One Night Only: Hot Game Previews for April 19th

by
April 19, 2011


Will Justin Upton continue his assault on regional purveyors of fast food?

This edition of One Night Only contains:

1. Previews for four games, all featuring Flawless Information™ — that is, sexy, updated Team NERD scores and sexy, updated ZiPS projections.

2. A complete table of those same Team NERD scores, now with totally infallible UZRs.

3. A video you can watch at home or office.

Arizona (10) at Cincinnati (10) | 7:10pm ET
Starting Pitchers
Diamondbacks: Armando Galarraga
154.0 IP, 5.90 K/9, 3.33 BB/9, 5.39 FIP

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.

Reds: Sam LeCure
140.0 IP, 7.20 K/9, 3.66 BB/9, 4.35 FIP

Notes
• Only three teams rate perfectly by NERD’s exacting standards, and these are two of them. (Or is it two of they?)
• For the Diamondbacks, their best thing is how their bullpen is stupid good (now at a collective 2.80 xFIP — as compared to the league average of 4.05).
• A sampling from same: Juan Gutierrez (7.2 IP, 1.36 xFIP), J.J. Putz (6.0, 1.36), Kam Mickolio (5.0, 2.42).
• For the Reds, their best thing is how they have the second-best offense in all of baseball, at 17.0 weighted runs above average.
• That includes the best Joey Votto in all of baseball, of course.

A Recent Call-Up for the Diamondbacks
A recent call-up for the Diamondbacks is Joshua Collmenter. The 25-year-old Collmenter is notable for being a marginal prospect and for having an Arizona Fall League that saw him finish second on the SCOUT pitching leaderboard. As Eno Sarris showed us late last fall, he’s also notable for a delivery that might be best described as “max effort,” “hard to repeat,” or “a case study in self-abuse.”

Regard:

Three Other Games
Milwaukee (4) at Philadelphia (3) | 7:05pm ET
• Roy Halladay pitches tonight.
• Somehow he’s managed to improve his ZiPS projection already, from a preseason FIP projection of 3.03 to a rest-of-season mark of 2.89.
• His numbers so far: 22.0 IP, 9.00 K/9, 1.23 BB/9, .283 BABIP, 44.1 GB%, 0.0% HR/FB 2.73 xFIP, 1.0 WAR.

Houston (3) at New York Nationals (1) | 7:10pm ET
• I wouldn’t generally advocate this game, owing to the low scores of both teams.
• That said both Wandy Rodriguez (16.0 IP, 7.31 ERA, 3.94 xFIP) and Jonathon Niese (17.0 IP, 6.88 ERA, 3.50 xFIP) have been entirely molested by bad luck.
• Behold, regression!

Cleveland (10) at Kansas City (9) | 8:10pm ET
• Jeanmar Gomez versus Bruce Chen doesn’t seem like a great draw.
• Then again, Kyle Davies versus Carlos Carrasco didn’t really either, and last night’s game was actually pretty great.
• Last thing. Cleveland’s first four batters are all clearly excellent: Grady Sizemore, Asdrubal Cabrera, Shin-Soo Choo, and Carlos Santana.

Complete and Updated Team NERD Table
Totally Unnecessary Subtitle in Bold

Here are your updated Team NERD scores, now with very early defensive numbers.





 

Carson Cistulli has published a book of aphorisms called Spirited Ejaculations of a New Enthusiast.

14 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
riverboatgambit
14 years ago

Sizemore and Choo are very vulnerable against left handed pitching. Something to keep in mind if gambling were legal.

1
Kroot
14 years ago
Reply to  riverboatgambit

Is there a correlation between which team I could consider betting on and a team’s NERD score ?

1
jaywrong
14 years ago
Reply to  Kroot

bid on the 10’s and find out?

1