Last night was a night to remember for Mark Teahen. Forget the box score – Teahen went 3-5 with a triple, a home run, a run scored, 3 RBIs, and a SB – it was the way Teahen refused to let the White Sox lose last night that made Monday, April 12, 2010 against the Toronto Blue Jays a career night for the veteran of five seasons.

Entering the sixth inning, it didn’t appear as though Teahen would even have a good game, much less a special one, as the 9th batter in the Sox lineup had been stymied twice by Blue Jays starter Brian Tallet, with a flyout to center field and a force out to second. At that point, Teahen’s WPA for the night stood at -.059. In that inning, however, Teahen hit a two-out RBI single, tying the game at 6-6, good for a WPA of .146, raising his total game WPA to .087. Teahen added a stolen base, but would be stranded at 2nd, his game WPA at .103 after the SB.

The White Sox bullpen struggled in the 7th, as Randy Williams walked in a run to put the Jays ahead 7-6. The Jays bullpen, behind Shawn Camp and Scott Downs, shut down the White Sox until the 9th inning. Jason Frasor, the Blue Jays closer, then faced Teahen to open the last frame. Frasor’s lead was gone immediately, as Teahen smoked an 0-2 fastball for a solo home run to tie the game. The shot was worth a +.333 WPA, bringing his game total to .436, nearly enough to create an entire win for his team.

The White Sox failed to score again in the 9th, and the game remained scoreless until the 11th inning, when Teahen once again appeared in an important situation – a runner on first and nobody out. Once again, Teahen responded, tripling in the go-ahead run off Jeremy Accardo. The triple earned Teahen another +.329 WPA, bringing his game total up to a whopping +.765. This turned out to be the winning run, as Bobby Jenks managed to close the door in the bottom of the 11th.

The winning team, as a whole, will only have a +.500 WPA. Teahen shouldered the entire load and some more for the White Sox on Monday night in what could be one of the biggest, in terms of clutch hitting and value to the team, performances of the entire year. In his final 3 PAs, in which he went 3-3 with a 3B, a HR, and 3 RBIs, the run he knocked in either tied the game or gave the White Sox the lead. The leverage index of these three plays were 1.86, 2.90, and 3.43, respectively. Teahen came up huge in big spots for Chicago. To do so once can make you a hero. To do so three times in the same game? That’s simply amazing.

The observant reader will notice that, though purporting to cover the entire weekend, what follows only actually mentions two of the previous four days. This has everything to do with the fact that, as previously stated, I’m not half-machine.

Friday, April 09
I was surprised to find that Major League Baseball scheduled other games on this, the day that All-Joyer Colby Lewis made his stateside return. “Sacre bleu!” is undoubtedly what you’re saying to yourself in utter disbelief. Indeed, that’s what I shouted, perhaps a little too enthusiastically, at the very public space where I first made the discovery. In any case, Marc Hulet and I both had thoughts (here and here, specifically) on Lewis’s start and were foolish enough to write them down for posterity yesterday.

Against all odds, two other pitchers distinguished themselves for other reasons, as follows.

Exhibit One: Homer Bailey

The top of the third inning of today’s Cubs-Reds game is probably the kind that Cincinnati’s front officers envisioned when they took righty Homer Bailey with the seventh overall pick in the 2004 draft.

It was during that inning when Bailey recorded whiffs on 6 of 17 pitches — all but one of which (i.e. the whiffs) came on Bailey’s four-seamer, a pitch he threw at about 93 mph for the game. Three of the aforementioned whiffs came on an excellent sequence of progerssively higher and outside-er (though always within the zone) fastballs to Aramis Ramirez*, a player who, according to our Pitch Type Values, has posted above-average run values against fastballs every year since 2004.

*You can see the third of these at about the 22-second mark in this video.

It deserves to be said that the inning wasn’t all flowers and a piece of cake for Bailey. He hit the first batter of the inning, Derrek Lee, with a first-pitch fastball; allowed Lee to take second on a wild pitch in the dirt; and conceded a run when Xavier Nady hit a wall-ball single. Still, the run aside, the life on Bailey’s fastball, and the way he managed to put it so ably by a fastball hitter, proved to make good viewing.

