What We Learned In Week Two

As Eric mentioned this morning, a few of our Monday posts are going to become weekly staples. He’s doing Game Of The Week, while R.J. pulls some nuggets from the past week’s UZR update. I’ll be looking back at the main stories from the past seven days and what we can glean from what happened. So, What Did We Learn in Week 2?

The Marlins are better than the Nationals.

Florida has the best record in baseball, racing off to a 11-1 start. Normally, winning 11 of 12 would open a lot of eyes around the game, but this hot streak has one problem – it was built on playing half of their games against the hapless Washington Nationals. The Nationals are a train wreck, and are clearly the worst team in baseball at this point. It’s good for Florida to take advantage of advantageous scheduling and rack up wins against an inferior opponent, but they don’t get play Washington every week.

The Marlins are a nice early story, but don’t expect it to continue. They lead the National League in runs per game at 6.42, but that is mostly due to clutch hitting. They have a good but not great .350 wOBA, so even if they were able to sustain this level of offensive performance, they’d still see a reduction in run scoring the rest of the year.

Florida might have the best record in baseball, but it’s the Dodgers who have played better than any other team so far. LA has racked up 6.1 value wins compared to the 4.2 wins that the Marlins have accumulated. Win-Loss records don’t always tell the story. If you want to be impressed with a National League team that is playing better than any other, look west.

There’s something wrong with Chien-Ming Wang.

Wang has made three starts so far in 2009.

April 8th @ Baltimore: 3 2/3 IP, 9 H, 7 R, 3 BB, 0 K, 1 HR, 8 GB, 10 FB
April 13th @ Tampa: 1 IP, 6 H, 8 R, 3 BB, 1 K, 0 HR, 3 GB, 4 FB
April 18th @ Cleveland: 1 1/3 IP, 8 H, 8 R, 0 BB, 1 K, 1 HR, 2 GB, 9 FB

Wang has been one of the most extreme groundball pitchers in baseball since his arrival in New York. His career GB% is 60.0%. Through his first three starts, it’s 28.6%. Only seven other starting pitchers in baseball have a lower GB%. His sinker isn’t sinking, and opposing hitters are teeing off on what is essentially a batting practice pitch right now.

Whether it’s mechanical issues or an injury, Wang isn’t himself right now. The Yankees would do well to skip his start this week in an effort to get him back to the pitcher he used to be, because this incarnation isn’t major league quality.

The Angels are facing a decade’s worth of adversity.

Most everyone had the Angels as contenders, if not favorites, for the AL West this year. However, I can’t recall an organization that has had more things go wrong in such a short period of time. They went into spring training with Kelvim Escobar rehabbing, so they knew that he wouldn’t be ready for the start of the season. But then John Lackey and Ervin Santana joined him on the disabled list with arm problems, knocking out the front of the Angels rotation.

This was followed by the tragic death of Nick Adenhart. As if they weren’t already dealing with enough, news came out this week that Vladimir Guerrero had a pectoral injury that would sideline him for at least a month and likely longer. As icing on the cake, Dustin Moseley left his start on Friday after three innings with elbow pain and landed on the disabled list.

That’s four starting pitchers and their franchise hitter on the DL, plus a horrible death in the family to have to deal with. It might just be too much for any team to overcome.