Giancarlo Stanton goes to the illjured list with a left biceps strain. I’ve seen the reports, but they don’t mention what caused the injury. I once saw Ron Bloomberg injure himself on a swing, so I wonder if it’s something like that.
It looks like Clint Frazier will take the slugger’s place. It’s a chance for Frazier to play his way onto the team.
The Cardinals visit the Pirates for Pittsburgh’s home opener. It will be a match-up of pitchers trying to comeback from poor seasons as Adam Wainwright faces Chris Archer. Wainwright started downhill in 2016 at seasonal age 34. In that time his ERA stands at 4.77, but he is 27-18 thanks to good support. Injuries limited him to 40 1/3 innings in 2018. Archer’s ERA went up in each of the last three seasons, reaching 4.31 in 2018.
On the west coast, the Red Sox take on the Athletics with David Price battling Aaron Brooks. Price pitched well in Oakland during his career, going at least seven innings in six of his eight starts. Brooks played poorly in the majors up to this point. He owns low strikeout and walk rates, and at the MLB level that led to a high hit rate and a 8.01 career ERA.
Enjoy!
For the past two years Baseball Musings tried to help with playing Beat the Streak. The Day by Day Database keeps track of hit streak of at least five games. In addition, two programs produce top ten lists of players with a high probability of a hit. If you find this useful, please support Baseball Musings with a donation.
Here are the top picks my programs produced for use in Beat the Streak. This post mostly explains the ideas behind the calculations. In addition, this post shows tests on the Neural Network (NN). This post discusses an NN that includes the ballpark. I updated the models, and the results of those tests are here.
For 2019, I am just going to publish the Log5 hit averages and the NN probabilities with parks factored in. I am keeping track of the results here. I added a graph that gives a visual representation of the probability and success each day.
First, the Log5 Method picks:
Adam Jones went two for five on Sunday, and his batting average of .368 is the same as his hit average.
Here are the neural network picks:
These probabilities are very low. Once there is more data for 2019, we should see these probabilities closer to .750
Yelich’s hot start works its way into this listing. J.D. Martinez is the consensus pick, however.
I do not guarantee results. Your best pick is going to have a 25% chance of not getting a hit. Good luck!
Christian Yelich extended his lead in the Baseball Musings Batter Rankings Sunday. He homered for the fourth straight game, and hit a two-run double in the bottom of the ninth to win the game. He is hitting .500/.667/1.583 so far this season. He is followed by Anthony Rendon, J.D. Martinez, Mike Trout, and Alex Bregman, who drops to fifth. Martinez replaces Justin Turner in the top five. The Red Sox leftfielder for a night went two for three with two walks and a homer, but also committed an error that led to five unearned runs. Luckily for him, that doesn’t count in this analysis.
I wrote, Changing The Questions, discussing how our questioning strategies tend to serve us, not help the customer think about their situations, what they are trying to achieve, and what they might learn.
Turns out, managers are just as bad in the questions they ask sales people. (Perhaps, that’s why sales people are so bad.) Managers tend to ask questions that are helpful to them, but not to the sales people. For example:
The answers to these questions are helpful only to managers and in their reporting up the food chain. Often managers think of these as “coaching questions.”
But they aren’t helpful to the sales person. They don’t help the sales person think about what they are doing, why they have chosen a specific approach. They don’t help the sales person consider different ways of doing things, ways they might improve the way they engage the customer, how they can improve their ability to achieve their goals, how they can be more helpful to customers.
Questions that are helpful to the sales person are those that help them think about what they are doing and consider alternatives. They are questions that help them learn and apply those learning immediately. They are questions that help the sales person reflect, and, through that grow and develop.
Questions might include:
Or:
The questions can go on, but you get the point.
The difference between the first set of questions and the last two is profound. The first set is for the manager. Nothing in those questions help the sales people with what they are doing–whether it’s to improve their ability to win a deal, to manage their time better, to improve their skills or capabilities.
Questions that help sales people reflect, learn, improve are those that are most important to their performance—just like the same types of questions are important to customers.
These questions are, actually, the questions that are most important to managers, as well. The more we can help them grow and improve, the more effective they will be.
Questions are very powerful, that is, the right questions are very powerful!
Are you asking and provoking the right questions? Are you helping your sales people ask themselves the right questions? Are you helping them learn how to figure things out?
Xander Bogaerts is close to a contract extension with the Red Sox:
Shortstop Xander Bogaerts and the Boston Red Sox are finalizing a seven-year, $132 million contract extension, league sources tell ESPN’s Jeff Passan.ESPN.com
The deal, which was first reported as close by Boston radio station WEEI, includes the $12 million Bogaerts was scheduled to make this season, then $120 million over the final six years.
Salaries have been flat coming into this season, but it would appear that next year there will be a big rise in the average salary with all the extensions.
