SB Nation User Blog: DanUpBaby

Game 81 overflow thread

DanUpBaby — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 22:47:09 -0000

Forgetful danup

Automated overflow

Match made in heaven

Game 82 Open Thread:

DanUpBaby — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 22:26:35 -0000


Pineiro	Bailey
6-9, 3.44	1-0, 8.68

Homer Bailey just retired in my St. Louis Browns Baseball Mogul league—in the year 2032. At least half of his 4200 strikeouts had to have been my guys, because he was a member of my most nefarious divisional rivals, the Athletics. Here's hoping today is not the day he shows off a fastball/curveball combo that keeps him pitching until he's 45.

If I may be so indulged, an 80 games haiku:

First half surprises
Ankiel, Dunc ten homers
And Rasmus twelve walks

Return of Goodemeyer

DanUpBaby — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:08:58 -0000

Step one to renewing one's self-confidence is wearing a pair of killer sunglasses. Check. (photo courtesy momup; I recommend the full-size version.)

View full size photo uploaded July 3, 2009

Giving up that home run at the end lends a little realism to the outing—it's like killing off one of the secondary main characters in an action movie so that you can get the romantic leads through unscathed. So I applaud Todd Wellemeyer for his attention to plotting, particularly the way that he wrote in a happy ending.

The Colonel—always an interesting interview, inasmuch as he has probably never seen Bull Durham—is one of the few pitchers who I've seen regularly discuss his velocity in print. His most recent musings on the subject were in this Strauss article, in which he said he was down from "94-96" to the low-90s, but it's a recurring theme; in this MLB.com article from his Kansas City days he uses it as a proxy for his preparedness in Spring Training, noting that he's moved above "88-90" earlier than he usually does in an attempt to make the starting rotation (a preposterous notion.)

It's an interesting tic for a guy whose success last year was attributed to—well, Dan'n'Al 2008, can you take this?

Dan: You know, Al, in the past when we've seen Todd he's been more of a thrower. He just reared back and—but this year you can see him taking a little off so that it moves.

Al: He really is, Dan. He's become a pitcher, not a thrower.

Thanks, guys. For all that talk, then, Wellemeyer is, at the very least, a guy who self-identifies as a hard thrower.

After the most recent quote Dave Cameron wrote on Fangraphs that Wellemeyer's math was off but his concern well-placed—his velocity hadn't dropped five miles an hour on average, but it had lost that mid-90s top-end. So it was interesting to see Wellemeyer, in this comeback outing, go with a very obvious, very deliberate fastballs-first approach.

It was heartening to see him go Out There with a plan at all; lately Wellemeyer has pitched so poorly that it has been impossible to see what, if anything, he was trying to do out there, aside from dodging line drives. All the team's other starters are easily typecast; Carpenter has perfect command, Wainwright has the big curveball, Pineiro and Thompson pitch, with varying degrees of success, as though the strikeout is an ungentlemanly pursuit. But when Wellemeyer's not striking people out he has no identity—he's a power pitcher without the power, a Thrower without the velocity.

But last night's plan wasn't just visible, it was executed. Wellemeyer began by more or less abandoning the changeup he was heavily reliant on earlier in the year; Gameday only caught three in the first five innings, and two of those were used to record outs against noted free-swinger Pablo Sandoval. Instead, it was all fastballs and hard sliders—not just that, but all fastballs until he was ahead of a hitter. The at-bat against Rowand was the first one of the game in which he threw a breaking ball without having a strike on the batter.

When he brought out the slider, most notably in the fifth inning at-bat against Rowand in which he threw nothing but sliders and got three swinging strikes—more than he got in the entirety of his first outing of the year—it was like he had justified it to himself before he threw it. Everything was like that—I can't think of a better word than deliberate. It was a good thing to see for a pitcher who has struggled to understand his own successes and failures over the last year and a half.

Of course, this preparation probably wouldn't have gone so well if his fastball hadn't reappeared, and if that works for Wellemeyer as justification for last night's success it's just as well. The top-end wasn't quite as amped up as he remembers it, but it was there—early in the game he hit 93-94 with startling consistency, and he topped out at 92 as late as the eighth inning. More worrisome for opposing hitters might be the fact that his slider, which was almost cutter-like in its utility and velocity, topped out as high as 87.

As you might expect, all of this has already been ascribed to a Coaching Moment, preserved here for posterity:

That way meant the way Wellemeyer rediscovered during his bullpen session Monday. Wellemeyer had abandoned the between-start session because of ongoing frustration with his delivery. He spent more than 30 minutes just talking with Duncan and bullpen coach Marty Mason about what he felt was wrong. After he made some throws "at about 50 percent," they determined it was his balance. When he lifted his front leg, Wellemeyer was tilting toward third base.

