For those of you that don't know, Joe Posnanski of the KC Star does these "Banny Logs" on his personal blog, where he chronicles each of Royals pitcher Brian Bannister's starts. Joe -- and everyone else -- is infatuated with Bannister for a few reasons. First, he's a good pitcher. Second, he's smart as hell. He combines both of those to be a rare breed of baseball player -- one who truly cares about the pajama/basement Sabermetric numbers, and a guy whose mental approach to the chess-like game of pitching is similar to that of Greg Maddux. That's not a direct comparison, but it's certainly valid. Anyway, Joe mentions a hilariously awesome text message exchange after the game.
It was like that. Banny was mostly working fastball as he does when he's successful, but his secondary pitches were generally not coming in the red-zone 84-85 mph range. Plus, it looked like Banny had a really good fastball. He got 11 swinging strikes, which is a lot for him, and most of those came on fastballs. He had his command too. I sent him a text after the game, and he wrote back to say: "Just had to let my Babip regress before I started dealing again."No. Seriously. How can you not? A major league pitcher -- arguably the ace on a major league team, depending on how you feel about Gil Meche -- totally monitors his BABIP. Most regular baseball fans don't monitor BABIP, but Bannister, he is all over that mess. The guy knows his stats; instead of some tangent about the changing world of baseball, I'm just going to sit back and enjoy it.
Seriously, how can you not love this guy?
Via Vegas Watch