Exhibit Dos: Kris Medlen

With one out in the bottom of the 12th inning of Atlanta’s game at San Francisco, Kris Medlen threw a sort of pitch to Travis Ishikawa that’ always a pleasure to witness — namely, a sort of two-seamer that starts inside and off the plate to a lefty but tails back in over the corner of the plate for a called strike.

The pitch — and three more, very similar ones, to righty Eli Whiteside — sent me to Medlen’s Pitchf/x profile. Here’s something interesting: 15 of the 27 pitches Medlen threw today were classified as two-seamers by Pitchf/x. This is unsurprising, as the sort of pitch that he threw to Ishikawa — with all that arm-side run — is almost always of the two-seam variety. And across three appearances this season, 42% of Medlen’s pitches have been two-seamers. Yet, a glance at last season’s numbers reveals that only 6.2% of his pitches were classified as two-seamers. Of course, this could simply be the product of a change in the GameDay algorithm — if that’s the case, so be it. It could also be sign that Medlen is making a concerted effort to feature the pitch this year. More on this story as it develops!

Sunday, April 11
If you’re all up on the Twitters, you might already know that I spent a good portion of this Pacific Northwest afternoon at PGE Park, home (at least for the remainder of the season) to the Portland Beavers of the Pacific Coast League. In the more likely event that you’re not hanging on my every 140 characters, well, it’s still the case: today, San Diego’s Triple-A Beavers played host to Oakland affiliate the Sacramento River Cats.

These last three years or so, the Beavers — like many Triple-A clubs, frankly — have been less a magnet for high-end prospects and more a sort of purgatory for fringe ballplayers of all descriptions. The early returns on this year’s club are a little more interesting, as center fielder Luis Durango, shortstop Lance Zawadski, corner guy Craig Cooper, other corner guy Aaron Cunningham, other other corner guy Mike Baxter, catcher Dusty Ryan, and starter Will Inman — i.e. 70% of today’s starting lineup for the Beavs — are all, if not necessarily prospects, at least reasonably interesting minor leaguers on the right side of 27.

The River Cats, meanwhile, featured a lineup that included big-time prospect Chris Carter, masher Jack Cust, and giant man Michael Taylor in the 3-4-5 spots. None of them did much of anything, as Sacramento managed only two hits on the afternoon. Of note, however, was this: over his first three plate appearances, Cust saw fourteen pitches and swung at exactly zero of them. The news prompted Ken Arneson to tweet: “A’s team yawns/PA is already way lower this year.”

The ZiPS in-season projections have just gone live on the site and all the pre-season projections are now hidden by default. You can still see the pre-season projections by clicking on the “Show Projections” button right below each section’s heading.

There are two separate in-season ZiPS projections:

RoS = Rest of Season, or what a player will do for the remainder of the season.
Update = An updated full season projection for the player in question.

Huge thanks to Dan Szymborski of Baseball Think Factory for allowing us to use these again this season!

Episode Eighteen
In which the panel does its worst.

Headlines
Predictions That Will Be Wronger
Texas Rangers and Pitching?
The Overlord Appears
… and other incalculable estimations!

Featuring
Dave Cameron, Sworn Enemy
Joe Pawlikowski, Polish W

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Audio on the flip-flop.

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When the Yankees’ CC Sabathia lost his no-hit bid against the Rays this past Saturday, I jokingly tweeted that it would have been a cheap no-hitter anyway. Some people seemed a bit confused by this, so I had to explain that I was being sarcastic. In fact, it was a very impressive performance given the high regard that I have for the current Rays lineup.

While no-hitters are fun to watch (unless your team is the victim, of course) and always involve a great pitching performance, their relative greatness tends to be exaggerated. For one, non-home run hits are greatly influenced by luck and the ability (or lack thereof) of the fielders behind the pitcher. For another, there isn’t really that much of a difference between a no-hitter and a one-hitter, especially given the luck/defense factors just mentioned.

