From Jared Schwartz:
The results might not have been what was desired. But the process quickly was evident.
The numbers from the Knicks’ 119-111 opening night win over the Cavaliers on Wednesday night at Madison Square Garden show just how much Jalen Brunson’s role on offense has changed.
He finished with 23 points but shot a rough 5-for-18 from the field and 1-for-9 from 3-point range. The way he got those shots, though, demonstrated coach Mike Brown’s desire for Brunson to play much more off the ball.
Seven of those nine 3-pointers were catch-and-shoot, according to the NBA’s official tracking stats, the most in any game he has played with the Knicks.
And according to PBP stats, just 10 of those 18 field-goal attempts (nearly 56 percent) were considered “self-created.” That’s the lowest of any game he’s played with the Knicks in which he’s taken at least 15 shots from the field.
Brunson averaged 4.26 dribbles and 4.7 seconds per touch — both were still team highs, but are significantly down from the 6.04 dribbles per touch and 6.06 seconds per touch he averaged last season.
It’s just one game, but those are interesting numbers.
117 replies on “NY Post: Whole new Jalen Brunson on display for Knicks next era”
Those are interesting numbers. I worry about Brunson becoming less efficient as he becomes less ball dominant.
I recognize he’s absolutely incredible, and don’t view anything he does as outside the rules, or even the spirit of them necessarily.
But I just don’t really enjoy watching Shai Gilgeous-Alexander play basketball.
“Brunson averaged 4.26 dribbles and 4.7 seconds per touch — both were still team highs, but are significantly down from the 6.04 dribbles per touch and 6.06 seconds per touch he averaged last season.”
I know I am getting old when I continue to be amazed by the level of data now available.
The Spurs are way ahead of schedule and could make some noise THIS year.
Me, neither. It’s like peak Harden all over again.
On the Brunson stuff, I think we’ve missed Julius Randle’s ball handling a lot more than people realize. Off-the-ball Brunson is a terror and that was a key component to our January comet (remember Brundle?). I assumed Bridges came here to replace Randle in that role but Thibs didn’t see it that way. He also had a rigid thought process about playing Brunson with any other small guard, whether it was Deuce or IQ, even though the data was always very good. It was refreshing to see Brown kick that to the curb immediately. When we can use McBride in that role I think we’ll look great but that’s probably very situational. The Cavs are a perfect team to do it against. The Thunder not so much. But the fact that we’re even considering situational possibilities is incredibly refreshing. Ultimately Bridges has to at least occasionally be a secondary ballhandler like Randle was, and if he can those picks won’t hurt as much.
No magic to his game, he’s the most bureaucratic, punch the clock superstar ever. Maybe if they win more rings and he’s still amazing when he gets older, the effort will be more clear, and it will create some mystic.
This is another significant counterpoint to the lazy “Thibs maximized regular season wins” argument, btw. I’d bet good money playing Deuce with the starters more often would have produced more wins than running the starters into the ground.
A big plus of Brown using 11 players in various combinations is that we’re gonna be very difficult to game-plan. Lots of different looks, lots of different strengths. Lots of ins and outs, what-have-yous. It’s exactly why Thibs had to go – obviously there are going to be ways of playing that are better, groups of players with better numbers, but if we have a variety of options, we are so much less predictable. Or as Hubert would say, we aren’t just throwing “rock” every time. Encouraging.
One other random thing before my caffeine high wears off: I like that we might have actual future coaching candidates on the staff. Chris Jent, Brendan O’Connor, even TJ Saint are all guys you might consider for a HC job in two years. Mike Brown’s best quality right now is not being Thibs. We might grow very tired of him when the honeymoon wears off and his foibles become apparent. We had zero coaches in our internal pipeline to interview this summer. Now we do.
Some fun narratives I’ll be tracking tonight and going forward:
Is Yabu a bum (and if so, how much of one)?
Is Clarkson an annoying irritant or a decent cog (or both)?
Will Brunson find his footing in the new system?
Is Mikal finally happy and freewheeling?
How good is Huk (as first resident of Huk Island, it’s no longer is Huk any good)?
Will Kolek continue to get burn? (Ditto Jemison)
please allow me to fourth the boredom with shai hes great but is for sure a horrible watch youd have to be an okc fan to love it
jalens poor shooting nite was offsent by 12 of 13 from the free throw line
If Hart plays tonight, does that knock Kolek out of the rotation? Jemison? Both?
If Hart plays tonight, does that knock Kolek out of the rotation? Jemison? Both?
Probably means we are playing 12 men…
SGA is the quintessential modern superstar, doing most of his best work by taking maximum advantage of an artificially-open floor, and the barely-even-basketball ability to induce foul calls.
“Bureaucratic” is a great word for it. (*) Kudos.
(*) It’s one thing to draw fouls in the ordinary course of basketball. That’s a skill, and generally speaking an underlying proxy for underlying talent. It’s quite another to build your game around consciously endeavoring to do so. I’d say pretty much the exact same thing about walking in baseball.
but when does dia get on the floor?
I’m good with SGA’s game. Very old-school. Kinda like Jordan in his last couple of Bulls runs. I don’t think he flails and rip-through’s his way to the line. His assortment of moves is beguiling…even mesmerizing.
Honestly, what is wrong with you guys? He is close to a perfect basketball player. Plays good defense for a great offensive player. Shares the ball, but has the seeds to dominate at crunch time when needed. High volume with top efficiency scorer.
What’s not to like? Not enough stupid “primal screams?” Doesn’t taunt his opponents enough? Plays for a small market team in a red state? Doesn’t have enough “Look at Me!, Me!, Me!” bullshit mentality?
WTF, the guy is great and plays 70’s Knicks team basketball. I’m guessing all you folks would think him spectacularly enjoyable if he played for the Knicks.
This will likely be shot down as cloud yelling — I of course don’t care — but I preferred the association play style where you had to actually earn your open spaces on the floor, rather than them being bestowed upon you by virtue of your teammates all standing 24 feet from the basket because of the artificial 3-point line.
The same 12 or do we see Dadiet/Diawara/McCullar/Tosan?
SGA also gets a way with a lot of pushing defenders, while getting a good whistle. I kind of agree.
Yeah, this. Brunson had so few catch and shoot 3s last year because Randle’s gravity was no longer there. I think his off ball role will generate good looks and he’ll shoot above 40% from deep like in his first two seasons here.
“What’s not to like? Not enough stupid “primal screams?” Doesn’t taunt his opponents enough?”
I do like the general cut of SGA’s jib, nothing to complain about there in the least.
Jokic is the perfect basketball player. Giannis is too almost.
I agree about SGA. Too much foul baiting. He is great though. Undisputably.
Donte DiVincenzo, starting Point Guard, is an interesting development.
That’s fine to have a preferred style of play, but virtually every team in the league plays with that offensive philosophy, he’s the best at it and he earned the MVP partly because he excelled at the style that everyone plays.
Giannis is super great but far from a perfect player. He can’t shoot outside of 8 feet and shooting is an essential skill. His dominance in other areas more than makes up for it but close to perfect, he aint.
This type of baseball player literally does not exist.
The type of baseball player who consciously “works the count,” “makes the pitcher throw a lot of pitches,” and has an OBA of .370 with a BA of .250 absolutely, positively exists.
The Little League fields of the mid-80s United States were filled with 10-year-olds screaming “walk’s as good as a hit.” Pace FJM axiom, the value of a walk has never been a mystery. But even those 10 year olds understood the athletic and aesthetic difference between (a) getting a hit; and (b) walking.
Walks and drawing fouls are the “eat your vegetables and take your cod liver oil” of sports.
Brown did say postgame that his normal rotation will eventually consist of just 9 players.
I suppose there’s also a chance Hart plays but KAT doesn’t, in which case Jemison is definitely staying in the rotation for another night.
Love how the curators of the sport — TV networks, ESPN.com, The Athletic — act as if the primal scream is the very essence of basketball. It’s completely inorganic and rote at this point, yet somehow they think it’s “showing the players’ passion” or some other idiocy.
“Not until basketball players began to primally scream did they actually care.” LOL.
Also interesting is how the WNBA players and curators have all adopted it as same, particularly given its obvious deep roots in The Patriarchy.
FWIW I enjoy the Knicks slightly less when Brunson is foul baiting, too. At the same time I want him to get the same whistle SGA gets, and Butler still gets (dude shot 16 FTs in the season opener), and Embiid used to get but doesn’t anymore bc he’s a washed up bum ever since he pulled Mitch down to the floor.
(Funny thing about Embiid… I feel like we collectively saw the sudden demise of his athleticism in game 1 of the playoffs. When he threw that ball off the backboard to himself for the dunk it was a jaw dropping moment. But he landed awkwardly, left the game, and that was probably the last time in his life he had elite NBA athleticism.)
In the long run, this makes sense. When Mitch and Hart are available, you’ve got seven guys who should be playing at least 20 minutes a night, several of them over 30. And then you’ve got Clarkson and Yabu who, if they’re playing well, should be at least close to 20. The math becomes hard to make room for more than 9.
But Brown is also smart to not be locking himself into 9 this early. He’s figuring out what he has, playing with matchups to a degree, etc. Especially since guys are going to be load managed (or, in Mitch’s case, “injury managed.”
Some of you guys have the shittiest and most ridiculous baseball takes I have ever seen. Walk rates have been remarkably constant for like 100 years. They reached a peak in the 1940’s and dipped shortly thereafter and have remained constant ever since. There was a little peak again in the steroid era, probably because pitchers figured it was smarter to walk guys than to let the opponent’s roided up second baseman jack a steroid-aided flyball into the stands. But they went down as the steroid era ended. If you plot the walk rate in baseball over time since the 1920’s it’s a straight line with those two bumps in it.
You get .250 hitters with high OBP today because the fucking league batting average is .250. In fact it was .245 this year. This has always been the case in baseball. League average hitters in terms of BA with high OBP have always existed.
