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May 5, 2010

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Tyler Greene: Leadoff Hitter

It’s been said, by people far smarter than me, that the day-in and day-out batting orders aren’t that important.  Specifically, this was noted in the excellent book The Book by Tom Tango and company, which I feel is underrated or at least under-discussed mostly because of its terribly generic name.  I don’t have my copy of The Book with me right now, probably because its in storage, but if I recall correctly the very best lineup, used in every game, only nets about 5-6 wins over a season compared to the very worst lineup.  No one uses the very worst lineup, except maybe the Royals, and the value in each individual game is fairly marginal.

Nevertheless, when I see someone like Tyler Greene batting leadoff, I sit up and take notice.  Some Tyler Greene facts:

  • Career .200 hitter in the majors
  • Career .264 OBP in the majors
  • Career .335 OBP in the minors
  • Only decent offensive year at any level inflated by a .350 BAbip
  • Named his son Brayden

Brayden?  Christ, that kid is stuck with the douchiness of the name “Braden” multiplied the uncalled-for need of every parent these days to stick a “y” where it doesn’t belong.  No, I don’t want to meet your baby daughter Tyffyny.  I already know I won’t lyke her.

Inexcusable parenting decisions aside, those aren’t the stats you want to see from a leadoff hitter.  Those aren’t the stats you want to see from any hitter in the lineup, but assuming you absolutely must play Tyler Greene for some reason, you’d ideally like him getting as few PAs as possible.  So why was Tyler Greene setting the table for Ryan Ludwick and Albert Pujols?  I’m going to give Tony La Russa the benefit of that doubt that he hadn’t placed a bet on the Phillies before the game, so I’m pretty sure the answer is because he’s right handed.

In fact, the entire lineup was right handed last night, which also meant that four out of nine of the batters in the lineup were batting somewhere around .200.  That is A Bad Thing and against a good pitcher like Hamels there’s really no doubt in my mind why the Cardinals only scored one run last night.  You can’t play with half a lineup and expect to do some damage.  Mather and Greene are AAAA players and Brendan Ryan is the kind of guy you accept in the lineup only when there aren’t two other guys hitting even worse.

I realize that in Tony La Russa’s mind, sending a lefhanded batter to face a lefthanded pitcher is like trying to beat “rock” with “scissors”.  In years past, he’s been able to get a lot out of marginal guys by playing the percentages.  But Greene and Mather don’t look like marginal guys.  There’s no reason to be running them out there instead of Colby Rasmus or Skip Schumaker.  Rasmus, especially.  It’s one thing when you’re platooning a Schumaker, a vet with several years under his belt and a .522 OPS against lefties.  But Rasmus is young, has success in the minors against southpaws (.826 OPS compared to .860 against righties), and is the future of the team.

Sure, Rasmus has struggled in (limited) playing time against lefthanded pitchers so far in the majors.  But he’s not going to learn to hit them sitting on the bench.  I’m having flashbacks to 1999 and a young J.D. Drew losing playing time in CF to the corpse of Shawon Dunston.  That’s not something I want to see repeated this season.  If we’re going to have a black hole in the lineup, let it be the slick fielding young player who is still developing, not Joe Mather.

And if Tyler Greene absolutely must be in the lineup, please don’t bat him leadoff.

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May 3, 2010

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A True Challenge Awaits

A quick quote from Dustin Pedroia, aka “The Good David Eckstein”, courtesy of mlb.com

“Everyone thought Baltimore was three easy wins and we got [beat] three times.”

I always like it when I see those little brackets in a statement by a baseball player.  It means they said something essentially unpublishable, at least on parts of the internet where old people might see it, but the quote was so important that it had to remain in the article.  I also like to imagine what really words were really there.  It was probably something like:

“Everyone thought Baltimore was three easy wins and we got our asses kicked three times.”

But I prefer to think it was actually a long winded, Aristocrats-style description of the recent Red Sox futility that would make even Ichiro at the all-star game blush.  A length metaphor involving handcuffs, a tub of vegetable oil, a deck chair, a zebra, and Jonathan Papelbon’s entire immediate family.  If they’re just going to edit the quote anyway, why not get a little bit more specific?

