Tough Loss
« So This is the New Coors | Main | Dog Day Afternoon »One of these days they'll have fancy new metrics that take the speed and distance of batted balls into account, and when they do, things like the second half of Thursday night's game against the Cubs will confound those metrics. On offense: Rolen lining one back up the middle to Walker, Pierre running down Molina's drive to deep right center, Ramirez diving for a Duncan line drive, Jacque Jones backwards-somersaulting on a Pujols drive to right and Rodriguez grounding one not too soft and not too hard for the game-ending double play. Furthermore in the fourth Albert Pujols, with the bases loaded, took a slider down the middle, swung wildly at a slider well off the plate and then tried to pull a fastball out and up; he had decided he was going to hit a home run and not even Pujols can do that. On defense you had the sickening three-run sixth: Nevin and Murton grounding out just softly enough to prevent the DP, Neifi lofting a single just in front of Encarnacion, Juan Pierre slapping a single just in front of Duncan and Rolen botching a groundball.
To be fair, Weaver lived on the edge for six innings, giving up two homers (why do people try to steal against Yadier Molina?), two doubles and six singles. Maybe it all evened out. It's still hard to believe the Cardinals lost that game.
In other news, the Hardball Times went after Molina not once, but twice today. Thus spoke Bryan Tsao:
Okay, I get it, he's a great defensive catcher. But let's face it, no one's this good.
I sent Bryan an email saying basically "Yeah, actually he is." I've established I'm not a Yadier fan, but anyone who watches the Cardinals everyday can see his value. The weird thing is you can build a statistical defense for Molina. At this writing, BPro has Yadier at 14 runs below average the catcher as a batter and 11 runs above average on defense. Assuming we can trust their defensive numbers for catchers (and since they're using SB, CS and pick offs, I think we can), there's a stronger argument that a future Hall of Famer is a hole than there is for Yadier Molina. Posted by Rob at July 28, 2006 12:16 AM
I saw that at THT and felt the same way. Don't they subscribe to their own stats? According to PrOPS Yadi should have a .284 average and a .712 OPS. That was enough offense apparently to get Paul LoDuca to an All Star game. And he has 6 fielding Win Shares. I'm fairly confident his offense will come around in good time given his contact rate, but between the pickoffs and the caught basestealers I really don't mind so much.
Posted by: Erik at July 29, 2006 09:42 AMIt's not clear whether the Tsao articles are referring to past performance or future performance. I mean, Suppan's a better pitcher than we've seen this year and he made honorable mention.
Oh, well, there's going to be a Yadier disconnect between Cardinal fans and statheads. The hard part is when you're both.
Posted by: Rob at July 29, 2006 05:20 PM