Just an incredibly shit take. You know who walks the most? The best hitters in baseball. You know why they walk a lot? Because pitchers don’t throw them a lot of strikes. You know why they don’t swing at those non-strikes, and walk a lot? Because they’re good hitters.
You know who doesn’t walk a lot? Shitty hitters. There is no such thing as a player who “bases his game around walks.” If all you can do is walk, nobody will walk you!
Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle drew a ton of walks!
The scare quotes around “working the count” as if that’s some kind of dumb idea are just… chef’s kiss. Amazing.
The most athletic and aesthetically pleasing thing to do, of course, is to just go up there hacking at everything like Jeff Francouer of Javy Baez. This whole “working the count” thing is for scrubs like Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, Ted Williams, and Babe Ruth.
Wemby may not be the perfect basketball player yet, but he’s on his way.
I think you inadvertently supported his take while calling it shitty and ridiculous.
Knowing and conscious effort versus byproduct.
Know the difference.
Three pointers in basketball, walks in baseball.
Two sides, same “efficiency” coin.
It’s odd to word associate Aaron Judge or Ted Williams and arrive at “works the count.” I frankly doubt that actually is the association being made.
You’re not reading it correctly.
.245 is the league batting average. He’s saying there’s a plague of low batting average hitters because too many guys “work the count” today. But the walk rate in MLB is the same it has always been. Hitters don’t walk at any higher rate today than they ever did.
You’ll get hitters with high OBP and a league batting average, just the same as in any season in MLB history. It just LOOKS different to people who don’t know what they’re talking about— to these people a .250 batting average is shitty even though it is ABOVE LEAGUE AVERAGE.
Point taken Alan.
Let me just say that when I have time to read through an entire thread, I often see the same kind of comments/concerns about our players repeated that I think miss the mark badly. So I’ll repeat myself and suggest why I think their concerns are misplaced and why they should really be worried about XYZ. I assume some people may not have seen what I think under the worse assumption that they care what I think. 😉
Whether or not it looks different, it *sounds* different because no one in his time made googly eyes at Ted Williams’s ability to walk.
Because that was a secondary, residual skill to the things that actually made him “Ted Williams.”
This was a great post, but this part in particular was very triggering to me because I used to regularly get into mindnumbing arguments with other Yankee fans about this as it related to Brett Gardner.
These guys were convinced that Gardner was an awful hitter despite his high OBP and solidly above average wRC+. I desperately tried to explain that with extraordinarily rare exceptions, every MLB pitcher can throw strikes to any given batter if that is their sole goal, such that if a hitter truly cannot hit, say, a 90 MPH fastball down the middle, they will never get on base.
I wasn’t able to breakthrough to them, and it bothers me to this day that some idiots didn’t appreciate Brett Gardner.
I can’t cut and paste now, but the second sentence of the second paragraph of JK’s last post isn’t at all what I’m saying.
For someone that doesn’t follow baseball closely, is that because the pitching is better, the bullpen is used more often and effectively and there is an effort to hit more homeruns or is there even more to it.
I was a big baseball fan as a kid, but didn’t pay any attention for literally decades. When I look at the players now, the change is so obvious I can see it. They look physically superior to decades ago. They look bigger, stronger and in much better shape.
Yet the walk rate remains constant despite the “googly eyes.”
Hitters aren’t walking any more than they used to. Good hitters tend to walk a lot and shitty hitters don’t. This is really not complicated.
Maybe this is missing the mark, but I have to think all else being equal some players have superior perception and/or patience and can use those skills to generate more walks than someone with less skill in those areas. I remember the days of little league when if you took a marginal pitch and it was called a ball, the other players would yell “good eye”. Maybe it was a misplaced compliment, but there probably is such a thing as a “good eye”.
The “conscious effort to walk among players and front offices” hasn’t remained remotely the same — the entire point — and so pitching has also adapted to that conscious knowingness to keep walk rates roughly constant.
Doesn’t change anything I said.
In terms of this new consciousness crowding out actual hitting, it pretty clearly has unless 1980 is some kind of outlier.
Hits per plate appearance (*):
1980: .240
2025: .218.
A nine percent drop.
So, yeah, walk consciousness has pretty clearly crowded out actual hits. Or just as noted.
(*) American League, to keep the DH constant.
I won’t speak to the tendency, but a lot of really good hitters didn’t walk very much, all the way through Ichiro, one of the best pure hitters of all-time, who walked 40 times per 162 games. His close predecessor, Rod Carew, (*) walked 67 times per 162 games.
*Could* Rod Carew have walked more if he had today’s sabermetric “wisdom”? Clearly, lest the obvious connection between being able to ID pitch location and batting average be denied.
and just like that baseballblogger is back!
To think that at the height of the FJM/walks craze, there were actually people who vociferously argued against the notion of Ichiro Suzuki as a Hall of Famer ….
The main thing that has driven batting averages down is pitcher velocity, and the increased use of bullpens. In just 15 years, the average fastball velo has gone from 92 to 94 MPH. That’s significant. There are simply more guys that can throw hard now. Most teams, even crummy ones, can bring in multiple relief pitchers who can strike out over a batter per inning.
