MLB Phoenix

It's not been a good year for the groins of baseball players. Before the season even started we saw Felix Pie miss time with a twisted testicle and, on Monday, a fastball found Jose Molina's jewels. Molina's okay and it would appear he got off easy. On the same night, Diamondbacks catcher Chris Snyder took a foul tip to the groin. He went on the 15-day disabled list yesterday with a fractured left testicle.

I know what you're thinking, one of the things anyway, how can you fracture something that isn't a bone? Fairly easily, it seems.

Each testicle is surrounded by the tunica albuginea, a tough, fibrous covering that often takes the hit of trauma to the gland. Like the shell of an egg, it can be easily "fractured" or shattered when confronted by a blunt or violent force.

Kaz Matsui's anal fissures never sounded so good. We'll take a brief pause at this time to allow our male readers to take a deep breath and thank the heavens that they aren't Chris Snyder this morning.

And we're back! Snyder will have surgery to repair the injured testicle today and is, shockingly, not expected to miss much time. The D-Backs expect to have him back after the All-Star Game. I expect to stop grimacing in pain at the thought sometime this afternoon.

Baseball is America's pastime, but had our forefathers enjoyed the modern conveniences of clocks, ball pumps, or haste, this pastime may well have been basketball or football. Instead, they had wood, leather, and a rudderless disposition. Baseball is Boring is a series of live blogs for folks who need irony and self-awareness to get through a game.

Check out Jonathan Papelbon up there. What are screams but angry yawns?

When first instituted a decade ago, interleague baseball was fun. Before 1997, the only regular-season interleague baseball existed as fan fiction in my Trapper Keeper, and usually involved Bo Jackson catching a line drive from Barry Larkin and running up a wall to high-five the black guy from DC Talk. But today, the interleague thrill is gone. Proponents of the rule argue that they allow fans to see teams and players they otherwise wouldn't at the ballpark, but I don't live in a baseball city, and those people can go fly a kite.

Diamondbacks and Red Sox, at Fenway, after the jump.

On Deck is FanHouse's look at the day's most intriguing baseball matchups.

Seattle Mariners (26-49) at New York Mets (37-37) - 7:10 PM ET

It's a great pitching matchup - Felix Hernandez vs. Johan Santana - but that's not why this game leads off our list of Monday baseball. No, it's because Jerry Manuel will be managing his first home game at Shea Stadium since taking over for Willie Randolph. The nature of that dismissal has been debated to death in New York since then but it will still be interesting to see how the hometown faithful react in their first look at the team since Black early Tuesday morning. Manuel's fertilizer comments, which seem like little more than a tabloid trying to make a stink where none exists, could also play a role in how he's greeted. If Santana pitches well, and no reason he shouldn't against the Mariners, it should all end up as a lovefest by the end of the night.

On Deck is FanHouse's look at the day's most intriguing baseball matchups.

Cincinnati Reds (35-41) at New York Yankees (40-35) - 1:05 PM ET

A friend of mine ... a Yankee fan no less ... said to me on Friday afternoon that he fully expected the Reds to win two out of three in this series in the Bronx against his Yankees. A pretty amazing statement from a fan of a team who had just won seven in a row. That's how impressed he was of the young pitching the Reds had. Although I think he expected the two wins to be against Edinson Vólquez on Friday, and Johnny Cueto today, and not against minor league call-up Daryl Thompson on Saturday. Instead, the Reds have a chance to sweep the Yankees in the Bronx (just like the Series in '76), ensuring that the Yankees last win over the Reds at Yankee Stadium will forever be Game 1 of the 1961 World Series, before The House That Ruth Built (and The House That Griffey Hates) comes down for good.

This last offseason was a rare one in baseball, as we saw three teams trade their aces to another team for prospects. The Twins sent Johan Santana to the Mets, Baltimore sent Erik Bedard northwest to Seattle, and the Athletics traded Dan Haren to the Diamondbacks.

To pry Haren away from the A's, Arizona basically had to send it's entire farm system to Oakland and pay for a vacation for Billy Beane to take his family to see the Grand Canyon. While the Athletics are enjoying what they've gotten in return from Arizona so far in the deal, Haren has enjoyed his time in Arizona as well. In fact, he'd like to stay there for a while.

"Hopefully I'll be here a long time," he said. "I liked it in Oakland, and, you know, I love it here."

He said he and the Diamondbacks discussed a contract extension earlier in the season but "it kind of broke off." He said the experience of negotiating an in-season extension while with Oakland wasn't ideal - "There's so much to think about during the daily grind, anything more is just too much," he said - but didn't rule out the idea that talks could rekindle this season.

"If it's something we revisit in the off-season, then it's that," Haren said. "If it's something that can be moved on quickly during the year, I'm sure we'd be good."

While I don't think anything will get done during the season, I fully expect the Diamondbacks to sign Haren to an extension in the offseason. Keeping him in a rotation with Brandon Webb along with all the young talent in the Diamondbacks lineup would probably go a long way in ensuring that the Diamondbacks stay atop the NL West for years to come.

