Archive for Cardinals

The Cardinals need to win Thursday night, and in theory there’s no one they’d rather have on the mound than Adam Wainwright. But, for one thing, they actually need to win three in a row, so it wouldn’t matter which of those three games Wainwright were to start. And more relevantly, Wainwright hasn’t exactly been himself, which maybe doesn’t come as a surprise given that he’s eaten innings like the Royals outfield eats fly balls. During the season, Wainwright went through and then seemingly emerged from what he termed a dead-arm phase, but his playoff struggles leave the Cardinals in an uncertain situation.

After Wainwright was bad against Los Angeles, the talk was that he had something of an elbow issue, and that was causing him discomfort. That also, in turn, caused fans of the Cardinals discomfort. After Wainwright was a little less bad against San Francisco, people wondered about the elbow thing, but Wainwright swore it was more mechanical, and that his elbow was fine. So what ought we believe, going into Game 5? We should establish here that, no matter what, Wainwright needs to get over something if the Cardinals are to survive. But must he conquer discomfort, or must he conquer a mechanical problem? Let’s investigate, inconclusively.

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It was the inning that shouldn’t have been.

First, in the tenth inning of Game Three of the National League Championship series, the Giants saw Brandon Crawford stroll to the plate against Randy Choate. It’s easy to say that the matchup didn’t favor the hitter based on Choate’s career splits. Choate has struck out 27% of the lefties he’s seen, and only walked 7.7%. Crawford walks 8.7% of the time against lefties, but his strikeout rate jumps to 24.5% when he’s seeing a southpaw.

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There’s a sort of check list you can go to when a pitcher’s performance changes. You run down the possible reasons, and if there’s no box checked, you shrug and figure a few bounces have gone differently and that was all that happened.

So what do you do when a pitcher has a breakout performance, then suffers a setback and then looks like he’s re-found what he’s lost? Especially when that pitcher doesn’t have any obvious checkmarks on the checklist? What do you say about Shelby Miller’s up-and-down year so far?

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Every year, there’s a gaggle of young guns, ready to take the league by storm. Wether it’s Clayton Kershaw, Jose Fernandez, or Matt Harvey, there’s a new face that everyone can dream careers upon. Unwrinkled faces, unworn arm ligaments, and the bright unknown future might be the stuff Spring Training dreams are built upon.

And here we are, October 14, 2014, and we’ll be watching 39-year-old Tim Hudson go up against 35-year-old John Lackey in game three of the National League Championship series. If, at the beginning of this decade, you had these guys down as top-25 pitchers for the next 14 years, congratulations. This game is your reward.

But that won’t stop us from looking back and trying to figure out how we got to this moment.

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If everybody in baseball were better at execution, offense would go down. Though the hitters would be improved on talent, hitting is reactionary, and if pitchers could more consistently hit their spots, it stands to reason there would be far fewer dingers. Pitches aren’t usually called in dinger-friendly areas — home runs, commonly, come out of mistakes.

Sunday night, the Cardinals went deep four times against Giants pitching. Matt Carpenter clobbered a Jake Peavy fastball that drifted out over the plate. Oscar Taveras got out ahead of a Jean Machi splitter that never dropped. Matt Adams punished a high Hunter Strickland fastball that, if Strickland had his druthers, would’ve been higher. And then Kolten Wong was the hero in the bottom of the ninth, taking advantage of a Sergio Romo mistake. And for Romo, it was a mistake he hadn’t made.

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There were a bunch of turning points in Game 2 of the NLCS, including three late-game home runs that allowed the Cardinals to walk-off as winners. Yadier Molina‘s exit, due to a strained oblique, also looked like a big moment, especially when backup catcher Tony Cruz couldn’t handle Trevor Rosenthal’s game-tying wild pitch in the ninth inning. But, given the change in expected outcome, the biggest moment of the game might have actually occurred way back in the bottom of the fourth inning.

Already up 1-0, the Cardinals mounted a rally against Jake Peavy, with Matt Adams drawing a leadoff walk and Jhonny Peralta following with a single. Yadier Molina then laid down a bunt, which wouldn’t have made any sense if he was healthy, but it seems like he very well may not have been, which would help explain why he gave himself up to move the runners over. With first base open, the Royals easily decided to walk Kolten Wong, but then Randall Grichuk singled to drive in a run while also keeping the bases loaded.

At this point, the Cardinals had a 2-0 lead and three runners on with only one out. Their win probability had ballooned to 86%, in part because the run expectancy of a bases loaded/1 out situation is 1.5 runs, so while the Cardinals led only 2-0 at that point, the WPA graph was assuming that the inning would end with them either having a 3-0 or 4-0 lead, most likely. And that would make them overwhelming favorites to hang on and win.

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There was no baseball last night. There will be no baseball tonight. This is the fault of a great many people, too many to list here. The cynical might say some blame falls at the feet of Don Mattingly and Matt Williams. Others insist the entirety of the blame belongs there.

Mattingly tried his best and Clayton Kershaw turned in two starts (or parts of two starts) unbecoming of a presumptive MVP and Cy Young winner. But if you’re looking for the true catalyst of the Dodgers’ demise and the author of a short series win, look no further than Matt Carpenter.

The Cardinals’ third baseman was unconscious during the division series, clubbing a home run and double apiece in the first three games of the series. In the deciding Game Four, he went 0-4 but his mark on this series remains indelible.

All that extra base pop is slightly out of character for Carpenter, who claimed the same high-OBP as his 7 WAR campaign of 2013 only without the extra base power. He hit just eight home runs during the regular season, only one player hit for less power while still producing more than 10% better than league average.

None of this makes Dodgers fans feel any better. How could L.A. let off-brand Joe Mauer beat them so soundly during the Division Series? Carpenter bested the Dodgers in three key ways.

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During the regular season, the Dodgers went 23-4 in games started by Clayton Kershaw, and 20-1 since the beginning of June. Kershaw and the Dodgers started to feel invincible, so, naturally, with Kershaw in the playoffs the Dodgers went 0-2, their year ending on a Tuesday in St. Louis. Plenty of things happened in Game 4 that played a role in determining the outcome, but this tells an awful lot of the story:

Kershaw’s final pitch of 2014 was a home run that turned a two-run lead into a one-run deficit. Under ordinary circumstances, that would just be a thing that happened. However, Kershaw had gone beyond 100 pitches, on short rest, in the playoffs. Despite consensus opinion, the Dodgers did have a bullpen, and a loss meant their season was over. So a tremendous number of people now believe Kershaw shouldn’t have pitched in the seventh, that Don Mattingly hung on a few minutes too long. And, certainly, we here have talked an awful lot about the need to be aggressive with bullpen usage in October. To talk this particular case through, from both sides, I’ve enlisted the help of my own brain. Usually it likes to sit my posts out, but this is a special circumstance.

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On Tuesday evening, Clayton Kershaw gave up a home run to Matt Adams. It was a big home run. Wanna know how I know it was a big home run? Because Matt Adams did this:

The graphic which appears during that replay is annoying, but also helpful, because it shows the real reason why Adams’ homer was a big homer. It was a big homer because it gave the Cardinals a 3-2 lead late in an playoff game with the opportunity to eliminate a team that had the best pitcher in the world on the mound. The Cardinals went on to win, of course, and the Dodgers’ season is now over.

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Clayton Kershaw seems like a virtual lock to win the 2014 National League Most Valuable Player award. Even though he missed a handful of starts at the beginning of the year, he more than made up for that over the remainder, and below, observe a plot of how Kershaw has distributed his runs allowed.

Kershaw’s made 28 starts, and in seven of them, he didn’t allow a run. In another ten, he allowed but a single run, so you can see why Kershaw’s MVP case has so much support. But I should note that Kershaw made 27 regular-season starts, and he’s made one postseason start. The postseason start is included in the plot above, and it’s something that kind of needs to be explained.

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