Nonetheless, no-hitters have a rightful place in baseball lore. None of them are exactly “cheap.” Still, I thought it might be fun to “rank” the no-hitters from the last three seasons by difficulty, given the offenses against which the pitcher was going. A more precise way to do this would be to take the precise lineups into account, adjust for park, and maybe even do a post-facto Marcel to see what the true talent of the hitters in the game really was. I’m not going to go that “all out” for a blog post. I’m simply going to rank them (going in reverse order of “difficulty”) by the wOBA of the opposing team for the season in which they occured. I’m ranking the seven no-hitters thrown from 2007-2009. I’m not saying this the the “best” way to do such a trivial exercise, but it’s a start. Let the arguments begin!

7. Jonathan Sanchez, San Francisco Giants vs. San Diego Padres, July 10, 2009, 8-0
Padres 2009 wOBA: .310
Comment: Only one baserunner during this game due to a Juan Uribe error. The Padres’ wOBA is, of course, deflated due to their home park, but Sanchez did get to face the pitcher during this game.

6. Jon Lester, Red Sox vs. Royals, May 19, 2008, 7-0
Royals 2008 wOBA: .314
Comment: Um, I guess it was at Fenway, but other than that…

5. Carlos Zambrano vs. Houston Astros, September 14, 2008, 5-0,
Astros 2008 wOBA: .321
Comment: This was the first no-hitter ever thrown at a “neutral” Miller Park due to Hurricane Ike. Yeah, right, “neutral.” Probably deserves to be downgraded for that.

4. Clay Buchholz, Red Sox vs. Orioles, September 1, 2007, 10-0
Orioles 2007 wOBA: .328
Comment: Only Buchholz’s second start of his career. The Orioles’ offense has come a long way since then.

3. Mark Buehrle White Sox versus Texas Rangers, April 18, 2007, 6-0
Rangers 2007 team wOBA: .329
Comment: Less impressive than one might think give the how weak the Rangers offense was that season (once one takes their home park into account), but still very good. The Rangers were so weak that season they took a flier on Zombie Sammy Sosa, who got was their only baserunner of the game and got picked off.

2. Justin Verlander, Detroit Tigers versus Milwaukee Brewers, June 12, 2007, 4-0
Brewers 2006 wOBA: .337
Comment: Very impressive, given the Brewers’ above-average offense. Moreover, it was in an AL park, so Verlander didn’t get to face the pitcher.

1. Mark Buehrle vs. Tampa Bay Rays, July 23, 2009, 5-0
Rays 2009 wOBA: .346
Comment: The easy winner, as the Rays offense was one of the best in baseball in 2009. Oh, and it was a perfect game.

Yesterday, knuckleballer Charlie Haeger had a pretty amazing game. He struck out 12 batters while walking four in six innings. He also threw three wild pitches, two of which were on third strikes and got far enough from A.J. Ellis for the batter to reach.

Obviously, based on the 12 strikeouts, Ellis wasn’t the only one having a tough time with Haeger’s knuckler. By my count he threw 94 knuckleballs (along with 22 fastballs) with 43 swings and 13 whiffs. That works out to a 70% contact rate and a 13.8% swinging strike percentage. Both those rates are very good. That contact rate was about where Huston Street and Andrew Bailey were all of last year (not to say that Haeger will maintain such a rate, but just to put it in context). Haeger’s knuckleball was dancing like crazy.

I have talked about the knuckleball before, but here’s a quick refresher. While all other pitch types have consistent movement — fastballs rise and move towards the glove-side, curves drop and move away from the glove-side — and cluster out cleanly in horizontal movement versus vertical movement space, the knuckleball has no clear movement and instead forms a diffuse cloud when plotted in horizontal movement versus vertical movement space. Some move up-and-in, others up-and-away, others down-and-in, and others don’t move much at all. Not surprisingly, the success of a knuckleball is directly tied to this amount of movement. Those which move little are rarely whiffed and hit hard. Those that move far result in whiffs and weak contact. Tim Wakefield is successful because his knuckles have a large spread in movement.

