THT Awards

Welcome to the awards.

All stats are for the period of Monday, May 4 through Sunday, May 9. All season stats are through the 9th. For award definitions, see this year’s primer.

This week’s proof that assigning wins and losses to a pitcher is an arcane practice that must stop

Good luck division

Ricky Romero got dinged up for five runs in six innings and got the win over Cleveland.

Daisuke Matsuzaka was fortunate that Scott Kazmir was pummeled by the Boston bats. If it weren’t for Kazmir’s seven runs, Daisuke never would have won a game in which he allowed five runs in five and a third.

Luis Atilano escaped blame for his six run meltdown in five and a third when Atlanta’s Takashi Saito blew the lead for the visitors.

Kyle Davies made Atilano’s shelling look effective by comparison. Davies gave up nine runs on nine hits in four frames. The Royals inexplicably came back to take the lead in one of the wildest games you will find this season. Strange is an understatement when Yuniesky Betancourt draws two walks, Scott Podsednik hits an upper deck home run and Joakim Soria gives up back-to-back homers.

Esmil Rogers and Hiroki Kuroda pitched 10 combined innings of bad baseball, yielding 10 runs on 16 hits and seven walks. They avoided decisions.

Season: Kevin Correia hasn’t been bad this season. His ERA is under four, his OPS against is .653, and he is striking out a career high 7.94 per nine innings. But as good as he has been his bullpen and the Padres lineup have given him a ton of cover. He hasn’t made it out of the sixth inning in any of his victories and his relievers have not blown any saves on his behalf.

Derek Lowe has a 4-3 record and a 6.16 ERA. He has given his team only one quality start and batters are hitting .293/.371/.453 against him. He has been horrible in all of his losses and also very bad in two of his wins.

Bad luck division

Adam Wainwright and Cole Hamels held the Philly and Cardinal offenses in check, combining for 16 innings of work with only two runs allowed. They struck out 14, walking four. And they each got no decision.

Ervin Santana gave the Orange County Angels seven innings of one-run ball against Boston, racking up a strikeout per inning and yielding only eight baserunners. He got a no-decision because Jon Lester was brilliant.

I can’t figure out how bad to feel about Felipe Paulino. On one hand, losing on an unearned run is bad luck. But when you were the one who committed the error, it is another matter.

Season: I said most of what I needed to say about Zack Greinke’s season last week. After this week’s abomination in which an appalling Yuniesky Betancourt popup and only one run of support made him a four-time loser despite being very close to the same Zack Greinke who walked away with the Cy Young award, he carries an 0-4 record in seven starts, five of which has been quality starts. He has no-decisions in games in which he has posted game scores of 70, 72 and 57 and lost a game with a game score of 76. In the seven games he has started, his teammates have scored 17 runs.

A Hardball Times Update
Goodbye for now.

Batters this year have hit .233/.277/.352 off him. Last year he allowed them to hit .230/.276/.336. He is within shouting distance of repeating his 2009 season, which happened to be the best performance a pitcher has put up in a decade. But he sits at 0-4. Words fail me.

Vulture Award

Jonathan Broxton blew the save and got the win over the Brewers. Ryan Franklin figured out a way to do it against the anemic Pittsburgh offense. And Francisco Rodriguez can thank Rod Barajas for covering his butt when he was a big pile of fail against the Giants. Then on Sunday, the Sergio Romo had a small reversal of fortune as he was a Giants reliever gifted with a cheap win when the Queens bullpen coughed up the lead.

Scott Downs got the win after an inning in which he retired Mark Kotsay, Alexei Ramirez and Juan Pierre. At the end of the game, their respective OPS stood at .539, .565, and .494.

Season: While Greinke obviously ran over karma’s dog, Tyler Clippard must have spent the last few off seasons rescuing kittens from trees and helping elderly women cross the street. He shares the NL lead in wins with two guys named Roy Halladay and Ubaldo Jimenez. If you add their ERAs together in seven starts apiece, it still is 2.38. Clippard hasn’t damaged himself with runs, being charged with only two all year, both earned. But via one of those runs and some inherited runs, he has blown four saves and has wins in all of them, three of them happened this week. Joe Pawlikowski beat me to the punch with a nice article on Clippard.

Wes Littleton Award

Two of the three batters Neftali Feliz had to retire to get the save were Jason Kendall and Betancourt.

Season: Octavio Dotel has been brutal this season, allowing batters to hit .239/.340/.425 off of him. His ERA is over eight. Still he has converted three quarters of his eight save opportunities.

Please hold the applause

David Robertson gave up solo home runs to Matt Weiters and Nolan Reimold in his two thirds of an inning of work. He still got the hold.

Season: Hideki Okajima has four holds. He has allowed a run in half of them. And in only one of them has he pitched a full inning.

