Rays Tank: Plays at the plate, shutting down Smyly

Yesterday, the Rays beat the Yankees 4-3, in part because of a play at home where Ryan Hanigan appeared to block the plate. Here's the play:

The out call may have been upheld, because MLB issued a clarification to the plate-blocking rule yesterday as well.

Joe Maddon's synopsis seems to apply:

Affirmed Tampa Bay's Joe Maddon: "I think the biggest thing is even blocking the plate and the runner's so far away from him and you can see that the runner is clearly going to be out, that you can't alter the call because of the fact that he was in his way. That would be the biggest thing."

Also, he Rays will shut down Drew Smyly to keep him from exceeding previous innings totals by too much.

Other Links:

There's a good series of articles on FanGraphs right now, where a scout talks about his system for evaluating the hit tool. Parts one and two both went up yesterday. Vogelbach mention.

September ninth (yesterday) was a big day in baseball history. Why should you care? I'm not sure, but September 9 is also my mom's birthday. Your present will arrive any day, Mom, and I really did call you, but you didn't pick up.

I agree with this impulse -- it's worthwhile to remove arbitrary weights and replace them with meaningful ones -- but why calculate wISO at all? Why not just use wOBACON (wOBA on balls that the batter makes contact)? I suppose that wISO is a bit easier to calculate, but if your goal is to represent the potency of a players' swing, wOBACON seems like the more intuitive metric. I'm open to being persuaded otherwise.

Good job, y'all. The Rays currently got the second most responses for Tom Tango's fan scouting report, behind only the Toronto Blue Jays. But is that acceptable? No. Losing to the Blue Jays is not acceptable. Go fill out the fan scouting report.

Speaking of Tango, interesting question he posed about individual park factors. Anybody feel like looking into this for the Rays? Front page is calling.

The Mets are shutting David Wright down for the season on account of his hurting shoulder.