With that in mind I wanted to see whether Haeger’s knuckleballs yesterday had more movement than they did in his previous appearances. Here are the fraction of Haeger’s knuckleballs whose movement fell in one of three categories (movement measured as the square root of the sum of the square horizontal movement and square of vertical movement). I included the value from yesterday, his career and the value for Wakefield’s knuckleballs.

                   Haeger          Wakefield
               Career  Yesterday    Career
0-5  inches      0.35      0.32      0.32   
5-10 inches      0.53      0.50      0.48
10+  inches      0.12      0.18      0.20

Haeger’s knuckleball was moving a lot more than previously in his career, though still not as much as Wakefield has averaged through his career. Obviously this one value does not tell you everything, but I think it is a nice metric to show us that his knuckleballs were really moving yesterday — that is if the 12 strikeouts wasn’t enough.

I have a question for FanGraphs readers. Have you noticed a drop in newspaper coverage for your local Major League Baseball team in 2010? I’d love to hear from at least one person (in the comments section) who follows each MLB team through the printed form.

As many of you know, I live in Ontario, Canada. The baseball market in Canada is unique because we have just one MLB team (although Seattle and Detroit are close cousins). As such, the coverage of the Toronto Blue Jays is truly a national thing. We have four national papers located in Toronto: The Toronto Star, The Toronto Sun, The Globe and Mail, and The National Post.

According to a report by the Canadian Newspaper Association (CNA), the average daily readerships for these four newspapers in 2009 were (rounded down): The Star (314,000), The Sun (143,000), The Globe (315,000), The Post (156,500). We all know newspapers are struggling. Cuts are being made almost daily as newspapers struggle to survive. Unfortunately, the sports sections around both the U.S. and Canada have seen significant cuts in most markets. Toronto is no different. I started to notice a real drop-off in Blue Jays coverage in ’09. It seems worse in 2010. So, I took to the online sports sections for each of the four Toronto papers to see if I’m correct… or just imagining things.

*For full disclosure, I used to work in the newspaper field as a reporter, editor and photographer. While training to be a journalist, I worked as a copy person for a mid-market TorStar paper, and I spent more than five years writing for Sun Media newspapers. I even had a Jays article published on The Sun’s Web sports section two years ago. It was supposed to be a weekly column, but The Sun cut its freelance budget soon after and my gig was one of those chopped.

It’s Saturday around noon when I check the sites. The Star’s baseball section’s lead article is from the Jays’ last win in Texas. It’s more than 24 hours old. The most recent game report (Friday afternoon’s Game 1 against Baltimore) is the sixth story down. All the ones above it are 24 hours or more old. Two articles are 48 hours old, one is 72 hours old. Nine baseball articles were posted on April 5, opening day (six were Jays related). It went downhill from there, including just one for Friday and no new articles for the Saturday Web page.

The Sun had 10 articles posted on April 5, but nothing new for Saturday. However, two articles were posted after the Jays’ win in Baltimore on Friday. The Globe appears to have upped its general coverage of Major League Baseball. There are numerous wire pieces from around baseball. Again, though, nothing for April 10, and one article reacting to the Jays’ win in Baltimore on April 9. The Post is also enjoying the cheaper wire stories. There are 10 stories featured on the main baseball page – none on the Jays. The lead story is that Cliff Lee will be out until May. The Jays? Oh, wait… I found a small header on the far right – “Blue Jays spoil Orioles’ home opener” – and it’s a link to… another Web site? No original Jays material at this paper.

I think we get the point. And I know the Jays are not the biggest draw in the world in Canada… but part of the reason for that is the lack of passionate (and intelligent) coverage. With all the extra coverage around the ‘Net, game reports are pretty much covered by places like ESPN, FoxSports, and MLB.com. What newspapers should be focusing on is features, interesting angles and even teams’ up-and-coming minor league stars. With apologies to the baseball columnists in Toronto, I haven’t read a truly interesting or inspired column in a year or more. Their Q&A articles, which seem to be rather popular, are usually bland and misinformed.

