The Dodgers have the best record in the National league, and are only one win off of Tampa's 18-8 mark for the best in baseball. A big part of that is Matt Kemp, who is making Bryan LaHair's numbers look pedestrian this year. Kemp has hit 12 HRs to LaHair's 7, though their wOBAs aren't that far off when you also note that LaBomb has also hit 8 doubles. He has more XBH than singles! Aside from Kemp, catcher A.J. Ellis (who?) and Andre Ethier are having big years at the plate, and Jerry Hairston of all people is not only still being employed by a professional baseball team but it putting up good numbers and playing great defense based on the enormous sample of three innings that I've watched. Despite the departure of the underrated Hiroki Kuroda their pitching staff is rolling right along, with retreads Aaron Harang and Chris Capuano posting solid numbers in the back of what was already a solid rotation.
Pitching matchups
ERA, FIP, xFIP, and ZiPS projected FIP listed
Due to the off-day Ted Lilly could pitch on Sunday instead, maybe shifting around the Dodgers rotation the other days. Clayton Kershaw pitched on Wednesday so the Cubs will not face him this series.
Friday: Chad Billingsley, RHP (2.64, 4.24, 3.63, 3.58) vs Paul Maholm, LHP (6.20, 6.01, 5.07, 4.13), 1:20 PM CT
Remember when Billingsley had a bad stretch a few years back and people were worried that he was broken? Me neither. Billingsley posted FIPs in the high 3's in 2009 and 2011 which were not great for him but still something that most SPs would love to post. Billingsley walks more guys than I remembered (~3.8 per nine) but that's what you'd expect from a strikeout guy. Unlike most strikeout pitchers, he gets a surprising amount of ground balls and does an especially good job at keeping the ball in the park (career 0.69 HR/9).
Maholm was supposed to pitch in the last series, but it was pushed back due to Tuesday's rainout. In the interest of laziness I'll just copy the same blurb.
Maholm finally had start where he did Paul Maholm things last time out. He still gave up a HR, which has been his main problem this year, but most importantly he induced 15 ground balls. He only had one strikeout, but blowing away hitters is not his gameplan.
Saturday: Chris Capuano, LHP (2.73, 3.74, 3.94, 3.97) vs Matt Garza, RHP (2.67, 2.96, 3.02, 3.38), 12:05 PM CT
Capuano's return to starting pitcher-dom seems even more surprising than the thought of Jeff Samardzija, transformed pitcher. Capuano posted meh to okayish numbers with the Brewers before missing over two years to various injuries and setbacks. The desparate for pitching Mets put him into their rotation last year and not only did he manage to post solid numbers (4.04 FIP), but he also managed to set a personal record for strikeout rate and even more surprisingly held up to make 31 starts. Capuano signed for a 2/10 deal with the Dodgers which could end up as a steal.
This Garza guy is pretty good. I caught most of his last start against the Phillies, one of his best since his no-hitter with the Rays, and had convinced myself for several innings that he was on the verge of throwing another one. I had forgotten about the bloop hit that Rollins recorded in the first Phllies PA of the game though (laughing).
Sunday: Aaron Harang, RHP (5.72, 3.71, 3.68, 4.03) vs Chris Volstad, RHP (6.11, 3.21, 3.70, 4.39), 1:20 PM CT
Look at what happened in the first inning of Volstad's last start
- Bunt hit to pitcher
- Strikeout
- Groundball single to shortstop
- Groundball single to center
- Strikeout
- Walk
- Groundball single to right
- Line drive single to right, followed by a fielding error
- Groundball out to end the inning
It certainly looks like much of Volstad's problems this year have been sequencing. His BABIP is at a reasonable .313 (especially for a GB guy), his strikeout rate is up, batters aren't hitting him unusually hard (19.4% LD rate), and his walk and HR rates are down. It loosk like the main culprit is an absurdly low 49.7% LOB%. I don't think Volstad is the reincarnation of Cy Young or anything, but there's plenty of reasons to think he's much better than the results we've seen.
Harang's also has a big ERA-FIP split, but most of that seems to be related to his .341 BABIP and the 30.5% LD rate that produced it. He's striking out a lot of batters this year, but when batters do it it they're hitting it hard, and he's also walking a lot more guys than usual. It's especially surprising for Harang, who was always very stingy with walks in his years with the Reds.