The impact of launch angle-related hitting strategies and the prioritization of high-EV hitters is less clear, but is certainly also a factor. Teams are willing to live with hitters striking out as long as they can mitigate that with extra base hits and walks.
Walk rates have remained constant, although it is a common misconception that the modern game stresses walks more, because Billy Beane liked Scott Hatteberg or something.
I’ll take “Things That Never Happened” for $800, Alex
?????????????????
Bizarre take.
Yes, exactly — that’s a “conscious effort by teams to draw walks.” You just admitted my entire point.
But in any event, walks in baseball have trod virtually the same path from “by-product of other things involved in playing the sport” to “conscious effort to obtain” that three pointers have in the NBA. It’s undeniable. That change from by-product to conscious effort is the whole story. Everything downstream, from player sorting to player usage to player scouting and evaluation, flowed from that.
Once three-pointers become something teams affirmatively try to obtain, defenses adapted to that change. Same thing with walks.
There are a couple of modern analogs to the Rod Carew/Ichiro type players of the past, who were outliers in and of themselves. Jose Altuve was a low walk rate guy who could put up high batting averages. Luis Arraez was kind of doing it there for a minute.
Those players still exist, they’re just rare. Rod Carew, incidentally, took a pretty decent amount of walks in his career, had an above average walk rate of 9.6% in his career. Ichiro was a little lower, 8.1%, which is historically the league average.
I’d rather talk about Kolek but I think the point I would put forth is a broad statistical one: single-year league average doesn’t mean good if the single-year league average is bad. There’s a 120+ year data set that helps us determine how good a year is, and .245 is a bad year.
What the fuck kind of Byzantine argument is this? The walk rate in baseball has remained constant for like 100 years, how in the everloving name of all things holy does that show that “teams prioritize walks” more? Shouldn’t walks go up like even a little bit if this was the case?
What exactly are we lamenting here? Too many teams try to get walks now, even though walks haven’t gone up at all? This is all very dumb.
id rather you post about kolek as well
In 1887, they counted walks as hits. I suspect this debate would look a lot different if they kept doing so.
Yes, exactly. A bunch of the BITD good hitters ex-walks below the Carew/Ichiro level have been sorted out in favor of the walkers and the launch anglers.
And thus we see hits, and especially the “lowly’ single, crowded out of the game, in favor of other, less aesthetically pleasing alternatives.
This is just fundamentally wrong. League batting averages are not magic, they simply reflect the state of the game at a given time. “.245 is a bad batting average” in an absolute sense is just a bad take, full stop.
The National League batting average in 1930 was .303. Is that because all the hitters in the league were just that good? The average hitter in 1930 was just a .300 hitter by dint of sheer quality? Or was it the conditions of the game that led to high batting averages? Of course it’s the latter. The conditions of the game change. In 1968 the league batting average was .237. Was the whole league populated by shitty hitters?
If you’re not comparing hitters and pitchers in a given year to the baseline of the whole league, you’re just doing it wrong. A .245 batting average in 2025 can’t really be compared to a .245 batting average in 2001, and WHY ARE WE EVEN TALKING ABOUT BATTING AVERAGE
Singles per plate appearance, American League:
1980: .173
2025: .141
18.5 percent drop.
“Or was it the conditions of the game that led to high batting averages? ”
I thought the “conditions of the game” were pretty much the topic of discussion.
On the other question, I mean … .245 kind of is a bit of a shitty batting average. You can make up for it in other ways, to be sure, and still have some “value,” but just on the sole question alone, yeah.
“WHY ARE WE EVEN TALKING ABOUT BATTING AVERAGE”
Because the ability to generate a high batting average in Major League Baseball is something people have admired as cool for over a century, and is a very aesthetically pleasing athletic ability?
So, let me just get this straight. You would rather see teams trot out empirically worse players, because they can hit singles like Rod Carew and Ichiro, because that is aesthetically pleasing, and furthermore, these Carew-esque players exist but just aren’t given a fair chance by their respective teams?
I’m just trying to parse out how bad the argument you are making is, exactly. Tell me some of these excellent Rod Carew-type players who are languishing in the minor leagues being passed over for the launch angle stars of today. I’ll go ahead and wait, since these very real players that exist should be easy to find.
It’s not. In 2008 the market was down 38%. If you were down 35% would you call it a bad take, full stop, if I said 2008 was a bad year for you?
Friday Night Knicks is right around the corner…
making my way now thru the Craig bond movies…Spectre turned me off a bunch to the series…
still haven’t watched No Time to Die, which received okay reviews…so want to…
watching Skyfall now, and I’m thinking I don’t remember this at all…guess that’s a good thing…
not gonna lie, I’m a bit concerned about the mitch situation, was wishing for a consistent healthy impactful season…
good to see though that huk appears ready…grateful jemison the 3rd is on the roster…
kind of excited to see if tyler can repeat his performance from last game, he really looked comfortable out there…a cool, confident and capable kolek could help the cause a whole lot…
it’s good to balance some disappointments (mitch and yabu) with some pleasant surprises – tyler kolek, jemsion the 3rd…
look forward to seeing diawara out on the court at some point when KAT sits out to rest/heal…or, when yabu gets shifted down on the depth chart (still believe he’ll adjust and show out, at some point)…
Hitting a single is a more admirable athletic event that drawing a walk. By an extremely wide margin.