The cheapest way for some newspapers (especially those operating in small or mid-sized markets) to get some footing back for their sports pages is to embrace the online writer (I dislike the term blogger; there are too many negative connotations). Hiring a writer or two off the Internet would be both cheap and it could really infuse some life back into the baseball coverage. Sure, there are some lousy and unreliable baseball writers online, but there are also some great ones that produce insightful and clean copy. The exact same can be said for sports columnists in the newspaper world.

Major national sports media outlets like ESPN, Sports Illustrated, and FoxSports have embraced the online writers. You can find them all over their Web pages. Newspapers need to realize that passionate and informed “bloggers” are not going away. You cannot beat us, and we cannot beat you. The best scenario for everyone involved (especially the readers) is to join together. Otherwise, there will be no winners. Only losers.

Oh, and if you’re wondering who I think the best baseball beat writer and the best baseball columnist in Canada are… It’s the same person on both accounts: Jordan Bastian of MLB.com.

We would look rather foolish if we drew conclusions based on the season’s first week. Anything can happen in the span of six games, which is why they play baseball for 162 games spanning six months. The first few weeks, even the first couple of months, centers on stories. A story doesn’t have to carry long-term implications. It just has to be entertaining. The opening week of 2010, thankfully, left us with no shortage of baseball stories.

Heading into the season, the Blue Jays were considered among the worst teams in the league. During the Opening Day chat, a number of panelists agreed that they were the team most likely to lose 100 games. Which, I suppose, means that they project as the league’s worst team. New GM Alex Anthopoulos apparently has a plan to rebuild the squad, but that takes time. It also oftentimes involves hitting the cellar for a year or two and collecting the accompanying draft picks. Yet the Blue Jays have started the season hot, finishing the first week with a 5-1 record, tied with Philadelphia, Detroit, and San Francisco for tops in the majors.

Does this mean that the Blue Jays figure to shock us this year, becoming the scrappy underdogs in the powerhouse AL East? Hardly. In fact, we’ve seen this type of play from the Blue Jays recently — as in, just last year. Through their first six games of 2009 they also finished 5-1, ending the week ahead of the Yankees, Red Sox, and Rays in the standings. Even Baltimore finished the week near the division’s attic, going 4-1, including two wins in the opening series against the Yankees. While the Orioles fell quickly, though, the Jays continued their hot play for quite some time.

After completing a four-game sweep of the White Sox on May 18, the Jays had played 41 games and held a 3.5 game lead in the AL East. To finish the first week at 5-1 is one thing, but to maintain a lead over the Yanks, Sox, and Rays through 41 games is quite another. Might this team have been for real? They made a compelling case to that point, but again, this is why the baseball season lasts 162 games. In fact, if the season lasted just 62 the Jays would have finished third place in the AL East.

May 18 represented a high point for the Jays. Immediately after they finished that sweep of the White Sox they collapsed. It started with a three-game sweep by Boston. Then Atlanta swept them. Then they traveled to play Baltimore, a team they had swept earlier in the month, hoping to rediscover their winning ways. It did not happen there, as the Orioles also swept them. That’s nine days, nine games, nine losses. The Jays hung around for another couple of weeks, but a four-game losing streak in June put them five games out, and even a sweep of the Phillies couldn’t bring them out of the hole. By the All-Star break they found themselves 11 games out. The only story left for them was the fate of Roy Halladay.

The Jays could have another story brewing this year. Their only loss of the season came on Opening Day, when Shaun Marcum, who missed all of 2008 while recovering from Tommy John surgery, took a no-hitter into the seventh. The bullpen blew that game, but the Jays recovered to take the next five contests. In two straight games they mounted ninth-inning come backs, thwarting since-deposed Texas closer Frank Francisco and then struggling Orioles closer Mike Gonzalez. They followed that up with two convincing wins, putting them atop the AL East as they head back to Toronto for their home opener later tonight.

