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Good article by Blake.
The Cardinals Defense Isn’t What it Used to Be
An influx of young players has turned the Cardinals defense from top 5 to average and that is affecting a rotation built on pitching to contact. https://t.co/UNXsu1gs93 pic.twitter.com/isxGS7Ju7G
— viva el birdos (@vivaelbirdos) May 14, 2023
This is to be fully expected when everyone besides the 2 corner IF’ers are constantly deployed all over different areas of both the IF and OF. It creates an atmosphere in the field of play that takes on the stability not unlike that of a single legged ladder…
Its nothing but a fantasy baseball organizational management mentality 1TD. The effect of moving guys defensively is hard to measure and quantify accurately. Therefore it is hard or impossible to input without corrupting the whole process with unreliable data. The way around that is to minimize or eliminate its importance. Changing batting order position is similar. It is much more important in real life baseball.
Exactly!…No numbers or data in the realm of the human condition have the ability to accurately measure or quantify those ill effects. The only thing that’s required is a reasonably serviceable pair of eyes and enough leisure time to watch and enjoy a few baseball games…Haha!
Let me place another example on this simple concept…I think Mrs. 1TD is a pretty good cook and even if I didn’t, I’d say she was to stay out of divorce court…But I’ve heard her and many other women say the following…”I can’t cook in someone else’s kitchen”…Haha!
Interesting article. Bad defense makes bad pitching even worse. Who knew?
I like the part about next year moving Matz and Mikolas to the pen and get 5 new starters with lots of swing and miss. I sure don’t want to miss that.
Haha! Yeah, that combination BP lefty punch consisting of a Cabby/Matz duo should be something reserved only for those who’ve endured the siege of Vicksburg…
I think the pitch clock and the shift are really being overlooked here. I think Yadi being gone has played a role as well. This team hasn’t been very clutch until recently.
At what point do you sacrifice defense for offense here? The pitching has choked until recently in close games. I mean can’t win if you don’t score and with Dylan and Tyler being virtual no shows at the plate and some regression by Donovan (although I think he rounds into something better) and Nado being in a bad funk for most of the early season. You got to get some Thump in the lineup.
You can blame the the defense all you want but the knucklehead starters can’t get to the 6th. Starters need to go longer in games or the.pen will get burned here. They flat out have to pitch better plain and simple or no defense you throw out there is gonna matter. They’ll be launching them in the gaps and over the fence on our burned out bully. The old hit em where they ain’t will be in full effect.
Don’t get your “tear it all down” hopes up too much guys. Barring injury, Mikolas will be a starter next year. But we may have 4 other new starters as Matz is maybe 50/50 at this point- maybe even 40/60. One will very likely be Liberatore. But who knows after that. Thompson, Pallante, Graceffo, McGreevey, Hudson, Woodford – I think it’s likely that one more spot gets filled by 1 of these 6. So then depending on Matz, it will be 1 or 2 FA starters or traded for starters. So ideally, to me, we get one good FA starter long term and another good one through a trade with only a year or two left.
Moving players around the field is one issue. The bigger issue is that the players we have been deploying on the field just aren’t that good at defense.
It seems that in the last week or so the powers that be have decided to put our best defensive team on the field and the results have gotten better. Go figure.
After 41 GS, lets call it 25% of the season.
Starters Game Score:
51.4 Montgomery
45.8 Mikolas
44.3 Matz
44.0 Flaherty
42.5 WoodfordPer catcher:
Monty: 52 w/WC (5 GS), 50 w/Kiz (3 GS)
Mikolas: 38 w/WC (5 GS), 55 w/Kiz (4 GS)
Matz: 39 w/WC (4 GS), 49 w/Kiz (4 GS)
Flaherty: 38 w/WC (5 GS), 53 w/Kiz (3 GS)
Woodford: 43 w/WC (4 GS), 40 w/Kiz (2 GS)These are small samples and how much you credit the catching is up to you.
Willson caught most of the early season games and Kiz has caught the most recent 9 GS.
Are the pitchers dialing in their pitches better as the season goes on? Mikolas seems sharper to me lately.
But anyway, I looked at it and am just passing it on.
I think there may be something to the Mikolas/Kniz connection as Kniz was his catcher almost all of last season and there likely is comfort there. But I think everything else is probably just small sample size.
