Forwards Angel McCoughtry of Atlanta and Breanna Stewart of Seattle were selected to the second team along with guards Diana Taurasi of Phoenix and Jewell Loyd of Seattle, and center Fowles.PURPLE ONELynx F Natasha Howard scored six points, but made a bigger statement with footwear. She sported the purple symbol associated with the late singer Prince on her white shoes.McCARVILLE INJURYLynx F-C Janel McCarville hurt her back and didnt return.UP NEXTGame 4 is Sunday night at Staples Center. 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