Cust Cussing (Dave Cameron)
– Dave takes a look at Jack Cust’s off the charts performance.

Is Willingham Ready to Bust Out? (Eric Seidman)
– Will Willingham continue his terrific season for the first place Marlins?

Keeping a Rookie Pitcher Grounded (Marc Hulet)
– What’s so special about top Red Sox prospect Justin Masterson?

Maximizing Potential (Dave Cameron)
– It looks like Chien-Ming Wang has a new trick up his sleeve.

Plate Discipline Stats
– Go look at them in the player pages!

Pitching Trio of the Month (Eric Seidman)
– It’s probably not any three pitchers on the Pirates’ staff.

About two years ago I attempted to delve further into plate discipline with two articles: Dissecting Plate Discipline Part 1, Part 2.

And then a year later I took an additional look at plate discipline: More on Plate Discipline

All batters now have plate discipline stats available dating back to 2005. Here’s what they are:

• O-Swing%: The percentage of pitches a batter swings at outside the strike zone.
• Z-Swing%: The percentage of pitches a batter swings at inside the strike zone.
• Swing%: The overall percentage of pitches a batter swings at.
• O-Contact%: The percentage of pitches a batter makes contact with outside the strike zone when swinging the bat.
• Z-Contact%: The percentage of pitches a batter makes contact with inside the strike zone when swinging the bat.
• Contact%: The overall percentage of a batter makes contact with when swinging the bat.
• Zone%: The overall percentage of pitches a batter sees inside the strike zone.

What you’ll want to know is the major league averages for each stat:

Season O-Swing Z-Swing  Swing  O-Contact Z-Contact Contact   Zone
2005     20.3%   68.0%  46.0%      51.8%     88.3%   80.8%  53.8%
2006     23.5%   66.6%  46.1%      57.4%     88.5%   81.0%  52.6%
2007     25.0%   66.6%  45.9%      60.8%     88.2%   80.8%  50.3%

All the location data is from Baseball Info Solutions and you can find all these stats in the player pages at the very bottom: Vladimir Guerrero

Whoops – You Aren’t Good, Are You? (Dave Cameron)
– Jon Garland is taking the term “contact pitcher” to new extremes.

A WPA Look at the Houdinis (Eric Seidman)
– Just how valuable is it to get out of that bases-loaded, no-out jam?

Robinzon Diaz… Not Your Typical Catcher (Marc Hulet)
– The Blue Jays have themselves a catcher who can hit.

Extra Base Hit Monsters (Dave Cameron)
– Utley may be #1 in extra bases, but there’s a tight race for #2.

Banking on a Fresh Start (Marc Hulet)
– The Padres might have just picked up another diamond in the ruff.

Rich Lederer over at Baseball Analysts asked me to write their “DH” guest column for today and I decided to take a look at the ever controversial “Clutch” statistics of starting/relief pitchers using Leverage Index.

You might be surprised who’s been “clutch” and “un-clutch” over the past 6 years, so go check it out!

Win Probability: 1974
– Who knew Richie Zisk should have won the 1974 NL MVP?

The Most Underrated Player in Baseball (Dave Cameron)
– Say hello to the next Tony Gwynn (maybe).

BrewCrew Win an Odd One (Eric Seidman)
– Check out Gabe Gross’s last hurrah in Milwaukee.

Snider Movin’ On Up to the East Coast (Marc Hulet)
– Marc begins his week long trek through Blue Jays prospect land.

Snakes Made Of Leather (Dave Cameron)
– Why are those DBacks 15-5?

Welcome to the Club, Smoltz: Who’s Next? (Eric Seidman)
– Maybe it’s Glavine? He could pitch another six years!

Good news! We have 1974 play-by-play data with all usual goodies including all 1,945 game graphs and the leaderboards.

And I bet you thought that 22 inning game was long:

Jed Lowrie made his debut on April 15th for the Red Sox. He started at third base in place of the injured Mike Lowell and went 1-4 with 3 RBIs that tied a 61 year old record for most RBIs in a Red Sox debut. Baseball America listed Lowrie as the 5th top prospect in the Red Sox organization for 2008. Although he started at third base in his debut, he typically plays shortstop, which is where he got his second start.

Alex Serrano debuted on April 16th for the Angels in the top of the 9th inning of a 2-3 game. He allowed 1 hit and struck out 1 in a scoreless inning. In AAA last season, Serrano struck out 46 batters and only walked 10 in 69+ innings of work.

German Duran got the start at third base in his debut for the Rangers on April 17th. He had 3 plate appearances and struck out in all of them. He was called up to fill a roster spot for the injured Marlon Byrd. John Sickels over at Minor League Ball projects Duran will have a long career as a “really good bench guy“.

David Purcey made his first major league start for the Blue Jays and allowed just 2 hits and 1 run in 4.1 innings of work. He also allowed an uncharacteristically high 7 walks. In AA last year, he allowed just 16 walks in 62+ innings of work. The Mockingbird did a full writeup on his Pitchf/x data and uncovered a mid 90’s fastball with good movement.