The lack of balance foiled his command, and any attempt to gather his delivery threw him further out of whack.

"We narrowed it down to the most simple thing, the No. 1 thing for all pitchers, which is finding a balance point," Wellemeyer said. "Just one consistent delivery ... where every pitch is the same, every delivery is the same."

Someone better-acquainted than I with pitchf/x could (and should) probably make an interesting fanpost about whether or not this shows up in the data. But it's good to see that the Cardinals have some medium-term plan for this mystery spot in the rotation, even if it isn't, as I thought it should be last week, riding Well-e out of the rotation on a rail.

Todd Goodemeyer Overflow Thread

DanUpBaby — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 01:14:18 -0000

As Clay Mortensen rearranges the pin on his voodoo doll...

Game 79 Open Thread: Giants at Cardinals

DanUpBaby — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 21:27:58 -0000


Johnson	Carpenter
7-5, 4.68	5-2, 1.78

Who knows what unknown defensive proclivities lurk in the heart of men? La Russa knows. I haven't done the research, but I can't imagine there have been many other seasons in which players with the collective experience in the infield of DeRosa and Thurston have been configured in this way.

Speaking of which: Schumaker UZR update: the stat has got to admit he's getting better, and now not just because he can't get no worse. His UZR/150, which was -19.9 when last we checked, is now -15.8, bringing him within three runs of Dan Uggla in his quest to be second-worst. More impressively, his actual UZR is down from -8.2 to -7.6.

I've come to the conclusion that it would probably be for the best if I stopped watching UZR in-season—that it is, as even its creator cautioned, not fit to judge such small sample sizes. But I can't stop.

Sometimes the other pitcher is just really, really good

DanUpBaby — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 06:16:44 -0000

More photos » by Jeff Roberson - AP

San Francisco Giants starting pitcher Tim Lincecum is hungry like the wolf during the fifth inning of a baseball game Monday, June 29, 2009, in St. Louis. Lincecum threw a two-hitter in the Giants' 10-0 victory. (AP Photo/Jeff Roberson)

Browse more photos »

Nothing to be done—it's not often a game that seems so lopsided at the start, featuring a slumping team and a lopsided pitching matchup et cetera, actually ends up so lopsided. Brad Thompson seems like the ideal underdog in this kind of thing; he's not much but he's rarely beaten into the ground, and even in tonight's game he, uh, minimized the damage, to the extent of his abilities. Too many singles, an enormous home run, but just one walk; in another configuration that might not be four runs.

But the Cardinals would still lose. I hate to mention the no-hitter, but Lincecum's having a just-about-perfect season so far. His ESPN season projection: 35 starts, 246 innings, 285 strikeouts, 60 walks, nine home runs. That's right: style guide rules dictate that I spell out the number of home runs he allows in 246 innings. That's a good omen, unless he's stepping in against your team's stunned lineup.

I don't profess to know who we'll still be talking about 20 years from now, certainly not when it comes to pitchers, but Lincecum looks the part. He's wholly unique as a character, from his little league mound presence to his wild Gashouse Gang delivery, but statistically he's a perennial—tons of strikeouts, no walks, no home runs. You can't ask for anything more than that. Like I said: I don't want to jinx it, but for the last year and a half he's pitched like a poor man's Pedro Martinez. Nothing this team could do about that.

After the jump: Mark DeRosa energizes the team, Clayton Mortensen has a bad day, and in a very special episode Joe Thurston reveals that he suffers from baselexia, and has been hiding it all along because he didn't think the gang would understand (even though they really do!)

DeRosa's leaping catch, sandwiched between standing ovations two and three on his first night in curtain call country, requires me to invoke the exceptions-proving-the-rule clause of sportswriter stubbornness. That beautiful play aside, he's currently 0-7 in two unattractive Cardinals losses since the team fed Chris Perez into the Miklasz Care-o-meter. Of course this means nothing, and of course nobody thinks it does. Which is a fine way to start writing about a subject.

Anyway, it seems like we're very open, as a rule, to glossing over early failings to help an Energizing Trade narrative along; if the Cardinals struggle for another two weeks and then take off we'll still happily credit it to DeRosa's account, is all I'm saying. It's a good thing that we do, too, because otherwise season recaps would be considerably less interesting.

