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I believe if a pitcher can prevent earned I dont if he’s a big K guy or not. Too much emphasis on k’s especially for starters. I can see where this is more important for relievers since they often come in with men on base
Just seems lately the baseball world gone bonkers for swing and miss. People drooling over guys hunter Green that simply arent good at run preventionWell a lot depends on your defense. The Cardinals were very average on defense last season so having pitchers on the team that give up more contact isn’t that great. Also guys who tend to have swing n miss stuff also I would say give up less hard contact when they do get hit.
Although I’m of the opinion that they’re tremendously overated, there are certain times when the only thing that will allow you to live another day is the K. It’s always nice to have a guy on the mound that can reach back for something extra when survival is at stake.
With the banning of the extreme shifts, it has put a greater premium on the strikeout even for the best defensive teams. The Cardinals have not drafted for that style of pitching, but looked for strikeout arms in their deadline trades. For example, read the free article about Zack Showalter on the front page today.
I am old fashioned and don’t like the team getting deep into the pen all the time. If a pitcher can strike them out in 4 or 5 pitches then do it. But if he’s always going deep in the count or they’re fouling them off and he can’t put them away, then he’s letting them hang around until something bad happens
and he’s running his pitch count up after 4 and he’s lucky to get through 5. Then you’re into your pen too early. Too many starts like that and you are deep into the pen too much. That is what is so maddening about running a guy like Liberatore out there. You know that’s what is going to happen.I’m ok with going for guys with a high K/9, but if they also have a high BB/9 it probably won’t work. I think that may be why some of that type prospects can be had.
I agree with bling in that too often high K pitchers tend to run up the pitch count way too high in order to give you a quality start.
Hopefully our days of watching Lib start are over. Last once the season was lost they just used any live body out there. Mo did good with the 3 solid starters, should get a lot of 6 inning starts
Lynn should be better here White Sox were a mess, just look at CeaseBeyond the obvious salary demands for high velo pitchers, swing and miss comes at a huge cost. As the number of 100 mph caliber arms has increased exponentially over recent years, so have the number of shoulder and elbow medical interventions and days spent on the IL. The correlation is fact and causation seems obvious. Redlining the body in this way is not a good practice and is not sustainable for most pitchers.
The dichotomy is, that while it’s a terrible position in which to put some of your most valuable strategic assets, if you don’t get that level of performance from them, then they’re not nearly as valuable. They’ll need to redefine a quality start as four innings if the trend continues. The line between starters and relievers is blurring. How about a 7-man rotation? Has anybody said that yet? It could be like college baseball. He’s our Friday starter, he’s our Saturday starter, etc.
The best outcomes in baseball are the strikeout on defense, and the home run on offense. Thus the game at the top level is evolving towards those results more and more.
But as Euro points out, power pitching creates a lot of wear and tear on the arm and shoulder. And it can also result in less control.
But you look at the list of all time great pitchers, and they all were higher than average strikeout guys. It is what you want, but there are not too many guys that can do that and maintain good control, as well as stay healthy.
Legend has it no one in the history of the game ever threw harder than Steve Dalkowski. But he walked about as many as he K’d, and eventually blew out his arm just before he was about to make the step to the big time.
“The problem I have with development — and I don’t even wanna talk about the big league level right now — is organizations have gone out and hired everybody from high tech companies that can understand spin rate and horizontal movement, to the point where pitchers are more concerned about spin rate and horizontal movement than throwing a strike and pitching deep into games.”
“That is a tremendous disconnect within our sport. And I just don’t understand how so many smart people who are running teams haven’t figured that out! This is not rocket science. It’s still about throwing strikes.”
— Former GM Dan O’Dowd
That kind of sums it up for me. And I’ve had this argument with Goold during his P-D chats on more than one occasion. I say that teams (esp. my Cardinals) are prioritizing the wrong things when developing pitchers, and also when acquiring pitchers. And Goold says, no, they don’t prioritize velocity and movement. According to him they prioritize velocity, movement, location, durability, and more! And I have tried to explain to him that that’s not what prioritize means. You see, you cannot prioritize everything. That’s why it’s called prioritize. Goold is an eloquent idiot. But worse than that, his refusal to think critically about Marmol or the Redbird front office makes him effectively corrupt, a non-journalist.