WC may not have been calling all the right pitches in the proper situations which I’m sure hurts some, but if a pitcher is executing his pitches, then it shouldn’t matter that much. And from what we’ve seen from Flaherty, Woodford, and sometimes Matz, they just failed to execute pitches. WC might have called for a FB away when the numbers said that he should have called for a fastball in, but when the pitcher throws it right down the middle with little movement, that’s not on WC. Those 3 pitchers just haven’t executed.
Also, we’ve talked about poor defense some. And my memory says that Matz most of all, but Mikolas as well were both bitten by poor defense early on that cost multiple hits/runs/extended innings.
And on the opposite end of the spectrum, I think Woodford got a fair amount of help from good defensive plays in a few of his games.
So if you adjust to the norm (and maybe XFIPwould tell us this), I think Mikolas & Montgomery are both been equally pretty effective and Matz isn’t too far behind. But the others have been ugly.
I decided to lookup XFIP to validate. In order:
Montgomery – 4.01
Matz – 4.11
Mikolas – 4.34
Woodford – 5.03
Flaherty – 5.05So yeah, that validates what I said above. Matz has had very porous defense and Mikolas too. I was a little surprised to see Woodford and Flaherty even as I thought Woodford might be around a 6.00.
I haven’t looked at the numbers but my impression is that the IF defense has been pretty solid most of the year, with possible fluctuations at 2B and C but until recently the OF defense has been a mess. In April it was primarily Burleson, O’Neill, and Walker. That is probably one of the worst OF defenses we could play. But in the last 10 days or so it has been Donovan, Carlson, and Noot and that OF defense is much better. That has to be a factor with the better pitching results.
Remember when a starter could be counted on to compete well vs both R and L handed batters? Well, after 50 GS, we currently don’t have one of those.
Handedness splits: (batters ops+)
Vs same side:
Monty (58), Matz (62) and Flaherty (81) are holding batters under league avg (100)Vs opposite side:
Monty (120), Matz (141) and Flaherty (163).Mikolas vs R (121), vs L (131).
Wainwright vs R (122), vs L (174)Penciling in a lineup vs our rotation is the easiest job in baseball. Just load it up with opposite side batters as much as you can….
(batters ops+) vs oppo:
120 Monty
131 Mikolas
141 Matz
163 Flaherty
174 WainwrightGood stuff jj.
Handedness splits apply to the opposing pitchers too, albeit maybe not to that extreme. OliMo’s printout has been trying to work that with the lineups.
JJ – can you remove the data from Mikolas’ first start of the year when he probably wasn’t ready to pitch yet and see where that leaves him? I’d love to throw out his first 3 starts but that’s hardly fair to the data. But I think we can safely assume his first start was not who he is as a pitcher and that data is an outlier.
It feels like to me that he’s our best starter by a significant margin. But I’m just going by feel there.
I hesitate to Jn, because every starter has a worst game. Using GmSc here is every starters worst outing…
1 Flaherty
16 Monty
24 Mikolas
29 Matz
34 AdamBut to your point, here are the May batters ops+ allowed:
80 Mikolas
121 Matzoh
142 Adam
144 Flaherty
174 Monty ouch
Yes, “significant margin” is appropriate for Miles once Monty got past March/AprilMay is between 90 and 100 PA’s we are looking at
I know I rant about Matz a lot. The primary reason is that I disliked that signing the moment it was announced and I haven’t seen much reason to think differently. However, the reality is that he isn’t going anywhere with 2 1/2 years remaining on his contract. So what do with him?
To be fair, Matz usually can string together three or four decent innings of work. It is always that one inning in which he has a meltdown. That is why I think you give him a shot in the pen to limit the exposure. You just have to hope that his one inning of relief that day isn’t the meltdown inning. Now, do you really want to be paying a middle reliever $10.5M or $12.5m per year? No, but we have to try something different to maybe get at least some value out of him.
gscottar said:
Now, do you really want to be paying a middle reliever $10.5M or $12.5m per year?
History may repeat itself. Andrew Miller.
Random thought. I wonder if Junior’s house is full of useless junk he won’t part with because he paid for it at some point in the past.
Memphis LHRP Andrew Suarez has an opt out coming up June 1. I assume he can choose to leave if he isn’t put on the 40 man roster.
Interesting take for those of you who like metrics.
Thoughts on the Rotation https://t.co/4vxaQl9ElG pic.twitter.com/4coa1e1ryb
— viva el birdos (@vivaelbirdos) May 25, 2023
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