Comments
Marmol ——-> Not the closer
I guess Dolis or Wood gets the job
BerseliusQuote Reply
It sounds like they’re going to closer-by-committee it with Russell and Dolis
BerseliusQuote Reply
Abreu ——–> Dodgers
BerseliusQuote Reply
@ Berselius:
I was going to write something about Marmol, but this just irritates me. He’s got nearly 2 years on his contract and is obviously someone the team would like to trade because of that. He’s not going to regain his value by demoting him. He has sucked this year and has been overrated for a long time now, but this team sucks. James Russell isn’t the answer. Maybe Dolis can step into that role later on, but the way to handle this is to give Marmol more time on the side and less time during games until you’re comfortable with him. You don’t demote him, but you give the occasional save opp to another pitcher.
mb21Quote Reply
I was listening to the Dodger yesterday and the announcer opined that AJ Ellis must have one of the highest proportion of balls seen per at-bat. He was right, AJ was tied with Adam Dunn for #1. Whoever he is, he’s one patient sumbitch.
joshQuote Reply
this could be interesting
http://www.cbssports.com/mlb/blog/eye-on-baseball/18955297/ncaa-mlb-in-talks-for-partnership-to-help-college-baseball
GWQuote Reply
@ mb21:
But that raises the question of whether a few good innings will erase, in a team’s mind, all of last season. I think most teams are going to see a guy who was an awesome setup man and then floundered in a closer role. And if they look at the numbers, they’re not even going to return Theo’s calls.
joshQuote Reply
http://www.sports-reference.com/blog/2012/05/war-upgraded-on-baseball-reference-com/
mb21Quote Reply
Dempster leads the team in rWAR with 1.4. LaHair 2nd at 1.3 (he has 1.4 ndWAR). Castro has 1.2. Garza .8 and if I recall from this morning F7 has .2.
mb21Quote Reply
@ GW:
That could be huge. I wonder how it affects minor league baseball. Teams would probably still pay a premium to get pitchers, at least, under their control so college coaches can’t have them throw 5000 pitches in a game
BerseliusQuote Reply
@ josh:
His best season was in 2010 as a closer. He stumbled last year and even more this year, but you aren’t going to get anything if you remove him from the closer’s role. The Cubs aren’t going to get anything anyway. The question is how much salary relief they get and assuming he rebounds as a closer I think they could get some team to pay all or nearly all of the remaining money he’s owed.
mb21Quote Reply
Berselius wrote:
Does that really happen anymore? College teams have their closers now and pitchers start once a week.
I would assume this type of partnership would essentially make college baseball the low minor leagues. I would guess teams would cut the number of minor league teams they have (some have done that already).
mb21Quote Reply
@ mb21:
It may well be that the behind-the-scenes plan is to get him right again. Didn’t they do that last season?
joshQuote Reply
@ mb21:
It sounds good. College baseball is already similar to the minor leagues (although not associated with a particular team until draft… and that won’t change). Might as well have MLB pay for the players to train instead of tax dollars. Also if it helps more players migrate to the sport instead of basketball or football, then it is great news.
Isn’t there a rule though with scholarships where if you give X amount of dollars for scholarships to men sports then the same has to be applied to women sports?
WaLiQuote Reply
@ mb21:
It still happens sometimes. IIRC Keith Law has blasted the HC at Rice for abusing pitchers.
BerseliusQuote Reply
@ mb21:
boyd nation tries to keep track of outings that catch his eye. i don’t see anything too egregious this year, but there have definitely been some in the last couple
http://www.boydsworld.com/data/pitchcount.html
GWQuote Reply
@ mb21:
I’d try to reunite Marmol with Rothschild now that Mo Rivera is gone. Let the Yanks pay 1-2M of each years salary and see if ole Larry can get him straightened out. That is unless Rothschild wants nothing to do with him.
NateQuote Reply
I’d think teams would rather develop their own players than let NCAA coaches do it. Plus minor leaguers play ball and nothing else. College kids have school and stuff.
NateQuote Reply
So, who ends up with the closer gig? I would think Casey Coleman is a dark horse
GWQuote Reply
@ Nate:
I bet the Yankees jump at the chance to add a guy they have to fix after losing the best closer in baseball.
joshQuote Reply
Agree with MB. The smart thing would have been to say “he needs to get it turned around so we will be giving a break from the 9th inning for a little while until he gets his mechanics straightened out.” It keeps pressure off him without humiliating him, saves a little of closer status veneer, and takes pressure off whoever fills in for him while they limit him to 6th inning garbage time situations.
Suburban kidQuote Reply
@ mb21:
We’re trying to win games here.
GBTSQuote Reply
@ josh:
well what i meant was he’d come on the dirt cheap, as cubs would pay for everything. given the rothschild connection, i thought there might be a possibility he would feel capable of “fixing” him, therefore potentially obtaining a somewhat dominant reliever for almost nil. The given in that scenario was that no one else wanted him
NateQuote Reply
MCA —–> Fighting for the Right to Party in the Afterlife
joshQuote Reply
@ Nate:
But then, there’s no advantage to the Cubs. They get $50 (or whatever league minimum is) in salary relief, and that’s it. I’m guessing that they use Marmol as a short inning reliever, give him a few 1-2 batter appearances, get his shit straightened out, and then move him into the setup or closer role. Or just cut him.
joshQuote Reply
josh wrote:
Fixed
MuckerQuote Reply
Sigh. I’d forgotten just how much I listened to these guys way back when.
