Archive for Javier Lopez

When you think of the San Francisco Giants bullpen, you think of Brian Wilson. Since assuming the closer’s role four years ago, Wilson has been the face – and the beard – of relief pitching in the Bay Area. That recognition comes with merit since the right-hander has been one of the better relief pitchers in baseball and his save totals (160 since 2008) shows he is well-equipped with the closer’s mentality. While he has done a great job closing the door, the pitchers bridging the gap from starting pitcher to Wilson has been as good, if not better.

As a unit, Bruce Bochy’s bunch has been a top-3 bullpen this season. More specifically, he has deployed a lefty/righty combination of high-leverage relievers to lock down the innings prior to his closer. From the left side, Javier Lopez has been quite the pickup for the Giants since joining the club in late 2010. As an alumni of the FanGraphs’ school of higher leverage, Lopez has settled in as one of the more dependable lefties in relief.

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Quite often we hear that a relief pitcher does or does not have what it takes to get the high pressure outs. Certain pitchers have “it” while others melt under the spot light. Ryan Madson could not be a successful closer because he lacked the vaunted “closer’s mentality.” I’m sure on a case by case basis you will find players who simply cannot handle the pressure; however, studies have shown that a reliever should perform to his talent level regardless of the leverage. After all, they are just roles not skill-sets.

As a fan of the Rays, I have watched Kyle Farnsworth transform from a guy who also lacks the closer’s mentality in to a true relief ace pitching in high leverage situations. Farnsworth is not the only middle reliever to graduate to the high life with success. Including Farnsworth, I found five relief pitchers who moved from the mid-to-low level situations up to a higher level. All five pitched at least 50 innings last season with a pLI less than 1.0. In 2011, they have tossed 30 or more innings with a leverage index of 1.3 or higher (basically set-up man or more). Here is the list…

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Perhaps the story of the Phillies in ye old National League Championship Series of 2010 is the story of missed opportunities at the plate. We know how poor of a statistic batting average is, but Ryan Howard was the only regular to top .261, so the bats weren’t hot. The entire team put up a .216/.311/.321 line, which is somewhere between “that’s disappointing” and “OMGz, trade that bum Chase Utley (.182/.333/.227) like yesterday” depending on your current state of mind. A team that hit .260/.332/.413 during the season didn’t come close to equaling that production in a six-game stretch. It happens, and it seems there’s no reason to slice and dice that sample any smaller.

Or maybe there is. Because we’ve talked about this team’s struggles against lefthanders at times. Looking at the series as a whole, though, the Phillies managed “only” 10 runs, 18 hits (7 extra base) and 9 walks in 21 innings against lefties. Perhaps we only remember the high-profile strikeouts – and the Giants’ LHPs did strike out 23 in those 21 innings. Even if we think the overall line overstates the case and want to consider the leverage index of all those Javier Lopez outings, in particular, he only averaged a 1.4 LI while compiling that 2.08 ERA and getting those 13 outs. Impressive? Yes. Higher-than-average pressure in those situations? Yes. The reason the Phillies lost the series? Hardly. The Phillies had chances and we obviously can’t blame their lack of offense all on their overall performance against lefties.

The word going in was that even if the Phillies offense was going to have a little trouble with this staff, their own pitching staff would easily neutralize the poor Giants offense. After all, the Giants were the only playoff team with a below-average wOBA and the Phillies had Roy Halladay, Roy Oswalt and Cole Hamels. That trio didn’t perform poorly – they pitched 33 innings and allowed 13 runs, striking out 34 against only six walks. Perhaps more was expected of Roy Halladay after his no-hitter in the first round, but he did strain that groin and you don’t point at three pitchers that pitched 65% of your innings to a 3.27 ERA and say, there, that’s your problem right there.

The bullpen? 13 innings, three runs. The defense? Four errors to the Giants’ three – and even if you want to say errors are a poor gauge of defense, you’d have to admit they played about even on the field in that regard. Timely hitting? Sure, but what can you really do about that, and how much of that is the short sample? Want to blame Ryan Howard just ’cause? Check Dave Cameron’s defense.

It was a tight series. Javier Lopez certainly helped the Giants, and the San Francisco staff deserves some credit for keeping a good offense down. Play this series a million times, though, and the Philadelphia squad probably wins close to half of ’em. The Phillies didn’t play terribly and don’t have an obvious scapegoat going into the offseason, so all they can do is find a way to replace Jayson Werth if he leaves (preferably with a right-handed bat), rework the bullpen as good teams do every offseason, and give it another shot next year.

First off, given some of the howling on twitter, it’s time for the obligatory strike zone plot. Let’s get it out of the way, thanks to Brooks Baseball.

It’s pretty ugly, but consistent enough. It was four or five inches too wide, or a half a foot if you count both sides. But there are plenty of triangles and squares out there beyond the box, so let’s not blame it all on umpire Wally Bell.

For all the talk of how similar Madison Bumgarner and Joe Blanton were going into the game, it’s somewhat prescient that they both failed to get out of the fifth inning and that they both left having given up three earned runs. On the other hand, the journey was not necessarily so similar. Bumgarner does use his left hand, and he did strike out six and allow only one run to score while he was on the bump, while Blanton struck out three and was directly responsible for all of his runs. It wasn’t all bad for Blanton – all of his balls in play were counted as groundballs – but it since the starters played to a standstill on the scoreboard, the advantage goes to the hometown pitcher.