Hitting .300 in the major leagues is cool and admirable and aesthetically pleasing, irrespective of “value.”
I can’t fathom this instance on treasuring the “efficient.” I mean, no, I don’t want to go to a Yankee game next year and watch the players hit .153, or watch the 2026 baseball season and watch the league put up a .220 batting average. I don’t want guys winning batting titles with .288 averages. Hardly a mic drop “admission.”
(Just like I didn’t want to watch the league engage in a bunch of ridiculous shifts and batters stand six feet outside the batters box scratching themselves for a minute straight before stepping in for the next pitch.)
We need more hitters like Judge.
Batting average isn’t the same as runs, and is not even a good indicator of hitter quality. These takes are getting worse as we are getting deeper into this.
Who’s a better hitter:
Hitter A:
.260 BA
.280 OBP
.300 SLG
Hitter B:
.240 BA
.380 OBP
.500 SLG
I’ll take hitter B.
shows exactly the same as just before tipoff of the other game with the exception of hart being upgraded to questionable:
Expected Lineup
PG Jalen Brunson
SG Mikal Bridges
SF O. Anunoby Prob
PF K. Towns Ques
C A. Hukporti
Arguably the most exciting development of game 1 for me was seeing him not be shit. I hope he gets an extended run as backup PG for the first couple months of the season. Let’s make an early determination on whether or not he’s worth the roster spot. All we need is cromulent.
You’re arguing against something no one has said, or believes.
I literally said the opposite right above:
“Hitting .300 in the major leagues is cool and admirable and aesthetically pleasing, irrespective of “value.””
So, at least we are clear.
Still, it is just wrong to think that singles have disappeared as walks have devoured them. The walk rate has remained constant, and there is really no amount of tortured logic you are going to be able to employ that is going to make that particular take any less wrong.
Strikeouts are the main culprit of declining batting averages, and it should be pretty obvious that strikeouts are increasing because pitchers simply throw harder. If you want to get mad at something, don’t get mad at Fire Joe Morgan, get mad at pitchers throwing in the mid-90’s now instead of the low 90’s. You can plot the rise of strikeout rates and the rise of pitcher velocity and they map almost perfectly.
i don’t know, maybe he shows out in practice, and the staff themselves weren’t really that shook on him…2 games in to summer league and he looked unworthy of a roster spot to me, but…
guess it’s good i’m not making these kind of choices…
Same. Took my son to the theater for it, regretted it halfway through. Didn’t see the last one.
Spectre is the only Bond movie I’ve never seen, because the response was so universally negative from everyone. I watched Craig’s last film, which has some good stuff and some stuff that doesn’t work, and could follow it despite not having watched the previous one
Strikeouts are also highly conditional on underlying norms. Hitters used to detest striking out in and of itself, now they don’t. The “choke down and put the ball in play with two strikes” maxim of yesteryear, which pretty much the entire league subscribed to, has disappeared entirely.
That one doesn’t “bother” me much (*) — except in the postseason, where it absolutely does, at least in high-leverage ABs with runners on base.
(*) Even BITD there were non-conformist types like Reggie Jackson, who flailed regardless of count, in what I interpemost likely in conscious and purposeful rejection of the norm. I actually liked those types, and still do, so I guess it never really bothered me. There isn’t a lot to the aesthetics of Duane Kuiper choking down and rolling over a dribbler to second.
How about Player C?
.294 BA
.413 OBP
.615 SLG
i recently blundered in to caught stealing with my middle child, should have gone to see fantastic 4 instead, headspace and timing error on my part, he dogged me unmercifully all the way out of the theater, in to the car, finally had to tell him to quit by the time we reached the first light…
Partly to get back to the original statements that triggered this barrage of baseball, and partly to annoy Doogie by continuing it — I find walks to be aesthetically pleasing and foul-baiting to be not.
That’s partly because a walk is part of the intense, one-on-one contest of batter against pitcher that takes up, oh I don’t know, 90% of the game. It’s not as exciting a result as a hit, or a strike-out, but it’s a significant win for one side.
Foul-baiting, on the other hand, feels like gaming the system. We need fouls, obviously, lest everyone starts playing like I used to do in pickup games (I won’t get into some of the results of that), but baiting just feels like a cheat. If there’s a baseball analogy, it might be closer to “pitch framing,” which just seems to me like catchers trying to befuddle the ump into calling a strike when it’s a ball.
To answer your last question, no, I don’t think it should. Prioritizing walks, at least from what I’ve seen on the Yankees, doesn’t mean walk rates should go up. It means a player’s inability to do other things will be tolerated if he can walk at the league average and do the other things the organization values (like launch angle, etc). So the walk rate remains the same, but the defense gets worse, situational hitting disappears, and (incidentally) batting average drops, leading to an overall less aesthetic product, kinda like watching SGA go to the FT line (which is what I thought E was arguing, but who knows).
