How Do They Stay Up?
« Cards-Pirates Chatter Monday 4-18-05 | Main | Milestones at Miller »The Cardinals team is doing its best bumblebee impression: taking a close look at it, you marvel that it can even get off the ground, much less achieve any kind of forward momentum once aloft.
Let’s look at these wonders of science that seem to defy the very principles of sabermetrics in flying off to a first-place position two weeks into the season.
The performance of the Cardinals' stubby little bats, upon inspection, yields few clues as to their role in attaining the team’s 6-4 record.
The team ranks last or next to last in several critical categories:
Runs Avg. obp 2b xbh bb sb
43 .220 .283 11 27 27 2
15 16 16 16 15 16 15 (league rank, out of 16)
Closer examination, however, reveals how the offense may be more effective than these numbers suggest:
(1) While the team is next-to-last in the NL with 43 runs, they’ve also played the fewest games, so their 4.3 runs per game is actually better than the RPG of five other teams.
(2) Second, they are tied for the NL lead in home runs, so while they’re putting fewer runners on base than any other team, they’re compensating for it by getting more “instant runs” than a team like Houston (.344 obp, 4.0 rpg, but just 8 hr in 11 games).
(3) The Cardinals strike out by far and away the fewest times in the league: only 4.6 strikeouts per game while the rest of the league averages 6.5 per game. Now, we all know that a strikeout is, in most cases, no worse than any other kind of out. Still, things DO happen when you put the ball in play (Exhibit A: Rolen’s catchable---and, apparently, droppable---pop fly yesterday that scored Pujols from first) and for a team that so far has needed some breaks to go their way, more balls in play provide more opportunities for breaks.
(4) The Birds may be hitting just .220 as a team, but they are, like last year, a team that relies disproportionately on a few big offensive guns and can tolerate a black hole here and there. The biggest black hole has been Yadier Molina, who, at 1-for-29 drags the team average down 17 points all by himself. It’s true that no starter is hitting above Albert Pujols’s .275, but the key offensive cogs have been hitting enough (Sanders early, Rolen recently, Pujols always) at the right times.
(5) Timely hitting: The Cardinals have been able to win with a minimum of hits. In their last 4 wins they’ve gotten just 25 hits, including 5 hits three times. Yesterday vs. Milwaukee their 5 hits went like this: 4th inning—Pujols hit, Rolen hit scores Pujols; 6th inning-- Pujols hit, Rolen hit scores Pujols (with some bad defense); 9th inning—Rolen hit (homer) wins game.
All this focus on the offense is, I guess, a little misguided.
The key to the Cardinals 6-4 record has been, of course, the pitching. Their 4.35 era is just 10th best in the NL, but it’s inflated by back-to-back blowout losses to the Phillies in the first weekend. They’ve allowed an average of just 3 runs per game other than that, and each starter except Mulder has looked exceptional at least once. Marquis has looked sharper each time out, culminating in yesterday’s game in which he retired the last 18 Brewers he saw.
The pen has seemed shaky at times (pedestrian 4.13 era), but for the most part has been extremely solid. Izzy was sensational last Wednesday, entering a bases-loaded nobody out jam and getting out of it without a run scoring, and his command of his curve and slider seem better than at any point last year. The pen is striking out better than a batter an inning (Al Reyes and Randy Flores have 16 strikeouts between them in 9.2 ip), and Ray King is unscored upon. Another key for the relievers is that they have allowed just one homer in 28.1 innings.
This team has not played like a first-place team, yet they’re somehow 6-4 and in the catbird seat. No starter above .275? Ten games in and nobody has more than two doubles? Let’s face it, they could just as easily be 3-7 if a few breaks go the other way, but even if that were the case, this team knows that better days are ahead once the bats heat up---and they will heat up. And when they do, it will be like…well, like last year.
Posted by salvo at April 18, 2005 02:32 PMAnd if anyone can tell me if there's an HTML tag for monospaced fonts for using in columned stats (as above) that retains multiple spacebar spaces between characters, I'd appreciate it.
Posted by: salvo at April 18, 2005 03:14 PMTo get the columns to align, just use table, tr, and td tags. Just do it once, copy the code into a notepad textfile, and reuse it as needed.
Otherwise you have to use & nbsp; ascii blank spaces, but that's messy and unreliable.
Useful tutorial here.