That’s not why I started with that quote.  I started with that quote because I think it represents a bad attitude.  One of the amazing things about baseball is that anyone can win a series.  Not everyone can win the World Series, because the Cubs, but in a three game set, even a terrible team can beat a good one.  There are no easy wins, and throwing that out there is just being a sore loser.

This is all an incredibly long-winded caveat to what I really want to say, which is that the Cardinals’ first big test starts tonight in Philadelphia.  That is not to say that this season so far has been full of “easy wins” or that the teams they faced weren’t a challenge.  But this series is one that threatens to reveal the soft, meaty underbelly of the Cardinals success so far.

The Phillies are probably the best team in the NL.  They’ve got a big lineup in a little ballpark, and that’s not going to bode well for a starting rotation that has been exceptionally lucky.  Right now the team ERA is 2.56.  I don’t want to say they’ve been doing it with smoke and mirrors, but there’s certainly been some sleight of hand involved.

Jaime Garcia, tonight’s starter, has a .221 BAbip on the year.  That’s not quite “J.A. Happ with runners in scoring position” lucky (.173 for his career dear god) but its not sustainable.  Penny, who goes on Wednesday, hasn’t given up a single HR yet.  That probably won’t be true on Thursday.

Speaking of Thursday, the match-up looks to be Kyle Lohse versus Roy Halladay.  That’s the kind of game only true fans watch.

When the pitching craters–or at least comes back down to Earth–the offense has to be there to pick it up.  Outside of David Freese hitting above his pay grade lately and Pujols being Pujols,  it just hasn’t been there.  That’s gotta change, and I’m looking to Joe Blanton or Kyle Kendrick or Citizens Bank Park to help us change that.

On the subject of Pujols?  Yeah, he’s striking out a lot.  But can we at least lay off the worrying and fretting until he’s his OPS (1.080) falls below his career OPS (10.55)?

Oh no!  He’s only hitting slightly better than his historically-significant-as-the-best-for-a-right-handed-hitter OPS!  He’s missing more pitches he must be broken!  Sound the alarm!

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April 18, 2010

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I Don’t Even Know Where to Begin

I confess, I am a bad baseball fan. When Felipe Lopez grounded into that double play to end the ninth inning, I just assumed the game was over. I didn’t expect the bullpen to be able to throw another shutout inning, let alone seven of them. I left to go out to dinner, expecting that Motte would come in throwing fastball after fastball and give up a merciful home run.

And now I kind of wish he did, because the game was still on when I came home two hours later. I hurried through the box score and the play by play, discovering strange move after strange move by Tony La Russa, baserunning gaffes, and the beginning of a scoreless inning by Felipe Lopez.

There’s really too much to write about and I’m sure that other places will cover it far more in depth. Better fans, fans who didn’t have plans that evening, can tell the story with far more detail and insight than me.

I will say this, though. La Russa made some mistakes and he’s getting toasted for it by the fans. However, no manager plans for a 20 inning game.

I go back and forth on whether I like La Russa. He makes some infuriating decisions, but so does pretty much every manager in baseball. Whenever he fouls up, I remember he’s not serial career destroyer Dusty Baker. He’s not Joe Girardi, who would have found a way to keep Adam Wainwright in the bullpen after 2006. He’s not Trey Hillman, who will undoubtedly use Yuniensky Betancourt’s strong first week to keep him in the lineup all season.

La Russa has been with the Cardinals for so long, he’s the devil I know. He’s going to make too many bullpen moves. He tries a different lineup every day. He keeps his backup catcher in an undisclosed location just in case Yadier Molina’s plane goes down. He thinks that a “surprise hit and run” is a good idea and not what got Josh Hancock killed. And he fucked up last night.

I’d still rather have him than risk who he could be replaced with.