So #1, I despise Derrick Goold, and #2, the understandable fascination with swing ‘n miss has congealed into a fixation for many teams. To their detriment.
Bob Reed, very excellent comment. I don’t pay close enough attention to Goold to have much of an opinion. I would say that those whose livlihood depends upon access have to be circumspect. But they can also be sell outs or suck ups. They can also fall into the Stockholm Syndrome effect where long proximity causes them to lose objectivity and sympathetically take on the subject’s viewpoint
Obviously, saying they “prioritize” a whole laundry list doesn’t make any sense. It is one thing to list the things that you value, it is another thing to prioritixe the things on that list.
I have become convinced that nothing having to do with player development is going to change, despite a report to the contrary from Katie Woo around the end of last season. Mo is filling the top slots there with trusty minions the same as he does with the uniformed coaching staff. DC MacLea is a worthy example. Now billed as ascending to Marmol’s major league staff, he’s a wonk who has been in the Cardinals player development ranks since 2018. Read his LinkedIn bio.
Swing and miss guys aren’t a cure for poor defenses. It just gives them fewer chances to make costly errors. Poor defense was problem 1b last year. It must be cleaned up for us to turn this thing around. If Walker doesn’t show marked improvement the first month or so, we need to rethink his role. He already had an entire season as a learning curve.
Goold fashions himself to be a wordsmith. He seems more interested in coming up with creative puns, dishing on DC comics, and other irrelevant topics than giving us substantive baseball information. And he rarely has scoops. Actually very few of the local writers have scoops. The national writers will usually announce a Cardinals transaction before the locals do.
One thing I do agree with Goold on is the absolute necessity of a pitching staff to deliver quality innings. Not counting extra innings game a pitching staff has to navigate through 1458 innings in a season. It is imperative that a team have starters who can regularly give you 6 innings a game. That killed the Cardinals last year and I think Mo has addressed that concern this winter, although I still think we are one quality starter short.
I’ve found that any attempt to read his account of the previous day’s action on the field in one of his game recaps leaves me as confused as a blind dog in a butcher shop. I won’t mention the names of his predecessors, but in my view the genuine baseball sportswriter is a thing of the past.
Goold comes across to me as smug and arrogant — a bit of “I’m smarter, so don’t disagree with me.” You never know, it might be a completely different vibe (better) in a real life meeting.
Having said that, he reportedly saved a man’s life a few years ago by administering CPR in the Cubs’ dugout. After many years of annual CPR training in the military and also as an ROTC teacher in high school, every time the thought crossed my mind that I hoped I’d do all the things correctly if ever confronted with that terrible, stressful situation. Outstanding that Goold did exactly that — he come through in the clutch.
Swing and miss guys aren’t a cure for poor defenses. It just gives them fewer chances to make costly errors.
Ha! You might be on to something, KCB.
Cards’ pitchers were 29th out of 30 last year in strikeouts per inning pitched. So that’s bad. Now Let’s look at the Diamondbacks and Rangers. They were 23rd and 24th respectively. So that’s the key, don’t be in the high 20s. Instead, be in the lower 20s to make the World Series!
The ChiSox had the 6th highest K/IP and finished a cool 40 games below .500. That 101 losses. The Angels were 8th highest. So much for correlation to what’s important.
Looking at it another way, Cards’ pitchers averaged 0.851 strikeouts per inning. MLB average was 0.971. That means the Cards had to get 1.08 more outs via defense (instead of strikeout) per game than the average team and 2.02 more outs per game via defense compare to the Twins (team with highest K/IP).
Also, couldn’t help but notice the Rangers were #1 in allowing the fewest unearned runs across MLB and the DBacks were tied for 3rd lowest. Cards were tied at 4th for allowing the most unearned runs.
Scoops seems to be a bit of a sore subject. The P-D may have been first to report the Cardinals’ interest in Matsui. (I didn’t try to verify that.) However, when the Japanese reliever and his wife visited the Cardinals a few days ago, the local reporters apparently did not know they were in town. A national reporter from MLB Network broke that news. The reaction seemed a tad defensive.
