No Sympathy For The Reds, Orlando Cabrera Edition

Insight_Bowl

Roy Fucking Halladay. As much as I’d love to write an article about how much I wish he was wearing a Cardinal uni yesterday (or Cliff Lee, who was excellent against Tampa…or Roy Oswalt, who goes for Philly in game two), it would really be beating a dead horse at this point.

Instead, we’ll talk about what Orlando Cabrera had to say about Halladay’s no-hit/one walk/eight K shutout performance:

“Another umpire, he [Halladay] wouldn’t have thrown a game like that,” Cabrera said. “He was getting every pitch. We had no chance. We had to swing.”

Must…resist…little bitches…reference…

There are two ways to handle O-Crab’s thoughts – 1) say “Shut the fuck up.” 2) Orrrr, you could use facts (drumroll…graphs and charts!) to prove him wrong. From here on out, whenever you come across anyone who has anything to do with the Reds and/or Cincinnati, and can call them out for being dumb, you take the opportunity to do so.

Check out the PitchFX data from Brooks Baseball:

I know it’s a little hard to decipher at first glance, but it charts all of Halladay’s pitches in relation to the strike zone, and describes the result of each pitch by the color of the box. Okay, you’re not five years old, I’ll get to the point.

As you can see, the only called strike outside of the zone is the light red box to the right, around the 2.2 foot high mark. If anything, the umpire was more wrong than right – I count four green boxes inside the strike zone that should have been called a strike, with a few more near the border. So Orlando Cabrera was wrong to complain about the umpire? Man, I am absolutely shocked.

I hope you end up looking like the coolest nerd in your office today. Stop by my mom’s basement if you want to hang out; it’s lonely down here sometimes.

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