When I saw the Rockies score in the top of the 14th inning, I called it a night. And when the clock struck 3 AM on the East coast, our live Win Probability called it a night. So if you missed it, here’s the complete 22 innings of Win Probability goodness. You may never see this many points crammed into one of these graphs again.

The DL bound Joe Borowski has apparently had soreness in his right triceps that the Indians staff decided to let him pitch through for weeks. I guess that helps explain his 18.00 ERA and super slow fastball.

Despite leading the AL with 45 saves last year, he also led it in blown saves with 8 and his ERA of 5.04 was by far the highest of any closer last year. He did have pretty decent peripherals though, with a K/9 of nearly 8 and a BB/9 of 2.33. His season was mainly marred by an extremely high .348 BABIP and a pretty sub par LOB% of 68.4%. Typically both of these will regress toward the league averages in following years.

The main problem with Borowski is that he’s a bit of an extreme fly ball pitcher and will be prone to giving up home runs. Last year he allowed 9, which was just 4 home runs shy of Al Reyes‘ reliever leading 13.

So the question is, if Borowski is out for an extended period of time, who will get his job?

Rafael Betancourt is the obvious choice. He had a gaudy K/BB of nearly 9 last year, and a 1.47 ERA in 79+ innings of work. He also entered games in high leverage, non-save situations last season with a gmLI of 1.78. Borowski entered games in slightly higher leverage situations with a gmLI of 1.94. Even though he has an ERA over 5 this year, his strikeouts and walks are almost identical to last year, so there’s probably not much to worry about.

Rafael Perez had nearly as great a season as Betancourt did in 2007. He struck out over a batter an inning and had a BB/9 of just 2.23, which led him to a career low 1.78 ERA. This year his ERA is over 8 and he’s allowed a few more walks then he should. But, he’s only pitched 4 innings this year and allowed his only 4 earned runs in one of his appearances so definitely take those numbers with a grain of salt.

Masa Kobayashi has had a solid season so far with a with a 2.08 ERA and 3 strikeouts and 1 walk in 4+ innings. He amassed over 200 saves in Japan, and technically has more career saves than anyone on the Indians. Kaz Sasaki and Takashi Saito had zero problems stepping right into the closer roles when they first arrived in the majors.

Finally, there’s Jensen Lewis who last year had a 34/10 strikeout to walk ratio in 29 innings pitched with a 2.15 ERA. This year, it appears to be more of that same excellence, though his K/9 is down to 8 from 10, but small sample size and all that….

Here’s how they’ve been utilized this year so far, according to gmLI:

Joe Borowski – 1.86
Jensen Lewis – 1.61
Rafael Perez – 1.48
Rafael Betancourt – 1.27
Masa Kobayashi – 0.23

Borowski should have the highest gmLI as the closer and does. Oddly enough, Jensen and Perez have entered the game in higher leverage situations than Betancourt has, despite his reputation as a fire putter-outer. Kobayashi is clearly not used in confidence, but there are only so many high leverage situations and he just hasn’t had the opportunity with such an overall excellent bullpen.

Judging from tonight’s game, Betancourt was being “saved” to close out the game and was not utilized in a tie game in the 8th. Nor was he used in the 7th with the Indians up 2-1 and the Red Sox threatening with a man on 1st and 2nd.

So for the moment, it looks like Betancourt is going to get to close out games, but the Indians have a pretty stellar bullpen and I think if needed any of these guys could handle the closer job.

When Borowski comes back and if he’s healthy, chances are he’ll be given a shot to reclaim his role as closer. And while he’s not as bad as he’s often made out to be, he really is one of the worst options in what appears to be a very stacked Indians bullpen.

Week two of baseball is officially in the books as of two days ago. Lots of surprises this year including David Ortiz trailing baseball in WPA, WPA/LI, and BRAA. He’s dead last, by a lot. Maybe he’ll land himself a not so coveted Worst of the Week award.

Batter of the Week:

Travis Buck takes top honors this week with .806 wins. His biggest hit of the week was on April 10th where he hit a 2 run double in the top of the 9th worth .391 wins. He hit 6 doubles and 1 triple the entire week and while he may not have hit any home runs or had the best OPS, his consistent hitting was definitely the most timely.

Pitcher of the Week:

Matt Capps narrowly beat out Wandy Rodriguez with .84 wins to become the pitcher with the highest WPA of the week. Capps threw five scoreless innings including two that were very high leverage extra innings.

Worst of the Week:

Joe Borowski’s -0.897 wins was by far the worst of any player. David Ortiz as the worst batter gave him a run for his money with -.565 wins, but Borowski giving up a walk-off grand slam to Torii Hunter was really something special. The way things are going, Borowski could win this award next week too!

The Biggest Hit:

.712 wins – Travis Hafner hit the biggest home run of the season off of Justin Speier with 2 outs, in the top of the 9th, and a man on first to put his team up 4-3. Jake Westbrook closed out the game for the win and his first complete game of the year.

The Biggest Out:

-.347 wins – With the A’s up by 1 and a man on 1st and 2nd in the bottom of the 13th inning, Keith Foulke induced a game ending double play ball hit by Aaron Hill. The Leverage Index in that situation was an extremely high 7.16 and it was the biggest out of the season thus far.