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April 16, 2010

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The Bud Norris Conundrum

Bud Norris in three starts against the Cardinals:

18 IP, 1.17 WHIP,  0.00 ERA

Bud Norris against everyone else:

45.1 IP, 1.78 WHIP, 6.15 ERA

What does this mean?  Probably nothing, we’re still in the realm of small sample size.  Nevertheless, when a guy who’s getting rocked by the rest of the league shuts down your team three times in a row you have to take notice.  You have to wonder what he’s doing.  So what is he doing?

He’s throwing fastballs and he’s throwing sliders.  He has a change-up but he rarely throws it and it sits around 87 MPH, which is harder than many pitchers throw any pitch (see Trever Miller, for an example).  His slider is also around 87 MPH.  With a 94 MPH fastball, this isn’t exactly what we’d call changing speeds.

To say that his command of the strike zone is inconsistent would be too generous.  Even in his 18 innings against the Cardinals, he’s walked 9 batters.  That’s actually in line with his other starts, where he averages a walk every two innings or so.  So he’s not pitching with better control against the Cardinal batters, they just aren’t hitting him.  Even with such a small sample size, that’s fairly concerning.

I could be wrong about Norris.  He actually has fairly good numbers in the minors–striking out over a batter an inning through his career–though even there is control was a concern.  However, he has two problems that make him stick out as a starting pitcher whose success in AAA won’t translate to the big leagues.  He doesn’t really have a third pitch and he has trouble throwing strikes.

Of course if he keep starting against the Cardinals, the sky is the limit and we should start engraving his Hall of Fame plaque.

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April 13, 2010

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The Start of a Season

Baseball is back, the Cardinals are back, and a week into the season I barely have anything to complain about.  I’ve put off writing this entry because it’s the first entry and I wanted it to be good.  Complaining is good.  It’s not terribly productive but it makes for far more interesting writing than praise.  For example, take the following sentence:

If not for the current scandal in the Catholic Church, this last week of baseball would have been the worst atrocity committed by a group of Cardinals in recent memory.

Wouldn’t that have been a nice lead-in?  It sets a tone.  Biting.  Acerbic.  Borderline offensive.  That’s what I want.  I could have even drawn a comparison between Tony La Russa’s refusal to bench David Freese and the decision of Pope Benedict (née Ratzinger) to relocate rather than dismiss pedophiles.  That’s just the sort of outrageous and stupid sports commentary that generates controversy and traffic.

But what am I supposed to say about the Cardinals 5-2 start?  If I’m too optimistic, I’m a homer.  I’m the fan who sits next to you at the sports bar and waxes poetically about the slick fielding of Brendan Ryan, comparing it to Ozzie Smith in his heyday.  I’m the guy who calls into KFNS 590 and has to be cut off when his description of Matt Holliday’s swing starts to verge on the homoerotic.  If I’m too pessimistic, I piss off the Astros fans who actually have a reason to be pessimistic.

And seriously the Astros fans have a ton of reasons to be pessimistic.  Goddamn.  I’m sure I’m going to have plenty of complaining on here as the year goes on, as the team slumps, but the Astros will remain as a reality check.  Whenever I’m feeling like my life isn’t going how I like, I remind myself that I’m not an orphan in Darfur.  Whenever the baseball season isn’t going how I like, I will remind myself that I am not an Astros fan.

With all that in mind, I will do the only thing I can think of.  I will be cautiously optimistic about the Cardinals.  Of course, cautious optimism is the most boring of all the outlooks.  For example, you don’t see protestors on CNN and FOX News with signs reading “There are some good things in this healthcare plan, maybe we should wait and see how they play out”.  That’s not good TV and probably would require a comically large sign anyway.

