SB Nation User Blog: osbug

Padres Bullpen Problems

osbug — Wed, 30 Apr 2008 13:50:30 -0000

I am basing this on a question I saw Dex ask in the OT last night. Basically, I am wondering the same thing. Which is our true bullpen? The one we saw last year dominate, or the one we are seeing this year flounder? I am guessing somewhere in the middle, but I decided to look at some numbers to see if there is a statistical trend somewhere in there.

Notes: 1.I pulled some info from baseballprospectus.com, and I am not going to repost that much info. I will give you the gist of what I see. 2. I am not looking for excuses for our bullpen, they haven't been performing. I am just interested if there is an underlying trend, or this is all a fluke and will normalize at some point.

Heath Bell

Let's start with one of the guys that seems to be doing ok (minus a meltdown in Houston). So far, his Hits/9 are up (way up), his BB/9 and K/9 are both down from last year, and his HR/9 are about the same. His LD% (21.6%) is up a little high, his GB% is way down (33.3% compared to 58.8% last year). Over his career his GB% has been about 50%. His BABIP is sitting at .294, which is pretty average, compared to .258 last season. His BABIP splits are pretty ugly though. Righties: .367, Lefties:.190. Last Year, Righties:.231, Lefties:.288. His home and away aren't much better. It seems to me that he is (either intentionally or not) pitching to contact more than last year, and more of those balls put into play are falling for hits. I would guess we are going to see things regress to the mean a bit, and we will see something between this year and last.

Kevin Cameron

Now to one of the guys that is struggling. So far, his H/9 is actually down a bit, but his K/9 is way down (3.8 vs. 7.4). His walk rate is about the same though. His LD% is very high (26.7%), and his GB% is down (33.3%). his BABIP is up a bit (.333 vs .318). The BABIP splits are similar to last year, but exaggerated a bit. He seems to be having similar problems to Bell. Guys are making more contact than last year, and the balls are falling in for hits at an above average rate. If it is a mechanical problem , a mental problem or just plain luck is way beyond this simple analysis.

Cla Meredith

Right off the bat we can see that Cla's numbers are a little out of whack. His GB% is sitting at 59%, which is really low for him. As a result his LD% is up at 20.5%, and his IF/F is down to 12.5%. His K/9 are down a bit, but his walk rate is the same. Cla's BABIP history is interesting. 2006 it was .199, ridiculously low, and he had the results to show for it. Last year it bumped way up to .344, an extreme overcorrection. I think that was pretty apparent last year too, he was unlucky. This year it seems to have leveled at .256. Oddly enough, Cla doesn't seem to benefit from pitching in Petco all that much (when it comes to BABIP at least). In 2006, he had a .182 BABIP at home compared to .210 on the road. In 2007 it was .295 vs. .385 (ouch), and this year it is .320 (ouch) vs. .143. I guess when you are a groundball pitcher, the park doesn't matter as much. His batter splits are odd too. His righty splits were .123, .375 and this year .231. His lefty splits were .309, .304 and this year .308. While he seems to be consistent against lefties, his numbers are all over the board for everything else. He was extremely lucky in 06, extremely unlucky in 07, and I think what we are seeing now is closer to the true Cla.

Joe Thatcher

Another guy who is struggling. Same story, his BB/G are up, his K/G are down. His LD% is astronomical at 32.6%, and his GB% is down at 41.9%. His BABIP is also astronomical at .419! compared to .197 last year. An extreme overcorrection, to something much worse? The splits there are just as ugly. I don't know what to make of his situation. I would have to guess he will level out a bit, and fall somewhere between last year and this year.

Trevor Hoffman

His H/9 are up, his BB/9 are up and his K/9 are up. His LD% is up, and his GB% is down. His BABIP is up, and way out of whack. Even though it is a very small sample (9 Batters I think), lefties have a .500 BABIP against him! Notice a trend here? He did buck the LD% trend though, and is sitting extremely low at 7.1%. Except for his walk rate being up, Trevor's peripheral numbers don't look too bad.