It is difficult, if not impossible, to imagine a situation where the Jays continue their early season surge. Vernon Wells will not keep his wOBA anywhere near .576, even if he does produce a bounce-back season. Alex Gonzalez will certainly fall hard from his .538 first-week wOBA. Dana Eveland will not provide 7.1 innings of shutout ball every time out — and there’s a good chance he won’t do that even one more time this season. Jason Frasor and Kevin Gregg will certainly blow saves. This isn’t to rain on the Blue Jays parade, but is simply a matter of fact. They might get some surprise performances that last all season, but certainly will not get enough to overcome the competition in the AL East.

That’s fine for the Blue Jays. It’s part of the plan for long-term success. I don’t think any of their fans expected them to finish higher than fourth in the East, and the majority, I would think, pegged them as the cellar. That might well come true. After all, in 2005 the Orioles led the AL East through May but finished the season 74-88. That doesn’t mean, however, that we should ignore the story they’re producing right now. Vernon Wells is surging. The pitching staff has handled itself well. Some role players have contributed. While we’ll be telling a different story next month, for now it’s the Jays’ time to bask in the spotlight.

It didn’t take Texas long to come to the conclusion that Frank Francisco was no longer their best relief pitcher. After two blown saves by Francisco, Neftali Feliz is in as the new ninth inning relief ace for the Rangers.

Over the years, we’ve talked a lot about the relative value of starters and relievers. Even the best relief pitchers in the game are only worth about as much as an average starting pitcher, due to the drastic quantity difference in innings pitched. So, in general, we usually feel like a pitcher should be given as many chances as possible to stick in the rotation before he gets pigeonholed as a full time reliever.

However, there are situations where it makes sense to take a high quality arm and stick him in the bullpen, and I think this is one of those situations.

As Jeremy Greenhouse just showed, not every pitcher responds the same way when shifted to the bullpen. There are pitchers whose stuff plays up in relief more than the average, and they get a significant velocity (and performance) boost when throwing shorter outings.

For this class of pitcher, the relative difference between what they can be as a starter and a reliever is significant enough to overcome the drop in innings pitched. Joe Nathan is the classic example, as he went from a middling back of the rotation prospect to one of the best relievers in baseball after the move.

There are quite a few reasons to think Feliz may be one of these guys. He’s had trouble sustaining his velocity before, and his questionable command of strikeout stuff make it unlikely that he’d be able to work more than five or six innings in most starts before he ran his pitch count up. In his entire professional career, he’s pitched into the seventh inning just once in 53 starts (though, to be fair, Atlanta and Texas were both actively keeping his workload down).

If Feliz is one of these pitchers whose stuff is significantly better in relief than as a starter, then Texas made the right move. They’re a contender in 2010, and the value of a marginal win to them this year is extremely high. Meanwhile, they actually have significant rotation depth, with Derek Holland hanging out in Triple-A waiting for an opening among their starting five. Given his current state of development, Feliz wouldn’t be a significant improvement over what the Rangers already have in the rotation, but there’s a very good chance that he’s their best reliever right now.

The present value of using Feliz as a reliever is quite high. Given that the other option is to have him in Triple-A attempting to develop into a long term starting pitcher, a proposition that is questionable to begin with, I think the Rangers are properly weighing present and future value here. Feliz is a big time talent, but there were good reasons to think his future was in the bullpen regardless of where he pitched this year, and he’ll most help the Rangers try to win the AL West by closing games in 2010.

Over the past couple weeks — and spanning multiple forms of media — Prospect Maven Marc Hulet and I have made clear our differences in re the imminent success (or lack thereof) of current Texas Ranger and citizen of the world Colby Lewis.

Put briefly, while Hulet regards Lewis as roughly the same sort of Quad-A player that he was before dominating the Japanese league these past two years, I’ve been seduced by the righty’s optimistic CHONE projection and have heralded him — on this site, to my mother, wherever — as a Person of Interest for this here season.