Phillies fans can’t even blame the randomness of coming through in high leverage moments in this one – there were eight moments with a leverage index over one last night. The Phillies batters came through in two of them, and the Giants batters came through in two of them. It may seem that the Giants were more ‘clutch,’ but that would probably just be because they came up last. To the home-fielders went the spoils.

At this point, some of the blame must rest squarely on the Phillies’ stars. In this game, Chase Utley put up a -10.8% in win probability by going one for five and not coming through in some key moments. That comes on the heels of a -12% in game three (0-for-4), +3.8% in game two (0-for-3 with two walks), and a -1.8% in game one (1-for-3 with a walk). It’s obviously just a poor four-game stretch for a great secondbaseman, but it’s also bad timing for that stretch. The same could be said for Jimmy Rollins (.267, 1 extra base hit) and Jayson Werth (.250, 1 extra base hit).

The larger pattern is one of struggles for all of the left-handers on the team. Chase Utley, Ryan Howard, the recently benched Raul Ibanez, and young Domonic Brown are a combined 7-for-39 with 7 walks and 3 extra-base hits, and most of that is Howard’s production. Maybe it’s not a surprise given the left arms of Jonathan Sanchez and Madison Bumgarner, but Javier Lopez looms as a large acquisition for the Giants in this series. He has three big holds and gave up his first run Wednesday night. His lefty sidearm release has been hard on the lefty batters, and that makes sense given the difference in release points vis-a-vis a regular right-hander.

All this said, it was a great game. The WPA graph does a good job showing the rollercoaster that was Wednesday night. Fans of baseball were satisfied, if not fans of Phillie baseball.

The weekend took your faithful Phillie correspondents to places we didn’t expect, and none of those places featured wifi and a comfy moment to kick back and review the first two games of the NLCS. Better late than never. The Phillies and Giants split the weekend, which wasn’t great for the maroon marauders because the series tilted lightly in the Giants’ favor with those results – teams that win one of two games on the road in a seven-game MLB series win the series 56.2% of the time.

Game One was just one of those games, it seems. Seven innings, eight hits, seven strikeouts, no walks and more ground balls than fly balls doesn’t seem like a line that would normally produce four earned runs, but that’s what happened to Roy Halladay Saturday night. The difference between excellent and a -8.8% WPA night for the Doc could have been summed up in two fly balls from Cody Ross that ended up in the seats. This same Cody Ross had exactly average power this year (.145 ISO) and had gone -for-16 against Halladay in his career. The same Cody Ross that was Cody Ross the Marlin until Brian Sabean briefly made him Randy Myers by supposedly claiming him just to block the Padres. Then the Giants then realized that he was better than Jose Guillen, at least in the field, so that he could become the Cody Ross, Giant, that the Bay Area now knows and loves. Either way, you read that fateful name backward as Grant did on the McCovey Chronicles, and you get “ssoR y doC,” which is about all that can be said to Halladay, who pitched well enough to win.

It did seem like the Phillie offense could have put together a five spot – Tim Lincecum wasn’t at his best either. He walked more (three), and gave up equal numbers of fly balls and ground balls, but he also struck out eight – one of which was Ryan Howard with two batters on in a tie game in the third inning (worth 6.6% in WPA alone). Though the two teams had the same amount of baserunners, and the Phillies showed a better slugging percentage as a team, it was the Giants that strung together the hits in the big moments.

The following may seem random – and most likely was – but the big lineup change between games one and two may have had a little bit to do with the different outcomes. As Rob Neyer noted before the game Sunday, Charlie Manuel reversed Placido Polanco and Chase Utley in the batting order so that the heart of the order did not include two straight lefties in Utley and Howard.

It’s a little strange to see Polanco and his lack of power batting third, and it may feel like separating two lefties isn’t that big of a deal, but just look at what the Giants did in the two games for your pudding-based proof. In Game One, Javier Lopez brought his lefty sidearm release to the mound to get Utley to ground out and Howard to strike out before leaving in a double switch that would have made Dusty Baker proud. In Game Two, Bruce Bochy brought Ramon Ramirez out to pitch to the righty Shane Victorino, but after Victorino sacrificed, he was faced with the choice of walking the lefty Utley to keep Ramirez in the game and pitch to Polanco, or burning Lopez on Utley, bringing in Sergio Romo to pitch to Polanco, and then summoning Jeremy Affeldt to get Howard. That is a lot of relievers, but with the off-day coming today, the second move-heavy approach is probably what Bochy should have done. Instead, this is what happened:

Bottom 7th: Philadelphia
– R. Oswalt singled to shallow center
– R. Ramirez relieved J. Sanchez
– S. Victorino sacrificed to third, R. Oswalt to second
– C. Utley intentionally walked
– P. Polanco singled to shallow center, R. Oswalt scored, C. Utley to second
– J. Affeldt relieved R. Ramirez
– C. Utley stole third, P. Polanco stole second
– R. Howard struck out swinging
– J. Werth intentionally walked
– P. Sandoval at third
– S. Casilla relieved J. Affeldt
– J. Rollins doubled to deep center, C. Utley, P. Polanco and J. Werth scored
– R. Ibanez lined out to third

4 runs, 3 hits, 0 errors
San Francisco 1, Philadelphia 6

Don’t underestimate the difference the new lineup made, as it obviously made Bochy’s life difficult in the seventh inning Sunday night (and then he went and made some dubious decisions of his own). Now it’s clear that he’ll have to use both of his lefties to get through the heart of the order late in game three, provided his starter once again gets the job done against the new-look lineup.