Our last Energizing Trade is almost too recent for me to recap—it's Jeff Weaver, riding in to save the day by not pitching all that well and then finally pitching pretty well in the playoffs. It was a different trade than this one, to be sure; it could be lauded because it was low risk, converting two good months from toolsy Terry Evans into a starting pitcher, and derided because it was low reward. But it was made with the same idea in mind, the new blood at a rough spot kick-starting a moribund team. Here's Some Blog on the occasion of the trade:

it does not strain the imagination to suggest that weaver might come in here, make 16 starts, turn in 9 or 10 quality starts and win 7 games. none of the cardinals' competitors in the division is likely to add a better pitcher than that; in what currently looms as a tight three- or four-way race for the division, weaver has a chance to make a real difference.

and then on August 3, after Weaves and the Cardinals got blitzed 16-8 by the Phils, midway through one of their famous multi-game losing streak:

i've seen all i need to of weaver; the experiment failed. he was worth a look, but these early blowouts sap morale, and the cards appear to have reached the limit of theirs. weaver's next turn comes monday in cincinnati, the first game of an important series; the cardinals simply can't afford to send him out there.

common sense dictates that his slot should go to wainwright, but it remains la russa's policy to run other, less competent pitchers out there.

(That last sentence is irrelevant, but I left it in because it's classic lboros x-acto knife prose. My rendition of that thought would require three sentences, eleven em-dashes, and a day-late qualification of my earlier position.)

As we know, here in the future, the Cardinals sent Weaver back out there, and he had his best start of the season, striking out seven in six innings to run the team's modest winning streak to three games. Then they got blown out 10-3. (That just was not a team that could Get Started—it was tuned for frustration, a lot like this one.)

Weaver didn't get the team going; one guy doesn't turn a mediocre team into one capable of meteoric winning streaks. But they went 8-7 when he started, and he replaced Sidney Ponson, who had not appeared in a game the Cardinals won since the end of May at that point. Weaver didn't pitch long enough to make quality starts, but even what he did, improbably as he did it, was enough to make that real difference. The Cardinals won the division by a game and a half.

Weaver and DeRosa and everybody this side of Will Clark can't make a team win eight in a row for the Gipper, or get everyone into shape with a well-placed montage. But if they play better than the mess they replace, and the division's close enough, they can certainly take the credit for it. I won't blame them.

Does someone want to explain this at-bat to Gameday?

SPD	BRK	PFX	PITCH	RESULT
89	7"	12"	Fastball	Called Strike
86	8"	5"	Changeup	Swinging Strike
87	7"	7"	Changeup	Ball
87	7"	4"	Changeup	Foul
91	7"	11"	Fastball	Stop doing that!

Juan Uribe homers (2) on a fly ball to left field.

There's Mortensen's problem, right there: 89 mile an hour fastball, 86 mile an hour changeup(?), consecutive pitches. To make things worse, 49 of his 50 pitches were classified as either fastball (ranging from 89 to 93) or changeup (ranging from 82 to 86). Some—maybe even most—of those pitches were probably sliders, but few of them did much of what Dizzy Dean would call sludding, and when they weren't the change of speeds wasn't enough to throw anybody off the scent. (His two strikeouts were against Pablo Sandoval, who will swing at anything and in that at-bat did, and Andres Torres, who swung at two of the worst consecutive pitches I have ever seen a non-pitcher wave at.)

I'm not about to judge a guy on one outing, but he's 24 right now, and the idea when the Cardinals reached for him back in 2007 was that he was only a few years away from shoring up the bottom of the rotation on the cheap. Back then I whined about the bizarre tactic of intentionally drafting back-of-the-rotation guys, who usually seem to show up, uninvited, on their own accord, and I'm still worried about the efficacy of that idea when I see Mortensen now. Now's the time the Cardinals were preparing for when they drafted him; hopefully he's ready for it.

Bill James Online's main draw is getting to read The Man Himself write incisively and accurately about all things baseball once or twice a week, but it has a sideline in exotic statistics, and one of them attempts to quantify how many bases a player adds or subtracts from the team till by virtue of his baserunning. It passes the first rule of statistical thumb: the players who you would expect to be really good at it are really good at it.

Scott Rolen, for example—here we take off our hats for a moment of solemn reverence—he's really good at it. This year he's taken twelve extra bases and made just two extra outs. In 2004, when he was at the height of his powers, he took nineteen and was only caught once, for a grand total of 26 bases the average runner wouldn't be expected to have.

Joe Thurston, for example—he's really not good at it. He's a daring, speedy baserunner; he's taken eight extra bases so far, and gone from second to home four times out of six chances. He Makes Things Happen, and if he had just kept his head down and done that he would still be assembling a cult utility-infield following. But he's already made five outs that the average baserunner wouldn't be expected to make. The final analysis rates him, already, at -6; Bill James Online sadly does not allow anti-leaderboards, but I'd be hard-pressed to think of anybody who weighs less than 270 pounds who would already be in that range.