As such, this past Friday night’s contest between the Texas Rangers and Seattle Mariners was of interest to the both of us. Exactly one hour ago, Mr. Hulet gave his reading of Lewis’s performance. Here’s mine.

Product
Results are where Lewis fared best. First and foremost, he got the win. If nothing else, that should allow for optimism, however unfounded. Moreover, Lewis allowed only nine baserunners in seven innings of work (a 1.29 WHIP for the game). If he’s on your fantasy team (as he is on mine), you’re probably pretty satisfied with his debut.

Win Probablity Added (WPA) liked Lewis’s performance, too. He led all players with a .298 WPA, barely edging out teammate Nelson Cruz, who posted a .271 on the strength of a 3-for-4 night (which included a well-struck donger). In this case, things could have gone much worse for Lewis. He loaded the bases with only one out in the seventh inning, creating the highest Leverage Index state of the night (a 2.63 mark) despite the fact that Texas held a 5-1 lead at the time.

Unfortunately for the Mariners, the batter for said base-out state was Jack Wilson, whom Lewis quickly dispatched on three pitches (called strike, foul, called strike). Ichiro followed, grounded out to second baseman Joaquin Arias (and his well-groomed moustache), and the threat was over.

Process
It’s always an interesting exercise to assess even a single pitching performance by means of at-bat results and their corresponding run values. If nothing else, it can give us a sense as to whether the pitcher in question was lucky or unlucky with regard to his batted balls, etc.

The following table includes all the possible at-bat outcomes with the corresponding Run Expectancy (RE) of each outcome. Additionally, I’ve added the number of such events conceded by Lewis and the corresponding runs allowed (or prevented, as the case my be). (Run Expectancies courtesy of StatCorner.)

Type	RE	Lewis	Lewis RE
K	-0.105	3	(0.32)
BB	0.329	4	1.32
HBP	0.345	0	0.00
LD	0.384	3	1.15
GB	0.053	7	0.37
OFB	0.046	6	0.28
IFB	-0.096	4	(0.38)
HR	1.394	0	0.00
			
TOTAL			2.42

What we see plainly here is something that I, unfortunately, intuited during the game — namely, that Lewis got somewhat lucky. Given a normal distribution of the above outcomes, we could expect Lewis to surrender somewhere in the neighborhood of two to three runs. And if we were being truly diligent, we might even consider accounting for “partial” home runs by removing the home run RE and adding one-ninth of a home run (so, approximately .15 runs) to each outfield fly ball, as homers occur on roughly 11% of fly balls. To do so would further push Lewis’s RE for his seven innings toward the three-run mark.

Lewis’s greatest weakness is made clear by this table: the walk-to-strikeout ratio. Last year in Japan, Lewis recorded 186 strikeouts against only 19 walks in 176.1 innings. His 2008 season was pretty similar. Lewis is now already 20% of the way to his 2009 walk total after just seven innings.

Unfortunately for me — and for everyone else who’s hopped aboard the Colby Lewis bandwagon — Lewis’s K:BB from this first game much more resembles the 1.25 mark he posted through his first 217.1 Major League innings.

Pitchf/x
I’m far from what you’d call an expert of the ol’ Pitch/f/x, but I also recognize the importance of the information it can provide to us. Anyway, so long as the Pitchf/x Tool over at Brooks Baseball isn’t lying, Lewis only recorded a grand total of nine whiffs in his seven innings of work. That total includes only two whiffs from a total of 33 sliders/curves, at least one of which will have to serve as a reliable out-pitch if Lewis hopes to stay in the rotation.

Conclusions
All in all, while Lewis showed things like pluck and want-to in his seven-inning return to American baseball, he showed less in the way of groundball- and/or strikeout-inducing stuff. Yes, it’s one start, and, yes, the infield flies are nice, but Hulet could be righter than I’d care to admit if Lewis’s next couple of starts resemble this one.