Saber Bombs are MLB FanHouse's introduction to sabermetrics, those new and sometimes unwieldy metrics that are changing the way we think about baseball

If you're even a semi-ardent baseball fan, chances are good that you've seen MLB.com's new Gameday feature this year, which gives an incredible and detailed synopsis of the action on the field. The most interesting byproduct of the new Gameday is that Pitch FX data is now available to the general public for every pitch throw. If you're unfamiliar, Pitch FX measures the speed of each pitch in two places (at the release point and as it crosses the plate), as well as horizontal and vertical break. Many people see this wealth of information as the next frontier of sabermetrics, because it allows more detailed analysis than ever of each pitcher's start.

Earlier today, Brinson already told you about Nick Piecoro using Pitch FX to analyze Brandon Webb's "dead arm." Spurred on by that and Bob Melvin's claim of Randy Johnson's fastball being fine, despite radar gun reports, I decided to dig into Dan Brooks' Pitch FX tool to see if Melvin was right about the Unit. Follow along after the jump, and I'll show you how I answered the question.

Randy Johnson is 44 years old. Decreased velocity on his face melter of a fastball is kind of part of the gig, at least as it pertains to getting older. So who else are you gonna blame outside of Mother Nature when the Unit's speed dips another notch or two as he heads into his later years?

Because just chalking it up to age would be too simple, Bob Melvin is apparently going to blame the radar gun at Chase Field.

'Our in-game gun was off,' Melvin said. 'I'm looking up and seeing 87 and 88 [mph readings] throughout the game, and we had him catching 94 and averaging 91 on our gun. I don't want to say that it plays into it psychologically, but the pitcher can't help but look up there.'

Please bear in mind that Unit got straight lit for seven earned runs and 10 hits in less than five innings, so there's a reason behind the psychological justification here.

There's also the possibility that Melvin is just right about this; he stated that this happens in other parks and that usually the Chase Field gun is "pretty consistent". Of course, if it was, wouldn't the Snakes have seen this before? And also, this can apparently happen in a lefty v. lefty situation, but that seems like it would have been noticed with Johnson on the hill before too.

It's all very odd, especially when there's factual evidence that Brandon Webb, also showing signs of a dead arm, doesn't actually have decreased velocity. Then you add in the fact that radar guns at home parks are almost never under the home pitcher's speed, coupled with Johnson's age, and things seem a little shaky.

This right here, meaning this article in the Arizona Republic's D-backs blog, is why I really enjoy Nick Piecoro's work. Piercoro is obviously concerned with the well being of Brandon Webb; he is after all the best pitcher on the Snakes staff. Piecoro is also a "stats guy" if my broad brush doesn't offend you. So when he and the AZ Central staff go about investigating Webb's recent struggles, it gets pretty cool.

At our request, researcher Eric Seidman dug through MLB's Pitch-f/x data, looking at all of Webb's starts to see if there was any evidence of a decline in Webb's stuff. He found some.

[...]Seidman says sinkerball pitchers want low vertical movement and lots of horizontal movement. Clearly, after Webb's ninth start (May 15 vs. Colorado), he went from consistently getting about 10 or 11 inches of horizontal movement to getting between 5 and 8 inches.

So even though the velocity hasn't changed much except for his most recent start, he's throwing with less overall sink.

Check the link above for the actual change in the vertical and horizontal numbers, but it seems pretty clear that the evidence points towards Webb's "dead arm" that was previously mentioned. He's not throwing the ball with any less speed (meaning an injury seems unlikely) but the ball simply isn't jumping the way it normally would.

It's a fascinating way to look at the mini-evolution of a pitcher of a short period of the season; it's also one of the most ridiculously practical and helpful of the "crazy" stat functions that are so often maligned by the older media.

Baseball fights rule. We all know that. Usually though, they're not simply a result of a batter taking too long. But that was the case last night, as Doug Mientkiewicz teed off Randy Johnson by taking too long in the batter's box.

Basically, Doug (we're not friends, I'm just trying to save my CTRL button) stepped out of the batter's box as Johnson was winding up. This angered the tall, mulletted gentlemen who has killed small animals with baseballs before. (Shocking, I know.) And the result was an empyting of dugouts sans any actual violence. Unless you count the words. They were kind of violent, even later on (emph. mine).

'It didn't really bother me at all,' Johnson said. 'If it would have, he'd probably be in a stretcher and I'd be out of the game.'

[...]Said Mientkiewicz: 'I just wanted to get set in the box. I don't get many at-bats, and I want to make the most of them. But I also understand that he's going through the delivery there.'

That is so sad on so many levels. First of all, poor Doug and the only so many at bats statement. Sheesh. And Unit just comes off as psychotic at this point, since, you know, he basically said he would send Mientkiewicz to the hospital if he ever angered the tall fella.

Or maybe the Pirates knew this would knock Unit off of his game just threw Doug to the wolves. Either way, the lesson, as always, is not to do anything that would cause you to get in the way of Randy Johnson's fastball.