If you want, just copy the source here:
RunsAvg.obp2bxbhbbsb
43.220.2831127272
16161616151615(league rank, out of 16)
Oops... Try this instead:
RunsAvg.obp2bxbhbbsb
43.220.2831127272
16161616151615(league rank, out of 16)
Ah html isn't allowed in the comments....
Here's the link, http://echoecho.com/htmltables.htm
here's the code:
<table>
<tr><td>Runs</td><td>Avg.</td><td>obp</td><td>2b</td><td>xbh</td><td>bb</td><td>sb</td></td><td></tr>
<tr><td>43</td><td>.220</td><td>.283</td><td>11</td><td>27</td><td>27</td><td>2</td></td><td></tr>
<tr><td>16</td><td>16</td><td>16</td><td>16</td><td>15</td><td>16</td><td>15</td><td>(league rank, out of 16)</td></tr>
</table>
Thanks, Liam---I was hoping you'd try it one more time.
Posted by: salvo at April 18, 2005 03:54 PMyou can also use pre tags. blah blah blah
Posted by: josh at April 18, 2005 03:57 PMThat looks like an easier way to do it.
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_pre.asp
Posted by: Liam at April 18, 2005 04:01 PMYikes!! I like it better without all the bars around the data....
Josh, I took out the cell border tag...but I'm wondering...What if I do a cell border, but make it white, and give it a width of 2 or 3? Would that accomplish what I want--columns that are separated by more than 1 space, but without visible borders around the data?
Posted by: salvo at April 18, 2005 04:18 PMOkay, thanks guys, that "pre" tag seems like the winner...
Except why is there a double return after each row?
Posted by: salvo at April 18, 2005 04:24 PMThe linebreaks within the pre tag of a page's code show up as linebreaks in the browser, and you've also got br tags at the linebreaks. My guess is the editor you're using is adding those br tags automatically. If you have the option to turn off "convert line breaks" do that, otherwise go back and remove the line breaks and replace them with br tags, all in one line.
So:
column titles
first line
second line
becomes
column titles<first line>second line
That's enough geek talk for now... Time to play ball!
Posted by: Liam at April 18, 2005 05:50 PMAw geez, that should say:
becomes
column titles<br>firstline<br>second line
Posted by: Liam at April 18, 2005 05:53 PMThanks, Liam.
Now let's kick some Pirate butt.
Although we're facing an obscure lefty---usually spells trouble for this team.
Posted by: salvo at April 18, 2005 06:02 PMYour cellborder problem: You can use cellpadding=x where x is a number of pixels table cellpadding=10px would give you 10px between each cell in the table.
Pre works best because it's faster to type.
Posted by: josh at April 18, 2005 06:33 PMThat's more like it. Nice work, salvo.
Re: formatting tables is pretty difficult. It looks like you're figuring it out, but I've found that the best way is to build your table in Excel, save it to a text file, and then copy from the text file into the tags (make sure you check the spacing in the text file first).
Posted by: Sean at April 18, 2005 07:30 PMWow, what an exciting html lesson by the Cards tonight in Pittsburgh... :)
Posted by: John at April 18, 2005 10:35 PMI tuned in late in the 9th inning and was ecstatic to see that the Pirates had only scored one run. Can we all now breath one giant collective sigh of relief with regards to Mulder? I know it's only one start, but when was the last time he went 8 innings and only gave up one run? He went 8 innings twice last August, but gave up 3 and 4 runs. In his last start of July, he had a complete game in which he gave up just 2 runs. So when was the last time he went atleast 8 innings and gave up 1 run or less? June 24th - 9 innings, one run. Tonight was also his first time reaching a game score of 75 or above since that same June 24th start.
Posted by: John at April 18, 2005 10:42 PMJohn, I think you nailed it in your pre-game commentary. This has been just Mulder early season jitters, not some prolonged, anti-Mulder slump.
He pitched very well tonight. And that ninth inning was incredible.
And Molina had 3 hits, 2 runs! I was worried when he let that ball squirt out of his glove after Sanders made a good throw to first in the one run that Mulder allowed. He smiled when he first came home in the ninth. That was a great inning.
Posted by: Liam at April 18, 2005 11:39 PMnice to get a HTML tutorial and quality writing on the cards! boy, what could be better than that?
what's that you say? even more HTML tutorials and quality cards writing? well, i say bring it on!
i especially liked the way that you practically asked for a exceptional performance from mulder . . . and he went out and got it for us.
Posted by: brenton at April 19, 2005 12:30 PM