⚾ Baseball - Taiwan

I don’t play fantasy sports, unfortunately.

I call it the “play small, gamble big” mentality.

If Team Taiwan managed to get someone on base, the coaches will immediately go in to “play small” mentality, and expect players to do poorly if they bat normally.

However, when playing small failed, resulting on the same amount of runners stuck on the same base with more outs than before, then the coaches go into “gamble big” mode, and throw all reason and logic out the window.

This applies pitching and fielding as well.

This often results in Team Taiwan putting up a better batting and pitching stats, but ends up losing more games, as the team either fails to drive in runs or gives up more runs than necessary.

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I just get the feeling the managers have zero relationship/trust/rapport with the players as well. They don’t seem to know them or trust them. Look at them in the dugout compare to other teams.

We should just get a foreign manager.

I usually maintain that managers don’t matter that much in baseball.

But if we just need to expunge the stupidity and the dinosaur-ism, anything but our current pool of domestic coaches would do.

Maybe Wang Chien-Ming is heading into that managerial direction:

Good for Wang. I have doubts about whether he’s smart enough to be coach.

I secretly hope he will come back to Taiwan and just pitch one season in the CPBL.

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Oh yeah, exactly that. I wonder why most of the coaches have that mentally. Maybe it is part of them playing during the “Team Taiwan dead ball era from 70s to 90s” when most of the players in the lineup are suicide bats

I’m personally not against small ball tactic, but the problem with Team Taiwan is always lack of execution. The standard bunting SOP most of the time turn out to be foul, foul and then strikeout or pop-fly. There are only a handful of players in the CPBL who I trust laying down a bunt.

And going back to the execution part, at least for the last 10 years or so for Team Taiwan. Is missing that final hit to bring home the runners, a lot of time you’ll team Taiwan piling up bases and then just end up scoring one run or no run at at all.

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To what degree do CPBL managers now use sabermetrics to hire or manage their lineups like it is commonly done in MLB?
Zero?

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Well Fubon and Chinatrust Brothers just installed Tracman motion capture data in their stadiums (scroll up).
What I fear is the savvier Japanese and Korean national teams just harvest the data and the GMs and managers of CPBL flush it down the toilet. Don’t put it past them!

I am a Guards fan (because of Manny Ramirez) but I care more about the CPBL league’s health, more than the success of any one team. I think it’s more important they use business-side analytics instead, to bring more fans to the park.

Correctomundo

Use the KBO as an example there are two school of thoughts there, one is data and analytical driven organisations and the other one are the traditional believe in former players’ (now coaches) gut feeling. I guess it all depend on the ownership and see which direction they wish to go down.

From my understanding, three out of four CPBL teams already have this sort of data tracking system. Monkeys implemented their system back in 2014, 2015? While the Brothers and Guardians will have TrackMan system this year.

While we are on the topic of TrackMan, the Taiwanese junior national team is actually the first team that started using TrackMan in their home stadium (Old Taichung Stadium) I think they started using that in 2015 if memory served me correctly.

That is also thanks to the “play small” mentality. According to Tom Tango’s Run Expectancy table, when you are on first with no outs, the run expectancy is 0.953, when you are on second with 1 out, your run expectancy is down to 0.725.

Plus the terrible small ball execution you’ve mentioned, which means often times there would be 1 pointless out with the runner still stranded at first. That has a miserable RE of just 0.573.

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Yeah, it’s the whole trying to copy Japan mentally, but doesn’t want to put in the time practicing the fundamental.

Yes, according to the article, Monkeys installed a “similar” system and have won two of the three championships since.

It looks like the Lions are piggybacking. This is what I’m afraid Korea and Japan will do to our data.

While Chinatrust and Fubon are installing Trackman this year, the Uni Lions currently have no plans to install a similar system at their Tainan stadium, although the Lions plan on using Trackman data on pitching and hitting from the Red-White games on February 27 and 28 organized by TPEU, and analyzing it afterwards.

Just flipped through channels last week and saw a RH batter lay down a nearly perfect bunt to the 3B side, forcing the SS and 3B to decide and one to come in to make the play (not sure what league, but it wasn’t MLB). The batter very nearly ran it out for a hit, and both runners moved up.

Bunting is dead easy if you have good eyesight and all ten fingers. Never been able to understand why professional players have any problems at all with it (including MLB). It can be a little scary with pro pitchers, though - and pro breaking balls - and maybe that’s the issue.

That might be the case up against 4-seamers, but a different story when it comes to 92mph+ 2 seam fastballs, especially the kinds that turn towards you.

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All breaking balls tend to make the batter back the bat up toward the body and drop the head of that bat, I agree. Those two movements are responsible for 95+% of foul bunts and popups.

But with enough practice comes discipline. Soft hands and good eyesight (especially watching the ball) should help make even two-seam fastballs easier to bunt. You don’t have to use the bat’s sweet spot, you mostly remove the difficulty of a moving bat, and that makes bunting much easier than hitting.

But there are lots of other things also missing in modern baseball (e.g., most pros obviously never played any unstructured, creative sandlot game much as children), so I guess it’s no surprise the bunt is on that list.

Here in Taiwan you would see bunting at every level of the sport. There’s no lack of bunt training, yet, pro-players still don’t perform bunt anymore reliably than regular batting.

Even in the majors, players don’t consistently perform bunts better than regular batting.

Since even a successful sacrifice bunt has proven to be causing more harm than good, bunting is only useful in today’s MLB against infield shifts with no one on base.

I also find this article pretty interesting

(Excluding pitchers) The frequent bunters bunted the ball fair 49.5% of the time. The infrequent bunters bunted the ball fair 46.1% of the time.

Bunting is a skill, and as with any skill, there’s a distribution in talent. But what’s made abundantly clear is that nothing about bunting is automatic, even for the most prolific bunters in the league. You’re still trying to bunt a really fast and moving baseball with a stick that isn’t that big.

That’s only for bunting fair… and we all know bunting fair isn’t always a good thing. In addition, once the pitcher noticed your bunt attempt, he’d be throwing more hard to bunt pitches, and the infield would be ready for the bunt.

Ok, old guy here. My beef with your links and stats is that only modern players are used in the stats and examples.

At the risk of putting you to sleep, I grew up playing baseball in the 1960s, and I played through the 1970s. I never received formal coaching until after high school baseball - none. I played in LL, BR, and AL - and I learned to hit a curveball in BR - but most of what I learned was in playing hundreds, if not thousands, of sandlot games. In those games there was no infield fly rule, and we took advantage (and became very good infielders). We played on rough fields in order to learn short hopping (and became very good infielders). We hit fungo flies standing on water towers and fielded them, and became better fly catchers. Nobody hit 1.000 bunting, but even in LL we bunted a lot and mostly successfully. I think modern players are over coached and under skilled; I think we were under coached and more skilled.

Full disclosure: I used to be a MLB fan but 1994 killed that. I still watch the playoffs, I like to listen to Cardinals games and watch YES, but the 94 strike and the rise of sabre metrics killed the game for fans (imo).

One more thing, ever heard of Wade Boggs? Played 3B for the Red Sox in the1980s? Guy had the the junkiest swing ever, but I would bet a house he’d never have faced a shifted infield. He would have eaten that defense alive.

:grandpa: