One of the most remarkable things about the Cardinals’ clutch hitting — aside from the reality of the Cardinals’ clutch hitting — is the way it refuses to regress the way we’d expect it to. From a Cardinals game recap over the weekend:

At the end of April, the team was batting .327 with runners in scoring position. A month later, the average was up to .333. Three months in, it sat at .335. And after going 2-for-5 with runners in scoring position on Sunday, the Cardinals now boast a mark of .338. No team in baseball history has even come close to maintaining such a pace.

The Cardinals came out of the gate hitting well with runners in scoring position. At least by batting average, every month they’ve only gotten better. That’s not what regression looks like. That’s the polar opposite of what regression looks like. It’s been enough to make some people wonder. Just what are the Cardinals doing, and how are the Cardinals doing it?

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Allen Craig’s a really good player, mostly because he’s a really good hitter. He just ranked No. 40 in Dave’s Trade Value series. Allen Craig has a lot of good things going on, and here’s one of them: he’s been the league’s best hitter with runners in scoring position. According to Baseball-Reference, 334 active players have at least 250 career plate appearances with runners in scoring position. By batting average in the split, Joe Mauer is third, at .338. Joey Votto is second, at .347. Allen Craig is first, at .396. Not only is Craig in first; to drop into a tie with Votto, he’d have to go hitless in his next 43 such at-bats. I’m not claiming that Craig is unusually clutch, but so far, he’s hit at the right times, and his category lead is remarkable.

So we have to acknowledge that Craig is good. We have to do this, before discussing a way in which he’s been bad. A way in which he’s been worse than everyone else. Allen Craig is a league leader in multiple categories, and the one explored below isn’t something Craig is going to want to hear about.

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The last time I wrote about Edge% it was in the context of the Tampa Bay Rays using it to get their pitchers into more favorable counts on 1-1. But now I want to take that topic and drill a little deeper to understand how often edge pitches are taken for called strikes.

Overall, pitches taken on the edge are called strikes 69% of the time. But that aggregate measure hides some pretty substantial differences. Going further on that idea, I wanted to see how the count impacts the likelihood of a pitch on the edge being called a strike.

Here are the results:

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Imagine, for a second, that Major League Baseball had an automated strike zone, and there weren’t any bugs in the system. Imagine that the zone were specifically defined, changing consistently for each hitter, such that there couldn’t ever be any dispute. The zone would be perfect, and any given pitch would be either a definite strike or a definite ball. What you have imagined doesn’t exist. Instead, we have human brains doing everything, and sometimes human brains fall for magic tricks and infomercials. Umpires make mistakes, and because of that, any pitch could conceivably be called either way. There’s always some probability, however small, that a bad pitch might be called a strike, or that a good pitch might be called a ball. This is the way it is, and for now the rate of mistakes is low enough that we haven’t had a bloody revolt.

Because there are mistakes, there is a spectrum of mistakes, with some being the most understandable and some being the most wrong. The most wrong strike-zone call would be a call with the greatest difference between the actual call and what the call should’ve been. Imagine a fastball down the middle. If it’s taken, and called a ball, that would be a big mistake on the umpire’s part. With all this in mind, the month of June is over, so I thought we’d take a look at the month’s most wrong ball call. In part out of curiosity; in part to see what we can learn. Get ready for a little Edwin Jackson.

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I don’t know if you can really understand until he’s yours. You might’ve forgotten, but Cliff Lee pitched for the Mariners once, and while I knew Lee was an ace starter beforehand, it wasn’t until I watched him every five days that I really “got” it. Lee was perfect. He wasn’t and isn’t the best starting pitcher in the world, but he’s close, and he does everything perfectly, just like you’d want him to. He’s always pitching in the strike zone, so he doesn’t get himself in trouble. He works quickly, which is refreshing, and his command is as good as anyone’s. Because of the zone work, Lee doesn’t issue walks, and because of the command and the quality of the stuff, Lee manages to rack up the strikeouts. Lee’s quick and always ahead in the count, and if you’ve had the chance to watch him and root for him, you know the way that I feel. When Lee isn’t pitching, you wish that he were.

Lee, then, is a superior form, a rare form, and he shouldn’t be the subject of many comparisons. Certainly, you wouldn’t expect to see his name linked to that of a right-handed young starter with basically two pitches. In terms of scouting reports, Cliff Lee and Shelby Miller don’t have a whole lot in common, aside from the fact that they throw baseballs at guys in equipment. But when you look at the processes, when you look at the results, Miller’s following in the right footsteps from a very young age.

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In his Major League debut for the Mets, 23-year-old Zack Wheeler struck out seven hitters in his six innings of work. Of those seven strikeouts, six came on fastballs — and of those six, four came on whiffs induced by fastballs.

This got me wondering, what pitchers this year have generated the largest percentage of their strikeouts off of their fastball? And how many generated those strike outs on swings and misses on fastballs*?

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At this point, everyone knows the story of the Cardinals stealing Albert Pujols in the 13th round of the 1999 draft. In terms of production for the cost, it’s probably the best draft pick in Major League history. Well, apparently, the Cardinals are good at this whole 13th round draft pick thing, because exactly 10 years after they unearthed Pujols, they struck gold again.

Their 2009 13th round pick? Matt Carpenter. He was a senior sign out of Texas Christian University, a budget pick who only cost them a $1,000 signing bonus. After signing, the Cardinals had him split time between short-season and two A-ball levels. At low-A, he drew some walks but showed no power — in part because he hit flat footed with no weight transfer — and was terrible when he got promoted to high-A, hitting .219/.286/.342 in 128 plate appearances. 23-year-old non-athletes who can’t hit A-ball pitching a few months after signing for $1,000 are the definition of non-prospects.

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Welcome to the second edition of The Fortnight. Read here for our initial post, and here for the explanation of our depth charts and standings pages, which fuel The Fortnight in its utmost.

This week, I thought we’d take a look at the teams whose projected full-season run differential has changed the most since we last left off. Stats for this edition run from May 21 through the games on June 2.

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The Detroit Tigers starters currently have a 2.54 FIP, which translates into a FIP- of 62, easily the best in baseball. In fact, it’s easily the best FIP- in baseball history, and as I wrote a month ago, Detroit’s starters have a chance to write themselves into the history books with their 2013 performance. But, instead of just writing a post updating their pace — they’d basically need to post a FIP- of 83 the rest of the way to break the record for best FIP relative to league average — I thought it might be interesting to look at how the best rotations in baseball history dominated.

For instance, the narrative around the Tigers current rotation mostly has to do with their strikeouts. They are on pace to shatter the all time record for strikeouts by a rotation, and the swing-and-miss stuff possessed by guys like Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer makes it easy to credit the strikeout rate as the primary driver of their success. However, once you compare the individual components to the league average, their strikeout rate becomes just a part of the story, and maybe not even the biggest part.

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You can knock ’em down, but you can’t knock ’em out.

The St. Louis Cardinals’ pitching staff has been decimated by injuries early on in 2013, but the club continues to receive strong performances from rookie pitchers thanks to one of the deepest minor league systems in the game. The next pitching prospect to throw his hat into the ring will be 2012 first round draft pick Michael Wacha, who will face the Kansas City Royals in his big league debut tonight.

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