Any sufficiently advanced defense is indistinguishable from pitching

Brad Bergesen failed to strike out a single batter in six innings of scoreless baseball.

Livan Hernandez walked five men, struck out one, and held Atlanta to two runs for the win.

Carsten Sabathia struck out only two batters in his eight innings of work on Monday. However, only five of the 25 balls that were sent into the field of play found open grass.

Season: I know I have mentioned him at least thrice this year, including above, so it is hardly a surprise that Livan is walking away with this one so far, with a .181 BABIP going a long way toward explaining his 1.04 ERA and .569 OPS against. He has struck out only 14 batters all season.

On the other side of the coin, Hamels had a high .321 BABIP last year, but this year the .358 that he has given up on balls in play has killed him. He is fourth in the majors with 49 strikeouts, but he has a 4.53 ERA.

Small sample size theater

Mark Teixeira added 117 points to his OPS on Saturday. Dallas Braden lopped eight tenths of a run off of his ERA in a span of two hours and seven minutes.

Six comments on Dallas Braden

1. Between Braden’s perfect game and Jamie Moyer’s shutout, it was a great week to be a lefty who couldn’t beat Betty White on a carnival speed pitch game. Actually that’s probably a little unfair to Braden. He has a below average fastball, velocity-wise. But at 87 mph, his heater is practically blazing compared to Moyer’s 81 mph average. (Thank you, Fangraphs!)

2. It is going to take a while for me to get used to the idea that Braden is one of only 19 pitchers in history to have a perfect game.

3. It almost certainly doesn’t mean anything, but it seems like a weird coincidence that lefties have thrown five of the last six perfect games going back to Kenny Rogers in 1994.

4. If they haven’t already, somebody should do a study and a series of papers on the best lineups to be the victim of a perfect game, no-hitter, and one-hit shutout. St. Petersburg is a pretty solid hitting club, currently second in the AL in runs behind the Yankees. The Rays were also perfect gamed by Mark Buehrle last year despite being seventh in baseball in runs scored.

5. It is worth noting that Braden was a 24th-round pick out of college. I have a project sitting on the back burner in which I talk about players who have taken unconventional paths to being major league players of significance. Braden just forced his way into that project.

6 Finally, I haven’t commented on the Alex Rodriguez mound imposition. This is because I have absolutely no opinion on the topic. I had never heard of that particular unwritten rule before it happened.

Joe Carter Award

Carlos Gonzalez drove in eight runs for the LoDo Rocks in 22 at-bats. Not only did he hit a pretty pedestrian .273/.292/.409, but he also was caught stealing twice.

Not to be outdone, the LA area first basemen, James Loney and Kendry Morales, went .150/.250/.300 and .222/.290/.370 respectively while plating six runs.

Andruw Jones had the extra base hit thing down, but not a lot else, going .233/.281/.467, driving in six. Mike Jacobs would be proud.

Sanchez Award

Roger Bernadina hit .333/.333/.389, which outside of a double is almost a perfect Sanchez line.

What is going on with Ben Zobrist? .286/.304/.333 brings him to .259/.331/.353 for the year. Where is the power?

Harmon Killebrew Award

Teixeira collected only six hits in 24 at-bats, but half of those hits were home runs that buried the Red Sox on Saturday. He also chipped in a double and four walks to go .250/.357/.667.

Three of Scott Hairston’s four hits were for extra bases and he walked three times in 19 at-bats. .211/.375/.579 is a funny looking line, but an effective one.

Steve Balboni Award

Jim Edmonds struck out 11 times in 19 at-bats. The strikeouts overruled the home run and two walks he contributed to the Milwaukee offense and dragged his line all the way to .105/.190/.263.

Tommy Manzella is a walking, talking representation of the concept of replacement level. As such, it shouldn’t be much of a surprise that he whiffed in 11 of his 19 at-bats on his way to a .105/.150/.263 abomination of a week.

Amazingly, Russ Branyan struck out eight times in 12 plate appearances. You don’t need me to tell you that that doesn’t end well. .100/.250/.100.

Three true outcomes

Well, he was missing a category as he didn’t homer, but Branyan’s eight strikeouts and two walks qualify him for a citation. Gordon Beckham also failed to homer, but he walked eight times and struck out seven in 19 at-bats.

Chris Snyder hit one home run, walked eight times, and struck out six times in 16 at-bats.

David Wright went two-three-twelve in 24 at-bats.

Adam Lind went one-five-nine in 26 at-bats.

Rookie Ike Davis went two-six-eight in 21 at-bats.

And it always feels strange when I don’t include Adam Dunn in the category that seems tailor made for his name one day. Two-five-five in 18 at-bats.