After today, I’ll try and do rundowns of each game.  What I saw, what I liked, what I didn’t like, and how I think it will affect the season as it goes on.  Right now there’s not that much point in that, but I’ll start off with this: two players I think will be critical to the Cardinals success this year.  (I’m disqualifying Pujols, Holliday, Wainwright, and Carpenter because…well…DUHHHHHH)

Colby Rasmus, CF: Seven games is a small sample size, but something is different about Colby Rasmus.  Last season, Rasmus was a free swinger.  He wasn’t quite Jeff Francoeur, but he was pretty bad.  He swung at 50.1% of total pitches, which was good for 20th in the league.  That isn’t a bad thing, per se.  Pablo Sandoval was 3rd, Adam Jones was 6th.  However, Rasmus had a couple things going against him that neither of these guys did.  First off, he was one of the worst players in the majors at making contact out of he strike zone, only making contact 51.3 percent of the time.  Unlike Pablo Sandoval, who follows in the footsteps of Vladimir Guerrero as a batter who can drive a pitch in the dirt or up near his head, Rasmus was awful with pitches out of the zone.

Rasmus also had a mediocre BAbip, meaning that he hit a lot of balls right at fielders. That’s not necessarily his fault.  He’s a fast guy who hits line drives.  A .282 BAbip is way lower than expected from someone with his skillset.  Unfortunately for Colby and his Rookie of the Year aspirations, he hit a long patch of bad luck.  All of this was compounded by a hiatal hernia which sapped him of his strength midway through the season.  No power, no luck, and no patience was a bad mix and the former first round pick disappointed.

Everyone expected that he’d put on weight with the hernia in the past.  Those of us who understand BAbip expected that he’d have better luck with batted balls.  His patience, however, is a nice surprise.  He already has 9 walks after only taking 36 free passes all of last season.  Before last nights game, he had one of the lowest swing percentages in all of baseball, swinging at only 30% of all pitches he’s seen.

Rasmus was once a top 10 prospect.  He’s had some ups and downs in AAA and MLB in the last couple seasons, but if he can put it together it will be a huge boost to the Cardinals.  Even with the setbacks last year, he was one of the better defensive CF in baseball, putting up a 8.9 UZR.  That put him behind only Franklin Gutierrez, BJ Upton, and Mike Cameron (and Rasmus had considerably less playing time than any of them).

Ryan Franklin, RHP: Colby Rasmus is the “optimism”.  Ryan Franklin is the “caution”.  Yes, I realize that the closer is not terribly important.  A closer only pitches around 70 innings, doesn’t always face the toughest part of the lineup, and is generally the most overrated position in baseball (other than DH).  However, Ryan Franklin is awful.  And I don’t mean “awful” in the sort of way that you talk about someone who is going through a rough patch.  The only rough patch that Ryan Franklin is going through is his hideous facial hair.  This is Ryan Franklin being Ryan Franklin.

A funny thing happened last year after Ryan Franklin was named the closer for the St. Louis Cardinals.  The stars aligned.  Specifically, a fluky homerun rate aligned with a preposterous BAbip that only started correcting at the end of the season.  Suddenly a journeyman pitcher who was, at best, a serviceable middle reliever turned into a perceived RELIEF ACE.  His ERA and WHIP plummeted while his K/BB ration only improved a tiny bit.  Anyone could have seen his late season problems coming.  It wasn’t because he was overworked.  It was because he was Ryan Franklin.  And Ryan Franklin isn’t that good.

It’s not his fault.  When you watch Animal Planet and you see a lion eating a gazelle, do you blame the gazelle?  No.  The gazelle did nothing wrong.  It was just a gazelle.  Ryan Franklin is just Ryan Franklin.  He could have a place on this team as a long reliever but he’s not someone you  want in high leverage situations.  He walks too many people and he allows way too many fly balls.  And while the closer isn’t always put in to face the best hitters, he’s usually put in during close games.  You don’t want to put in someone who walks too many people.

Of course, what are the Cardinals supposed to do?  Their relief options are limited.  McClellan has been shaky.  Motte does this: and opposing batters have caught on.  Hawksworth is probably the best option, but you don’t always want your best pitcher in as your closer anyway.  Closer by committee?  It would be nice, but La Russa practically invented the modern closer.

I think we’re just going to have to hope that Franklin starts getting lucky again, and stays lucky.  A team can survive with a mediocre closer.  It just can’t survive a terrible closer.

That’s it for my first post.  Look forward to updates after games and whenever else I feel like it.