I am not going to do Ledezma and Rusch right now. Maybe later. So far all of our pitchers are showing a similar trend. K down and BB up, or both K and BB down, LD% up, GB% down, BABIP out of whack. What does this mean? It seems that they are all pitching to more contact, intentionally or not. An above average number of balls falling into play. Could it simply be bad luck, and all of them are going wrong at the same time? Could it be some change in team philosophy gone horribly wrong? Are they concentrating too much on the runners and suffering for it? Maybe the umps took some kind of offense to the talk of how great the Padres bullpen was, and decided to call things tougher for them. Or maybe it is even more sinister, and they are paying us back for Wells and Bradley. I hope that is not the case. Whatever it is, there are some weird statistical trends going on, and it might be worth digging deeper. Maybe just like the hitters going sour all at the same time, they are all going wrong too. Maybe good clubhouse chemistry is a stupid goal. Maybe the Padres should go get Bonds to stir things up and piss people off. San Diego fans want us to win, and what better way to improve than getting a superstar LF. You get your slugger and big name all at once. Regardless, I say that this bullpen will right itself at some point. Will it be as good as last year, probably not. It will certainly be better than what we are seeing now.

Is Gaslamp Ball a bust?

osbug — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 13:31:08 -0000

Three weeks into the season, I find myself getting more and more frustrated with the blog production of gaslampball.com. I think now is a good time to take a hard look at their career in a Padres uniform.

Batting Average: Over the last few games we have seen wrong lineups posted, we have seen plain no-shows (due to "techinical difficulties"...aka Outfit Shopping I am sure"), and just plain lack of hustle as evidenced by things such as "Padres are rad, blah blah blah they'll beat the Astros blah blah blah. [Insert Amazing statistical evidence here]". Please.

Decline: Look at the evidence I just gave you. What's scary is that GLB isn't improving every season...they are actually getting worse with each season. Does the blame lay with the "coaching staff" or GLB itself?

Power: The managements reluctance to bring in some heavy hitting interviews around here is really starting to cost the team. The lack of interviews with guys such as Clay "Ratfink" Hensley, and Claw Meredith I believe has directly lead to our loss of the 18YOGP. There feeble attempts to "reclassify them all as gaslamp ball girl posse" just shows where management stands. They don't even bother to hide the fact that it's just so they don't have to produce more styles of t shirts. It doesn't change the fact that the GLBGP just isn't showing up to the games.

Petco Park: GLB is awful at home. They do things like insult awesome human individuals like Jayson Werth, kiss PSAs butt for free water (yet no hard hitting interview), and refuse to sign autographs for anyone. Then their groundscrew is busy cleaning up the Open Threads as soon as the game is over.

Curt Schilling?!?! Exactly

Injuries: I hate to even bring it up again...but it's impossible to ignore. GLB has only played in 121 games in each of the last two seasons. Which leaves us with a sdsuaztec4-type player starting the other 40 or so Open Threads. Can they withstand a full season in the majors? Are they capable of giving us 150 games or more?

FrequentGLBers Program What happened to the loyalty program? Where are my GLBbux? Where are the tshirts? Obviously they don't care about the fans. Next they will announce that it will cost $10 to be able to make posts each season.

Lack of Respect Broken Jake bobblehead. Need I say more? And they keep letting that cat show up around here.

Also, what's with the lack of appearances by the Rally Unicorn? Why do they refuse to let the up and coming stars play, yet keep giving at bats to washed up veterans? Maybe we should trade them while we have a chance, before the rest of SB*Nation figures out that they are a bust. We can probably get something of value for them still. If we get a reasonable offer before the trade deadline, are they gone?

We are under attack!

osbug — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 15:25:45 -0000

First the Chicago War Profiteers steal our jerseys and try to take credit. Now they are trying to take away our Robot Shortstop! That is just too much. Well, beyond the attempted theft, that is actually a pretty good website and worth a read. As much as I find fans refusals to admit Derek Jeter is a below average shortstop when he shows up over and over at the bottom of every defensive study, I am finding it hard to ignore that maybe Khalil isn't as good a shortstop as we think, considering he generally show up in the middle of the pack. Hopefully that run-on sentence got me to 300 characters.

Season Ticket Holder Meeting

osbug — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 17:35:13 -0000

The annual season ticket holder meeting is next Tuesday. I just got a call from Jerry Coleman telling me that Kouz, Adrian and Jake are all scheduled to appear. I am hoping Fukudome will be there too. Didn't we put together a list of questions last year that we would like answered? Maybe we should do that again this year. Any suggestions?

KhalilOs Cafepress Store

osbug — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 15:50:19 -0000

I am in the process of setting it up, but for some reason Cafepress shut down on me and I can't access it. When it is up and running it should be here.

