SB Nation User Blog: tarakas

Skip's Lament: The Curse of Too Many Decent Players

tarakas — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:05:11 -0000

While I was reading this piece comparing the Cardinals to the Phillies, I was remembering the old Bill James comment that one challenge of improving a team is not that of fixing obvious problems (like the Cardinals currently have in LF), but of how one handles the need to improve overall where there aren't positions that are obvious problems.

For the last few years, the Cardinals have an offense that is increasingly built around Albert Pujols, which limits their ability to have big innings and can make the offense easy to negate. As the linked piece points out, the Phillies have more hitters who are dangerous than the Cardinals do. The Cardinals need a sequence like they had a few years ago: Walker, Pujols, Edmonds, Rolen.

The problem is not that the current Cardinals have a lot of bad position players:

Skip is a nice little hitter at second
Ryan, if he can keep up his current level of hitting, has a glove that carries his bat
Molina has a decent OBP and a great glove
Rasums, while he did not hit particularly well in 2009, needs to play to grow into a good hitter
Ludwick (2009 version) was OK
Freese could hit at above replacement level

And so on. It's not like it's obvious that any of these players in particular needs to be replaced.

The problem is that none of these players are currently a strong offensive player. Skip, Ryan, or Molina, if they are the worst hitter in your lineup, aren't going to hurt you. But when they are amongst the best hitters in your lineup, you have a problem.

This would seem like a difficult problem to solve. Plugging Freese into third doesn't solve this problem, and none of the free agent third basemen do, either. Putting Holliday in LF is a step in the right direction, but it doesn't solve the problem alone

The mistake is that the team reviews things position by position--the problem with Skip isn't that he is bad, it's that the team needs some great hitters someplace other than 1B, and Ludwick, Skip, etc., aren't helping. We've got to get some great hitting at three positions from among LF, CF, SS, 2B, RF, 3B, and C. In short, some decent players need to be replaced, not because they are bad, but because they aren't great.

Cardinals and Injuries/Announcements

tarakas — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:26:45 -0000

Is it me, or do the Cardinals have serious credibility issues with their announcements concerning injuries?

When the Cardinals first announced DeRosa would miss a few games with a sore wrist, I told a friend that I was sure that inevitably "a few days" was going to be weeks or months, not days, because the Cardinals always seem to be wrong when they say something about injuries. And now DeRosa's "2-3 days" has morphed into a DL stint, just like when Kyle Loshe got hit by a pitch, he went from not having to miss any starts, to one start, to well over a month.

Over the last few years, whether it was comments about injuries and/or return times for Glaus, Loshe, and DeRosa this year, or Carpenter, Mulder, Edmonds, Duncan, Ankiel, and Tyler Johnson in previous years, what the Cardinals say about players' health often seems to be wildly optimistic and consistently inaccurate. The initial diagnose of a problem is often wrong, and even when correct, the projected recovery time is rarely accurate.

Is this endemic to the sport, a deliberate attempt to mislead, a symptom of the difficulties of the medical profession, or simply a sign that they are not getting good medical advice? Are they simply having bad luck?

Any thoughts?

Average Team Opening Day Payroll Down by 1.7%

tarakas — Thu, 09 Apr 2009 13:24:57 -0000

The Associated press reports that the average baseball team's opening day salary decreased by 1.7% from last year, or about $1.6 million per team. 16 teams cut payroll.

The Cubs increased payroll by $16.5 million. The article does not discuss them, but the Cardinals are down quite a bit more than the average (the cards are down about $10 million and 10%, I think).

While I don't think throwing money at players will solve the team's problems, I'm still curious why the team is cutting more than most teams and how this helps the club construct a winning team around Pujols.

Cardinals 19th Best Team in Baseball?

tarakas — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 18:32:00 -0000

Joe Sheehan at Baseball Prospectus predicts the Cardinals to finish the season at 79-83, and as the 19th best baseball team in 2009 (Requires subscription).

He is highly critical of the team defense, faulting Schumaker at 2B and Duncan in LF as a poor idea for a pitch-to-contact pitching staff. He also views the pitching as over its head last year and is "skeptical of a Chris Carpenter comeback."

Among the teams he ranks as (albeit marginally) better: The Brewers, Giants, Marlins, and Reds.