How about this as topic instead of baseball.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/24/opinion/crypto-trump-libertarianism-corruption.html?unlocked_article_code=1.v08.2f-x.9PNhXmgSMKSv&smid=url-share
personally speaking i dont mind discussions of anything on this site (including politics but stay away from it anyway) i just prefer basketball cannot speak for others of course
this is gonna sound silly, but it’s the lore that’s the attraction, helps enable easier immersion, the storylines a little less…the music, relationships to bond all exciting and interesting…hopefully some sharp and witty dialogue…
the visuals to a large degree, not only breathtaking action sequences, but, just like a good western, bond has got amazing locales…the desert in QoS, maybe to a lesser degree…
it’s just bond, and boy did daniel craig look really good at it in CR…
interested now to see which of the older bonds have “survived” over time…barely remember any of them, maybe check out goldfinger…
The major flaw in E’s basketball argument, though, is that you can’t game FT’s in basketball. Only the most elite athletes in the game are so good that they have to be consistently fouled to be stopped. That’s why it’s SGA, Embiid, Harden, Butler, Brunson, etc who we’re talking about. There’s never been a hustlebunny who figured out how to get to the line a lot.
Defense in MLB has never been better, its another huge reason why batting averages are so low now. Banning the extreme shifts hasn’t helped that much either.
I only watch the Yankees so it looks like it’s been declining steadily for 20 years. Walk rate’s been consistent, though.
You know, BBA, I’m sure your baseball defense point can be proven by metrics, but I’d largely stopped watching baseball for some years until this year, and I was really shocked by the number of misplayed balls in the outfield and absolutely crap throws from there as well, way off base, missing the cut-off man, etc. Maybe it was always thus, but it felt worse.
Infield play looks about the same, maybe it’s better. Lots of spectacular plays.
E, you can rest assured there are no Ichiro/Carew caliber hitters who are now forced to learn accounting because they do not walk enough. That’s such an absurd proposition I don’t really know what else to say.
When you look at league averages by year, you’ll see that the drop off in AVG coincided with a drop in OBP, meaning there wasn’t really a conscious decision to feed one at the expense of the other.
I mean, league average OBP peaked in 1894, and league average BB/9 peaked in 1949. 2025 is completely unremarkable historically in terms of league average OBP and BB/9–in the middle of the pack, closer to the bottom than the top.
This is pretty straightforwardly a story about pitching becoming insane.
terry rozier never seemed to get fouled much
There is cold hard evidence staring everybody in the face as to why batting averages have dropped. You guys are trying to do all of this circumlocution around it, but pitchers just throw harder and are harder to hit. You guys really want to make this “the nerds ruined baseball” when the obvious actual answer is “pitchers throw a lot harder.”
It seems incredibly uncontroversial to suggest that faster pitches are harder to hit than slower ones, yet here we are. The K rate in baseball in 2000 was 16.4% in 2000, and it’s 22.6% today. If you’re striking out, guess what, you’re not getting a hit. That’s gonna put a ding in the ol’ batting average. Fastball velocity averaged around 89 MPH in 2000, and averages 94 today.
I mean how fucking gobsmackingly obvious does it have to be that fastball velo is the main driver of declining batting averages?
I think BABIP has for the most part stayed relatively the same but I guess I probably should’ve said defensive positioning has improved greatly thanks to all the new data which was the reason MLB banned the extreme infield shift.
JK, ignorant question, but I hear an awful lot about spin rate, and wondering if it’s not just velocity but ball movement. Plus it feels like there are about 15 new pitches since I was a kid, with only the knuckleball mostly getting garbage binned.
Spin rate is also significant, as some of these guys are uncorking truly hellish breaking balls. More importantly, with the advent of tracking technology it has been possible to really dig down into the mechanics of breaking pitches, and to get pitchers to focus on the pitches that are most effective.
There have always been pitchers with nasty breaking stuff– the Koufax and Gooden curveballs were so good that those guys didn’t even need a secondary breaking pitch, for instance. There have always been guys who can really spin it. But watch a run of the mill game today, and even scrub relievers are usually throwing at least one breaking ball that spins like a MF.
BABIP has remained constant despite hitters hitting with higher EV, which tells me this is correct: positioning has gotten better.
I do believe that with fewer runners on base, teams have made the Outfield Arm tool less of a priority. That is one thing that I do believe has declined, the booming throw from the outfield. It doesn’t hurt to have a great arm, but teams these days are more willing to play guys in CF and RF who don’t throw as well, while poor range is seen as a no-go.
Home runs in 2000: 5,693
Home runs in 2025: 5,650
So the walk rate is the same and the home runs are the same.
I would think if it were all about the velocity, we’d see change across the board.
It’s a remarkable coincidence that rising velocity was only a scourge to the attributes GM stopped valuing, while at the same time it had absolutely zero impact on the attributes they prioritized.
What else changed in baseball from 2000 to 2025?