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEbVuO3Or5E
uncle daveQuote Reply
My daughter follows the Rev Run on twitter and just told me. RIP Adam Yauch, the one from Brooklyn.
Suburban kidQuote Reply
@ GW:
I forgot they kept track of that. There are only a few starts on that list that stand out to me and they actually stand out because the pitcher wasn’t even pitching all that well. Then again, I don’t care that much about pitch counts. I care more about the short rest starts than anything else.
mb21Quote Reply
@ mb21:
I’ve read that studies indicate Tommy John – requiring injuries are most strongly correlated with innings pitched
joshQuote Reply
@ mb21:
yeah, the friday starter pitching in a doubleheader on sunday, or a reliever pitching twice and then getting an unexpected sunday start… these are the troubling things
GWQuote Reply
@ uncle dave:
Shitty way to go, too. Sad.
joshQuote Reply
@ Nate:
It works pretty well for the NFL. The advantage to MLB is that the players who are weeded out early on won’t end up being drafted. MLB lets the NCAA do the weeding out while they sift through the rest.
The real question for me is if this is an eventuality as I think it is, how does this affect international free agents? My quick guess is that it would lead to fewer international free agents signing. The success rate in the draft would be significantly higher than in international free agency so teams would prefer go that route. That’s just a guess though.
mb21Quote Reply
The Astros are providing sabermetrics at the ballpark. http://www.crawfishboxes.com/2012/5/4/2996867/fun-fridays-three-astro-things
Why is it that when the Cubs finally become involved with saber another team in their same division tops them? Didn’t the Astros hire 3 or 4 of the best analysts this offseason?
mb21Quote Reply
@ GW:
Do you think mlb could better educate the college ranks to limit this kind of thing or do you think mlb wouldn’t even care? I lean toward them not caring. I see no reason to think they would.
mb21Quote Reply
@ mb21:
I noticed on the WGN broadcast they were showing players’ BABIP along with AVG. That’s kind of cool.
joshQuote Reply
@ mb21:
It’s pretty obvious the Cubs waited too long to adopt this kind of strategy, and now Theo is going to be fighting to keep the team up with everyone else. Hopefully he’s creative enough to find the exploitable holes in the new system before anyone else does.
joshQuote Reply
@ mb21:
yep. fortunately they have been banished, though i have mixed feelings about that (should have been you, milwaukee)
GWQuote Reply
@ josh:
Well, short of being chased off a cliff by naked ladies, I’m not sure there’s a great way to go. But, yeah, it sucks. I gotta say that for a good chunk of my life, the Beastie Boys were exactly the right band at the right time. I was a punk junior high kid when “Licensed to Ill” came out, had started getting high to “Paul’s Boutique,” dropped out of college and did the skater/slacker thing to “Check Your Head,” cleaned up, got back into school, and was a snooty intellectual to “Ill Communication,” blocked “Hello Nasty” out of my memory somehow, marched in the war protests listening to “To the Five Boroughs,” and was pleasantly brought back to it all as an old man by “Hot Sauce Committee Number Two.”
I’m not sure I can think of a death that seems more connected to my past and memories than this one, at least holding friends and family to one side.
uncle daveQuote Reply
mb21 wrote:
I’d have to agree that this is most likely the line of thinking here. We see it most obviously from the NBA, where the age limit and prohibition on taking kids straight out of high school is nothing more than an effort to limit their financial exposure to kids who haven’t played at a high level.
Still, I don’t know if MLB will really benefit all that much from expanding their ‘partnership’ with the NCAA. Baseball, basketball and football are materially different in terms of player development. I think that the NFL is justified in not letting high school kids go pro — an 18-year-old would be in grave physical danger playing in that league. I think it’s instructive that kids typically sit out a year before even playing in college…the physical rigors are just too much for someone who isn’t ready.
In basketball, it becomes pretty easy to gauge talent once players have one or two years of college ball under their belts. I think that some skills aren’t perfectly projectable from one level to the next, so having that intermediate step helps.
I’m not sure that it would be quite as easy to take advantage of that in baseball, though. If you could draft kids straight out of A-ball (which I guess would be a decent analogue for, say, the SEC) you’d still have a very high bust rate. Even the most polished kids rarely jump from the NCAA to the bigs, and we have guys who kill at AAA and still don’t make it. And it also seems like the need to adjust and adapt to higher levels of play takes time, regardless of the level of competition.