I am setting all the merch at zero profit so you guys get the best deal you can. It isn't viewable to the public right now, but if there is enough interest I will mark them up a bit and use the profits to buy some Jbux.

If you would rather make one yourself just email me and I will send you a high res file: osbug at prisonfork dot com.

New GLB T Shirt Idea

osbug — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 16:02:23 -0000

We all know that we have a robot playing shortstop, and robots need software. Therefore:

Obviously someone forgot to load the Display_Emotion library, and the Hit_Slider routine needs some work, but otherwise everything seems to be ok. Although there does seem to be some slight incompatibility with the Offense functions and the PETCO_PARK.app...maybe GLB should get their top programmers on that.

OOTP Baseball

osbug — Sun, 03 Jun 2007 15:33:30 -0000

I saw some ads on here recently for Out of the Park Baseball, and was wondering if anyone here plays.

I am in a pretty cool promotion/relegation league, and we need some more GMs. There is a good core group of people in the league, and we are looking to expand some more. Even if you haven't played before, the COmmish does a great job with Newbies. Take a look

Hardball Times

osbug — Thu, 31 May 2007 12:13:55 -0000

Haha. Hardball times linked to our "Penance for a Loss" thread. Man, first USA Today, now Hardball Times, we are making some waves. They make a nice plea too, that we shouldn't take "a players lack or amount of All-Star appearences as an indication of quality". I think that is a great idea, the same way that lack of playoff appearances shouldn't detract from a players career. EDIT That link was from yesterday. Maybe we did get enough exposure for Greene to see the thread about him. That might have given him enough time to upload KhalilOS 2.0.1

Coolstandings

osbug — Wed, 23 May 2007 13:29:59 -0000

Did anybody else check out this link they had in one of the articles on padres.com?

Coolstandings!

They have a pretty favorable outlook for the Padres to make the playoffs. Currently the only team with better odds is the Mets. I didn't check out to see how accurate they were over the last couple seasons though.

All Star Schamll Shtar

osbug — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 03:11:08 -0000

I've been debating posting this for awhile now, but the more people I talk to, the more logical it seems.

I have a couple problems with the All Star game since that fateful tie a few years ago. I hate the fact that MLB is trying to force us to care about the ASG. Let's face it, just like every other professional sports league, the ASG is an exhibition game that is supposed to be for our enjoyment. Trying to put an artificial importance by having it determine home field advantage for the World Series is ludicrous. Especially when you look at it's history, and how one league tends to dominate for long stretches at a time. But that is just my opinion. Obviously the league likes it that way and it will be around for awhile, and there will be plenty of fans that think the ASG should matter. I can live with that.

My big gripe is not really about the game. MLB puts an exagerated importance on the game. Fine. If that is the case, let's be logical about deciding who plays in the game. Not only are they starting the voting three weeks in to the season, but the game takes place at the halfway mark. Like someone said in one of the main posts, how can you tell who deserves to go this early in the year? Also, does the second half of the season not matter? Allstars can't be made in the run for the playoffs? It is a popularity contest, and I think everyone knows that. Pujols could be hitting .120 with 1 hr and 40 errors at first base and he would still get voted in. Didn't Nomar get voted in at SS a few years back without even playing a game or something like that? And Giambi was starting first baseman with terrible numbers at one point wasn't he? So ok, it's a popularity contest to determine who plays to determine who gets homefield advantage in the World Series that probably most of the players in the ASG will have nothing to do with.

Blah blah blah....get to the point. Ok, here is what I think. MLB has given us the power to determine a portion of the ASG rosters. I say we exploit this power to our best advantage! No, as much as I would love it, that doesn't mean voting in every possible Padres player (Not that some don't deserve it). Yes, we need to make sure the NL has the best lineup possible, but that is only part of it. I think using the system they have given us to the fullest includes voting for the WORST possible AL team that we can! I say we put together the worst AL team we can, and pass a list out to all the NL team blogs and have everyone start voting, online and at the games. Let's do out part to get the NL an advantage in the ASG and the Padres homefield advantage in the World Series.

I've kicked around the idea for awhile, but always felt like it was more trouble than it was worth. But since the Padres have a legitimate chance to go to the World Series, and after seeing something similar work with Ameican Idol and Sanjaya, I say we go for it!