It would be exciting if his outs came in the course of, well, Making Things Happen, but the weird thing is that just the opposite is true; they come on some of the most mundane plays imaginable, plays in which baserunning risk is the last thing on anybody's mind, up to and including the team playing defense.

His last gaffe was probably not game-altering—let's not humor ourselves, Joe Nathan was coming in—and it was almost excusable, coming as it did after LaRue and Oquendo had a sign mixup. But it just wasn't a situation in which you expect a major league baseball player to even be threatened, and that is what makes it so unspeakably frustrating to see it playing out over and over. I've just never seen anything like it.

Game 78 Open Thread: Giants at Cardinals

DanUpBaby — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 23:41:21 -0000


Lincecum	Thompson
7-2, 2.57, 10.6 K/9	2-3, 4.50, 2.8 K/9

This might be the youngest-looking pitching matchup since (Bill Simmons mode engage) Gary Coleman took on Emmanuel Lewis in a lost episode of Battle of the Network Stars.

Lincecum strikes out 3.8 times as many batters as WonderBrad does, which is probably the highest gap between two starters in baseball this year. Meanwhile, the Cardinals will likely be without Colby Rasmus tonight, after he spent some time under general anesthesia. I was going to make a thirteen pitchers joke here, but an unexpected benefit of having Mark DeRosa is that La Russa actually does have five real-live-outfielders on the roster, and is thus immune to mild depth-based ribbing in this situation. He's always a few steps ahead of us.

Morning Thread: Khalil likely to hit DL

DanUpBaby — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 08:35:34 -0000

Morning Thread: Khalil likely to hit DL

Morning entry's going to be late—I'm a little under the weather, which has made dragging gamelogs for Joe Thurston baserunning gaffes a more painful exercise than usual.

I was at the game yesterday, and after Greene's response to his last strikeout I figured something would happen. The odd thing is that it was the angriest—the most stereotypically ballplayer—he's been all year; at this point, after working so hard to get back, I can understand sullenness boiling over into frustration. I'll be pulling for him whether he makes it back this year or not.

On a lighter note, clicking through will get you this quote: "(Thirteen pitchers) was too good for us," said La Russa.

Cardinals acquire Mark DeRosa for Chris Perez, PTBNL

DanUpBaby — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 03:08:32 -0000

More photos » by Tony Dejak - AP

Cleveland Indians' Mark DeRosa, right, is congratulated by third base coach Joel Skinner after DeRosa is traded to the St. Louis Cardinals. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak)

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ESPN is reporting it's a done deal. DeRosa's a league average bat and a career defensive negative at third base; Chris Perez is probably the best of the three Young Right-Handed Relievers. He's a big price to pay.

Now that we've had a moment to digest I'll take off the Drudge flashers and say that I was off base in suggesting that DeRosa is strictly league average. He'll get on base in front of Pujols, which is wonderful, and after a few years at this new talent level, even in hitter's parks, it's probably fair to assume that he'll maintain it for the four months it'll matter to us.

And his versatility—well, needless to say that his handedness and the fact that another manager has already moved him into the outfield have gotten Tony all faklempt. On the Cardinals, with their left-handed surplus in the outfield, he is peculiarly valuable as a left fielder.

He's an upgrade. But I disagree with the idea that Perez is fungible, even given the volume of hard-throwing right-handers the Cardinals are sitting on at this moment. McClellan and Motte aren't lighting things up in June or this season, either, and while Todd is a fine relief prospect he isn't half the prospect Chris Perez was exactly one year before the Cardinals gave up on him. Perez has better stuff, both scouted and observed, and better numbers at every level than the players he will be replaced by.

This is a nice message trade, and since I've defended La Russa throughout the 13 Pitcher Spectacular it would be inconsistent for me to say that keeping the team On Board is suddenly unimportant. And If the Cardinals get to the playoffs this year the deal can be said in some way to have worked, like it did when they traded for Chuck Finley. But four years from now this will be remembered as the Chris Perez trade.

Game 75 Open Thread: Twins at Cardinals

DanUpBaby — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 23:49:53 -0000


Perkins	Wainwright
2-4, 5.10	8-4, 3.58

Perkins is a Soft Tossin Lefty in everything but the actual velocity of his fastball, which does touch 90; hopefully that contradiction is enough to list the Cardinals' offense out of its southpaw doldrums.