Was like half the league or more on PEDs in 2000 or nah?
SGA has felt like the guard equiv of Tim Duncan for the past couple of years now. The guys does everything well, he’s like a robot. I’m surprised when one of his shots even hits the rim before going in.
AL K rate went up 19% between 1973 and 2000, BA went up from .259 to .276. (*) It’s not remotely some kind of automatic relationship.
I’m still trying to understand the claim. Is the claim that literally there were no other available outfielders that could have hit better than the .160 batting average Joey Gallo put up for the Yankees in 2021-22. Because if you scoured the MLE’s of the baseball universe’s minor leaguers, you’d probably find dozens if not hundreds of outfielders that could have.(*)
The claim that Joey Gallo didn’t crowd out a player with a better hit for average tool can’t be taken seriously and couldn’t have been intended seriously. The assertion needs significant refinement to even get into the same area code as serious.
(*) And that doesn’t even include the myriad of fourth and fifth major league outfielders that could have.
Although, thinking about it more, I guess the point you’re making is that you’d expect to see HR hitting decline instead of remain the same, since velo makes it harder to hit.
You have the chicken and egg backwards.
More strikeouts = fewer baserunners = stringing along a bunch of hits is less viable = slappy singles hitters fall on hard times
The teams that adjusted to this earliest started kicking the other teams’ asses, until finally everybody just adjusted and started phasing out the slappy singles hitters (also known as “the less productive players”).
Nobody tries to put a team of slappy singles hitters together anymore, and pretty much every team prioritizes power hitters at as many positions as possible, because you’re not going to score enough runs by slapping singles while you’re striking out 22% of the time.
Earl Weaver was onto this in the 70’s.
There’s no reason increased velo, higher spin, better video engendering smarter pitch selection, etc. should lead to lower batting average but not lower HR rate.
The reason it did is that … sigh … sorting for batting average hit tool waned, sorting for HR power tool increased.
See, e.g., Joey Gallo, Poster Child.
Yes, “slappy singles hitters” became phased out. That’s literally what we’re saying. And the slappy single can become effectively replaced by a walk if there’s not a lot of hit stringing going on, which there isn’t in 2025 — reason number 253 teams began to consciously prioritize and seek out walks, even in lieu of singles.
So to bring it full circle, this started with “baseball has phased out singles hitters in favor of “hitters who work the count,” and who “make the other team throw a lot of pitches,” and “have .370 OBPs and .250 averages.”” That’s a true and factorial statement.
Knicks v Celtics. Likely Huk v Queta at C. A year ago, what were the odds of this happening?
Okay, well it’s pretty fucking stupid to evaluate a player like Joey Gallo based solely on batting average, because in one of those years he hit 38 HR and drew 111 walks. He was a 4.4 WAR player in one of those years you’re talking about– did the Yankees have a 4.4 WAR player just kicking around in the minor leagues somewhere? Yes, believe it or not Joey Gallo accumulated 4.4 wins above a replacement player despite his .199 batting average for the season. Hard to believe, I know, but it happened. Caveat: he was worse for the Yankees than he was for the Rangers, and the Yankees acquired him midseason. But still– you’d look at that player and say “He stinks! He hit .199!” You’d think that because you weigh batting average way, way more than it deserves to be weighed.
The Yankees had a minor league outfielder named Greg Allen who hit .327 in AAA that year. Should they have given the at bats to that guy? The answer is no they should not have fucking given the at bats to that guy, as Greg Allen did get 700+ plate appearances in the major leagues and had a 70 OPS+ because he’s a terrible baseball player.
The following year with the Yankees, his second year, Gallo stunk and lost playing time, and probably should have been just waived or something.
I think we’ve reached the crux of it here, where really what we have is somebody who values batting average to a degree that’s pretty ridiculous given that we have far, far better metrics to value hitters.
You have the “what” right and the “why” ridiculously, laughably wrong.
You’re moving the goalposts and not hearing what I’m saying. I’m not “valuing” the players against each other. I fully understand that singles hitters that don’t do much else aren’t particularly valuable. I mean, I’ve fully understood that for decades. You’re continuing to make this a “take” on what constitutes baseball value and it’s not that and has never been that.
The contra claim, though, was that there were no better hitters for average being crowded out by the Joey Gallos, and therefore effectively no batting average to be gained given the current universe of baseball players. That was asserted multiple times by multiple posters. It’s categorically false.
Yes, Greg Allen (assuming his MLE average was higher than .180 or whatever Gallo would have hit) *would have raised the aggregate American League batting average above what it actually was.* Axiomatic. That’s the statement. The statement isn’t “Greg Allen was a better baseball player than Joey Gallo.” That’s a different statement.
Yankees traded Gallo at the 2022 trade deadline to the Dodgers for Clayton Beeter.
Joey Gallo was a 4.4 WAR player in 2021.
Were there a bunch of 4.4 WAR players just loitering around not getting playing time?
(And then of course once we realize that the aggregate batting average of a league is heavily dependent on the sorting mechanism to pick players, any asserted “natural” relationship between batting average and velocity or pitcher quality starts to badly fray. All of this stuff is contextual.)