#stlcards interest in reliever Yuki Matsui was previously reported mutiple times by the Post-Dispatch (here https://t.co/EDAeMp54nJ or here https://t.co/LADJwTeW67).
And @feinsand forwards the story by reporting a visit to STL from the reliever. https://t.co/fdzmsvrLAk
— Derrick Goold (@dgoold) December 15, 2023
The next day, the P-D “confirmed” the visit and credited MLB Network. In reporter speak, that means, “We weren’t first, but you can believe us.” But they have no details about the meeting, instead rehashing prior reports.
Japan’s All-Star closer and free agent Yuki Matsui visited St. Louis to meet with #stlcards in person, @LWorthySports confirms — and adds more of his reporting on the team’s pursuit. https://t.co/9W1XmJZvu0
— Derrick Goold (@dgoold) December 16, 2023
I think I read somewhere that Matsui is from the Tokyo metro area. An enormous metropolis that hums along 24/7. Tidy and well ordered. I can just imagine what he would think of downtown St. Louis. Hopefully his visit was heavily curated.
I saw this in an Anthony Castrovince article on the MLB site.
“there is some healthy skepticism attached to putting Gray, Lance Lynn and Kyle Gibson in front of an iffy defense”.
Ouch. I decided to look at how much swing and miss we might expect in 2024 by checking what kind on K/9s our presumed rotation put up in 2023.
Lynn 9.4
Gray 9.0
Matz 8.4
Gibson 7.4
Mikolas 6.1Well, lets see how many hits per 9 IP
Gray 7.6
Lynn 9.3
Matz 9.3
Gibson 9.3
Mikolas 10.1WHIP
Gray 1.147
Mikolas 1.316
Gibson 1.318
Matz 1.333
Lynn 1.394That strikes me as a pretty solid but unspectacular 5, with a #1 and everybody else. I would agree that the defense behind them will make a differece, positive or negative.
I really don’t care for percentages, particularly in pitching stats. K%, BB%, cause me to calculate the approximate numbers. or go to Baseball Reference and look them up myself.
I am the same way about pitchers 27. For a batter I think in terms of his K%, but for a pitcher I think how many per 9.
You can tell a lot about the state of things by looking at a pitcher’s per 9s. Consider Mikolas, who has been around a while now is very consistent, going out there answering the bell. No huge ups and downs. His BB/9 was exacly the same in 2023 as it was in 2022. But his WHIP was not the same. 1.033 in 2022 and 1.316 in 2023. This is because his H/9 was 7.6 in 2022 and 10.1 in 2023. So either his stuf got worse or the defense behind him did, and my take is his stuff did’t change much or at all. I think that because his control didn’t change much or at all. His BB/9 and K/9 were consistent from year to year. If his control didn’t change, neither did his stuff.
So my take is the defense in 2023 let 2.5 more balls get through or fall in per 9, and that made the difference between Mikolas’s WHIP of 1.033 and 1.316. I don’t need to tell anyone how meaningful that difference is. What’s more, Gibson’s per 9s are very similar to Mikolas’s, and the defense behind him in 2024 is going to have a similar impact. That is 40% of our rotation. Think about that the next time you see Walker head out to RF or when OlliMo churns defensive alignemts every day. 2.5 balls per 9.
“his stuff got worse or the D behind him did”
Maybe it’s both? Is it too wonky to mention the increase in Miles career high exit velocity allowed? (stuff?)
Also, his BA on balls in play (BAbip) spiked, and his GB% allowed in 23′ dropped significantly.
You could use his pitching splits page to see his actual outcomes, of different batted ball types (career splits page / by trajectory).
You’ve established his Walks didn’t drive up his WHIP, yr to yr. Where were those extra H/9 falling in on the field? In the OF?
Another potential factor. Mikolas turned 35 during last season. Not every player has the same end-of-career curve. (I am not saying he is toast, but unless he finds a magic elixir like Clemens, his career peaks are almost surely in the past, making the big question for me being how graceful his late 30s decline will be.)
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