Maybe this isn’t just a cynical ploy to pawn off development costs on colleges and is really aimed at building the profile of the game. I dunno, though.
uncle daveQuote Reply
Wow, Sveum is letting Maholm swing away with one out and a man on?
Rice CubeQuote Reply
@ Rice Cube:
Or not. Weak.
Rice CubeQuote Reply
Levine thinks Marmol was overworked:
http://espn.go.com/blog/chicago/cubs/post/_/id/9810/overuse-to-blame-for-marmols-woes
That might explain the drop in velocity but I’m not sure what that does to control.
Rice CubeQuote Reply
@ Rice Cube:
Overuse? I can’t even remember a time when the Cubs had consistent save opps. 2010, I guess?
joshQuote Reply
josh wrote:
When you never, ever have a 1-2-3 inning, I guess the stress piles up.
uncle daveQuote Reply
WTF just happened? How do you double on a grounder to CF? Did it bounce off a guy? Did Matt kemp trip?
Rice CubeQuote Reply
@ uncle dave:
Fair enough.
joshQuote Reply
@ Rice Cube:
Honestly? Pure grit and a clever slide, where he pulled his hand back and the guy missed the tag.
joshQuote Reply
NOBODY FUCKS WITH DEJESUS
uncle daveQuote Reply
That’s never going to get old. Trust me.
uncle daveQuote Reply
uncle d, i was on board since the single “She’s On It” came out and saw the Raising Hell tour three times on two continents. I was technically already too old for this kind of music (we have established I am ancient) but it was thrilling to be around for one of the all time great bands for the beginning of their career for a change. Hello Nasty was actually a really good record IMO.
Suburban kidQuote Reply
How come on days where the wind is blowing in virtually every ball hit in the air “Would have been a homerun on any other day” and yet when the wind is blowing out, the Cubs still only hit maybe 1 a game. The math doesn’t add up.
joshQuote Reply
@ josh:
Shitty variance.
Rice CubeQuote Reply
@ josh:
It didn’t stop JHJ from hitting a homer today, after all.
uncle daveQuote Reply
Rice Cube wrote:
Suburban kidQuote Reply
@ Suburban kid:
That’s the one good thing I can say about getting older — nobody can tell you what you can and can’t listen to. I’m jealous, never got to see them myself. First I was too young, then too broke, then out of the country for a while…the list goes on. (I also never saw the Rolling Stones, having passed on seeing the Steel Wheels tour at the Hoosierdome because who the fuck would pay like $15 to see a buncha old men?)
I’d actually been contemplating whether or not to revisit “Hello Nasty” so maybe I will now. I think that at the time, it was a pretty stark departure from what they had done and what everyone else was doing, and since I was a bit down on the genre as the production got thinner and the samples less complex that the ‘butt naked’ sound wasn’t what I was looking for. I warmed to it pretty well when “To the Five Bouroughs” came out, though, so I may change my mind on that one.
I did just break down and buy a copy of the “Love American Style” EP on vinyl (features a couple of singles and a couple of remixes from “Paul’s Boutique”). My cassette of that had long since been fried on the dash of a ’85 Olds, but I guess the real takeaway is don’t let me have access to Amazon when I’m grieving (dying laughing)…
uncle daveQuote Reply
http://www.fangraphs.com/not/index.php/the-avengers-in-baseball/
MishQuote Reply
Joooooooooe MATHER!
joshQuote Reply
@ uncle dave:
Yeah I thought HN was kind of back to basics type thing. Paul’s Boutique was a masterpiece – every minute great — then CYH and IC to me were half great and half meh. HN maybe wasn’t great but I thought it was about 3/4 really good. Simple, but good.
/inarticulate fanboy’d
Suburban kidQuote Reply
@ josh:
The Hope Monster is going to feast tonight.
Rice CubeQuote Reply
@ Rice Cube:
Patience, young grasshopper. The bullpen still needs to get seven more outs.
uncle daveQuote Reply
@ uncle dave:
I think the Hope Monster got his quota for the day.
Rice CubeQuote Reply
Campana let them throw him out, so he seemed more human. That was nice of him. Setting them up is all.
joshQuote Reply
(dying laughing) @ Campana TOOTBLAN
Wow.
Rice CubeQuote Reply
Fuck you, Todd Coffey. Your failure to win the closer’s spot in 2007 cost me a fantasy baseball title. You will never be forgiven.
uncle daveQuote Reply
@ uncle dave:
His mugshot makes him look like a lumberjack or a viking.
Rice CubeQuote Reply
Now THAT is how you steal a base. Pay attention, Campana (dying laughing)
Rice CubeQuote Reply
Make them pay for that IBB!
Rice CubeQuote Reply
Darlosing
uncle daveQuote Reply
the Cubs suck at scoring
NateQuote Reply
@ Rice Cube:
Or not.
Rice CubeQuote Reply