The anti-TTO

David Eckstein and Miguel Tejada each went zero-one-zero in 24 and 27 at-bats respectively.

Martin Prado and Seth Smith made it zero-zero-one in 26 and 19.

Neither here nor there

With a .254/.357/.390 line, Mitch Maier is playing like a serviceable, but ordinary player this year. In his major league career, he is a .250/.332/.331 hitter. I don’t think there is anything else that is typical about him. He was drafted in the first round as a catcher with a polished, advanced bat. Then it took him until his age 27 season to see any significant amount of major league playing time, by which time he had inexplicably become a speedy center fielder with a decent glove and questionable bat. Along the way he had a brief, disastrous stopover at third base.

Also odd is the way he has suddenly learned to walk, something he failed to do in the minors. In his minor league career, he walked in 6.7 percent of his plate appearances. In the big leagues, that figure is 9.8 percent. I have no idea how often this happens, but it can’t be very often. The catcher turned average or better defensive outfielder is not unprecedented since I watched Jayson Werth play for Syracuse back when he was splitting time at catcher with Josh Phelps. But I can’t think of anybody who improved his walk rate that significantly almost immediately upon finding himself in the Show.

This week’s MVP

AL: One name I didn’t mention in TTO was Kevin Youkilis, who rapped out nine hits, four for extra bases, and walked nine times in 31 plate appearances. Alex Rios, who smacked 13 hits, outslugged Youkilis by 200 points, but I favor the 178 point advantage that the Greek God of Walks boasts in OBP thanks to the free passes.

NL: The Cardinals may have lost four of their seven games this past week, but I have a hard time blaming Yadier Molina, given that the catcher hit .500/.560/.636 and was two for two on the basepaths.


9 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
ecp
13 years ago

Am I the only one who thinks Ben Zobrist’s 2009 was a fluky aberration?  He wasn’t exactly a power hitter in the minors or in any of his previous ML seasons other than a small sample size 227 PA 2008.

I will grant that his 2009 slugging % is way low, but I don’t see the guy as a big bopper.

MikeS
13 years ago

I think either this site or Fangraphs did an analysis of the most impressive no hitters after Buehrle’s perfect game last year and that game came out on top (or near the top) because the Rays are so good offensively.

Also, re: Youkilis OBP vs Rios SLG, I thought it was widely accepted that the biggest flaw in OPS was that it values OBP and SLG equally when in actuality slugging is more important since 2 bases are always better than one.

Jim G.
13 years ago

MikeS – re: OPS – the thing is, a player will gain average for a hit in both the AVG and SLG category, while the OBP stands alone. In a sense, they double dip for every base hit. Therefore, the OBP is weighted less than SLG.

Toffer
13 years ago

MikeS – Actually it is widely accepted that OBP is 1.7~1.8 times more important than SLG.

See here: http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/why_does_17obpslg_make_sense/

Also see here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_Production_Average

jim
13 years ago

I always enjoy this weekly article, just a quick suggestion: for the “Three true outcomes” I think it would make more sense to show total PA instead of AB, since BB are included in PA and not AB.

Marc Schneider
13 years ago

“This week’s proof that assigning wins and losses to a pitcher is an arcane practice that must stop”

It’s a tradition of the game that does no harm.  Obviously, wins are a flawed way of measuring pitching performance but, after all, baseball is entertainment and I suspect most fans would not like dispensing with wins/losses for pitchers.

gdc
13 years ago

“Octavio Dotel has been brutal this season, allowing batters to hit .239/.340/.425 off of him”
Did you get the right avg/obp/slg?  That doesn’t seem so bad.

Also, some of the links failed, David Robertson gets David Roberts and Wieters was misspelled Weiters so he got no link.

John Barten
13 years ago

ecp: It is possible that it was a fluke power surge, though he did slug .505 in 2008, so it would make it a weird span of about a season and a half.

jim: I have done the PA thing in the past, but I tend to list AB because…I’m actually kind of lazy. The sortable stat page I use for weekly numbers lists AB on the main page and I have to flip over to another page to find the PA. Given that most of the difference between AB and PA is walks, which are obviously already there for reference I take the shortcut.

gdc: Dotel’s line was a transcribing mistake on my part. That was his 2009 line against, which isn’t very good for a high leverage reliever given that it is something like 40 points of OPS higher than the average NL batter. This year it is .263/.353/.544, which is of course much uglier.

The player links are inserted by a “linkify” feature and it is the last thing I do before submitting. I’ll keep an eye on that in the future. Thanks for the heads up.

MVD
13 years ago

So, 2009, Dotel turned hitters into Brandon Phillips. And this year, he’s turning everyone into Mark Reynolds. Neither scenario is very good for a setup man/closer.

love the awards!