Did you read what I wrote?
In terms of the entirely different question you asked, I don’t know. Maybe? Do they run WAR MLEs for minor leaguers? I honestly don’t know.
(And Gallo was a 0.5 WAR player for the Yankees in 2021.)
The answer is no, there are not a bunch of 4.4 WAR players just hanging around in the minor leagues. There are a bunch of 0.0 WAR players in the minor leagues, which is what the definition of “replacement player” is. You know, it means the guys hanging around at AAA. That is the literal definition of WAR.
The “sorting mechanism” that is used is “are they good baseball players,” while you would seem to like to use the sorting mechanism “do they have a high batting average.” Baseball GMs got smart enough to realize a player like Joey Gallo can still be a good baseball player while hitting .199, as impossible as that may seem.
Was he like the best player in the league? No. Is he the kind of player you don’t want to rely on in the playoffs? Possibly. Are there BETTER HITTERS THAN HIM who didn’t have jobs? No. No there were not. Were there hitters who might have had a higher batting average? I mean, sure, possibly. The aforementioned Greg Allen batted .227 in the major leagues. Is he in any universe a remotely comparable hitter in terms of value to Joey Gallo circa 2021? No, he is not.
If you’re making some other kind of argument that I’m not understanding, please forgive me. Gallo had a 123 wRC+ in 2021, and I really don’t give a flying shit about his batting average. He was a productive hitter. There are generally not guys kicking around in the minor leagues who can put up a 123 wRC+ in the majors, and people who run major league baseball franchises are not drooling idiots.
Joey Gallo was 28th in hitter WAR in 2021, the year he hit .199. He had higher WAR than guys like Nolan Arenado, Xander Boegarts, and Francisco Lindor.
So Roman Anthony was a “0.0 WAR” player until his first major league AB?
Not really sure that’s how it works.
Kind of getting hamster wheel-ish at this point.
Fwiw I don’t disagree with your position, JK, just your certainty. We went through an analytical revolution whose major premise involved OBP and Home Runs being paramount and batting average being overrated. 20 years later batting average has fallen to 19th century levels and home runs and OBP rule, so it seems odd to say it’s ridiculous to think the two are related. And of course I tend to get triggered when anyone calls a seemingly reasonable take “shitty and ridiculous”, as I think we should all be more open minded when it comes to multi-factor problems.
I’m of the opinion that everything cited here (velocity, defensive adjustments, etc) has been a contributing factor but I do think the modern GM may be more responsible than the others, especially when they’re actively redesigning players’ swings at an organizational level in the minor leagues.
And lastly, I do think benchmarking is a three body problem. You need to measure against current environment, historical norms, and expectations. Focusing on one and saying consideration of all three is “fundamentally wrong” is troublesome.
Anyway, basketball.
These new black Knicks jerseys are sweet AF. They even have “once a Knick always a Knick” stitched into them. 5 stars. Would recommend.
SOOOOOOOOO close to getting it! You’re like 99% of the way there now!
If you are a player with an outstanding hit tool, it is going to behoove you to try to lift the ball into the air. There’s a perfect example of a player who made this adjustment mid-career: Daniel Murphy.
Murphy was at one time a Mark Grace-style first baseman. He had a long track record of being a perfectly mediocre major league Mark Grace-type first baseman, hitting for high batting averages but not a lot of power with that good hit tool. Mid-career, he adjusted his swing and went for a different launch angle. His fly ball percentage soared, and his HR/FB soared. He was still the same excellent hit tool player he always was, except now he was an actually good baseball player, far better than a Mark Grace caliber player. His strikeout rate didn’t increase, and his walk rate didn’t change.
He could still see the ball and hit the ball. He simply stopped giving away outs by hitting the ball on the ground.
This is how ALL hitters with good hit tools are trained now. They are trained not to hit the ball on the ground, because ground balls have a low vallue. The high hit tool hitters didn’t disappear, they just learned to ALSO hit with power and to not hit the ball on the ground.
“Launch angle” has been decried as some sort of evil, but all it really is trying to accomplish is to limit ground balls, a low value batted ball event. When you look at the top hit tool prospects in the minors, most of them project to have solid power in the major leagues. Teams don’t say “we’re not interested in this high hit tool guy without a lot of power,” they say “we need to figure out how to get this high hit tool guy to hit the ball in the air.”
Jacob Wilson of the A’s is a perfect avatar of this kind of player. He has a 70 hit tool grade, and was a really, really tough out in the minors. The fear with Wilson, who has savant-level bat-to-ball skills, was that he would not hit enough to be a true star. This year in a full season with the A’s, he batted .311 with a low walk rate and moderate power, and had a solid 3.5 WAR season. He’s sort of a Rod Carew type! Look at him out there, existing, getting treated like a top prospect!
The A’s will still certainly try to get him to bring down his ground ball rate, as they should. There’s more upside in him due to that alone.
Slightly nervous about this game tonight given all the guys we have on the injury report. Celtics could be frisky in revenge mode. I expect Brown & White to be highly motivated.