On May 29,49ers Bowman Jersey 365djerseys.com X0, the Rays faced the White Sox and lefty John Danks for the second time. In the first matchup, Danks struck out 9 and gave up just 2 hits in 8 innings. In the rematch, Danks only struck out 2 and the Rays would score 8 times. One difference was that Joe Maddon stacked the lineup with lefthanded batters. Last week we saw a similar scenario in which JoeMa loaded the lineup with righthanded bats against the righthanded Shaun Marcum of the Blue Jays. Why? Joe Maddon is kinda crazy. But also because Danks and Marcum throw changeups that are tough on oppositehanded batters. Joe Maddon does a lot of unorthodox things. Some work. Some don’t. Filling a lineup with a bunch of lefties against a lefthander is certainly one of the more unusual moves. But does it work? Tommy Rancel of DRays Bay dubbed this “The Danks Theory” and … If an opposing starting pitcher has a specific aboveaverage pitch that he throws to a certain type of batter, then let’s put a lineup together that neutralizes that pitch as much as possible, if such a lineup is possible,cheap nfl jerseys from china. The question is: How effective is The Danks Theory? While Maddon is neutralizing the strength of the pitcher, he appears to be doing this at the cost of neutralizing the strengths of his batters. That is,cheap whitney mercilus jersey, typically, a batter is more effective against an opposite handed pitcher (e.g. RHB vs LHP). Rancel admits that testing the theory is nearly impossible based on sample sizes. One way to analyze the theory would be to look at how the Rays performed in games under Maddon’s tenure in which The Danks Theory was employed. But there are problems with this method. While some games may be obvious, others may not. How would we know if Maddon employed The Danks Theory with only one or two batters? And even in the obvious games like May 29, we can’t be absolutely certain how many of the batters were utilized for The Danks Theory. For example, Dioner Navarro batted righthanded against Danks. Do we include his stats or not? Switchhitters present an interesting scenario. Anytime a switchhitter bats righthanded against righty or lefthanded versus a lefty, then we know The Danks Theory (or something similar) is being utilized. Also, consider that a righthanded batter faces righties all the time. But switchhitters are truly doing something unique under The Danks Theory. That is, a switchhitter never bats righthanded against a righty. So one way we can test The Danks Theory is to see how switchhitters do under these circumstances compared to their normal production levels. So let’s take a look at every switchhitter* that has played for Maddon and how they have performed under The Danks Theory… OK, not a lot of data here, so we really can’t draw any conclusions. But we do learn one thing: switchhitters under Maddon have never batted lefthanded against a lefthanded pitcher. So all of the above data is when switchhitters batted righthanded against a righty, as was the case for Navarro against Marcum. So what can we do? Well, we can look at how switchhitters as a group perform under The Danks Theory. Let’s take the total from the above table and compare that to how the group performs under normal conditions… To calculate the career totals, we weighed the contributions of each hitter. For example, Ben Zobrist accounts for 15.8% of The Danks Theory plate appearances, so his career stats contributed to 15.8% of the overall totals. So switchhitters appear to be improving their performance when they bat righthanded against a righty. Again, still not a lot of data. In theory,cheap new jersey nets jerseys, we would like another 100 plate appearances before we can be certain that switchhitters do better under The Danks Theory. But what is really important from this data,superbowl 49ers jerseys 365djerseys.com W8, is that we see the switchhitters are not performing worse under The Danks Theory. And as they say, so far, so good. Then again, maybe all this says is that Navarro needs to stop switchhitting. But hey, we’ve been saying that since 2008. *Four other switchhitters have played for Maddon (Greg Zaun, Elliot Johnson, Greg Norton, Raul Casanova) but never had a plate appearance under The Danks Theory.