One Night Only: Hot Game Previews for April 19th
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
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.
Sizemore and Choo are very vulnerable against left handed pitching. Something to keep in mind if gambling were legal.
Is there a correlation between which team I could consider betting on and a team’s NERD score ?
bid on the 10’s and find out?
brought skyline chili into the Reds at Pads game last weekend…amazing! makes me miss cinci
Shamefully, I’ve never even tried it.
Was just reading about it, though, and apparently the original two-way (spaghetti with chili) was the creation of Macedonian immigrants.
Unexpected!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cincinnati_chili
it’s pretty much the Colby Lewis of food.
it regresses in your mouth?
How could you not feature tonight’s CHI-TB game for which Maddon will clearly utilize Danks Theory?!?!?!
When John Danks himself (the face of Danks Theory) faces Tampa Bay, Jonah Keri has to get a little aroused.
I will be proudly starting Matt Joyce tonight as well!
Could you go back and do a historical look at which teams have been the most fun to watch over the last decade and which ones have been the least fun?
This would actually be really interesting, has anyone published historical NERD scores even on a smaller blog?
You just take the teams zStats and plug them into the formula — (AGEz*2) + BATz + HR/FBz + (SBAz*.333 + SBRz*.333 + XBTz*.333) + BULLz + UZRz + PAYz + LUCK + POFF + Constant (to make 5.00 average) — right? Although what would you do about POFF? Look at teams playoff odds throughout the year? Look at the final difference in standings and reward teams that finished within a certain number of games from first place / second place? Ignore the variable entirely?
I don’t think you can just take end of the year numbers and apply them like that. A team that had a really hot start, but faded after the first month might look totally unenjoyable, which isn’t necessarily the case. Maybe look at each month worth of data, calculate all of the factors, and then do an aggregate, weighing each month evenly?
I think we need Carson’s input on this very important issue.
Collmenter developed his throwing motion from his experience in competetive hatchet throwing.
Seriously.
Already my favorite pitcher now.