Everyone reported safe and sound.
- The Sergio Santos Saga continues: "Carlos Quentin is abusing Santos in their BP session. Looks great. A. Jones said, "Damn Carlos, you gonna make an out?"" Good luck making the roster.
- The club is receptive to Paul Konerko signing an extension but "[a]t the same time, Williams admitted, "not everyone finishes his career here.""
- Jermaine Dye thinks he's a veteran who deserves respect: ''There's nothing close,'' Dye said. ''Still a few teams calling, couple teams made offers, but nothing really worth it. Anaheim made an offer, but they could only offer me 200-250 at-bats. Toronto made an offer; they wanted me to play right field every day, but the money was ridiculous.''
- Quentin isn't going to be loquacious once the season starts: "It's my third year here, (so) people know me better,'' Quentin said. "It takes a while to get to know how I've always been. Once games start, I'll take it back to how I planned, and I thank you guys for respecting that.''
- And some fun stuff on pitch sequencing:
Sliders after a previous slider have better results than the average slider. This is seen in the whiff rate and in the slugging on contact. Similarity for fastballs there is better performance after a previous fastball, although it is seen just in the slugging on contact fastballs. So the whiff rate on a fastball following a fastball is a little lower than the average fastball, but the slugging rate is much lower. On the other hand both of these pitches are worse after the other compared to their average performance.
Maybe batters facing these two-pitch pitchers expect a slider after a fastball, and vice versa, and when they see the same one again it trips them up. Or again this could be some sort of sampling effect. Either way I hope to continue this analysis looking at the interaction of subsequent pitches based on their location and movement.