The Stats Geek

As the season winds down the Stats Geek sees one enormous reason we've been outscored by 92 runs this year. We've given up 142 more walks than we've taken. In fact, only Brian Meadows, Zach Duke, Mark Redman (?), and Josh Fogg are below the league average in BB/9. Meanwhile only Jason Bay, Matt Lawton, and Craig Wilson are above the league average in BB/PA, with Rob Mackowiak and Daryle Ward close to the average. That means, in effect, the only person in our lineup that walks more than average (because Lawton is gone and Craig's barely played) is the guy that sticks out like a sore thumb in it because he's the only one that can hit. If you count beanballs, Ryan Doumit moves up the list quite a bit. In fact, thanks to him and Craig (10 beanings in only 225 PAs) we're second in the league in getting hit by pitches! Hooray for small victories! He does make a good point about Craiggers though:
Many fans want to trade Wilson because he "strikes out too much." If his power returns, which seems to be happening (four doubles, a triple and two home runs in his past six games), then fans should learn to endure Wilson's strikeouts and be far more concerned with those Pirates who make outs too much.
If Craig Wilson is in right field next year, we certainly could do a lot worse, especially if he's the early 2004 Craig. He closes with some simple analysis:

To sum up, the Pirates are sixth in the league in hits but 13th in on-base average (.323) and 14th in runs scored largely because of this chronic walk shortage.

Pirates opponents, meantime, have a .268 average and .345 on-base average. Lowering the latter number by cutting the walk rate should be Job One for the revamped Pirates pitching staff and whoever coaches them next year.

Get more walks. Give up fewer. Easier said than done, but if that isn't done, 2006 is going to look an awful lot like the past 13 seasons.

It seems so easy, doesn't it? Charlie has some analysis as to why this happens.

Popular posts from this blog

82 wins

  This is how it starts: in 1989 in a living room in front of an old cathode-ray tube TV, the kind with the power button that pulls out into a little knob to adjust the volume and the individual buttons for channels running down the side, with a four-year old asking his dad a non-stop stream of questions about the Pirates/Phillies game on the TV. Or maybe this is how it starts: in a parking lot at Three Rivers Stadium where the same little boy is tailgating before his first-ever Pirate game, eating food out of the back of a car, then watching the Pirates dismantle the Expos 6-1 with his favorite player hitting a home run.  Or maybe it starts in the second floor hallway on the morning of October 15th, 1992. That's where he finds out that the Pirates blew the 1-0 lead they when he went to bed the night before in the most painful way possible and that, for the third season in a row they will not go to the World Series. The worst is yet to come, though, and no one has any i...
Read more

80 wins

  Good morning. It is September 3rd  2013. With last night's win, the Pirates are 80-57 Since 1992, the Pirates failed to win 80 games in the following seasons*: 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997 , 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 . There is another way to write that list up. It could be written like this: 1993-2012. It's fitting that the final years on the countdown are 1997 and 2012, because there are not two more memorable years that the Pirates have had during their 20 year losing streak. The 1997 season was, of course, The Freak Show. As previously discussed , the Pirates jettisoned their entire post-Bonds core of talent over the end of the 1996 season and the following winter. The 1997 Pirates were supposed to be a lousy baseball team that would lose a bunch of games in the interest of laying a foundation for the 2001 Pirates, who would usher in a new era of Pirate baseb...
Read more

Pirates, Alvarez agree to new contract

Holy crap. On Sunday nights between about 10 PM and 2 AM, I get tied up in making my weekly rewinds for FanHouse and I don't venture to many websites beyond Getty Images or Creative Commons, unless I'm bouncing out to write up an incredibly overdue recap of the Sunday afternoon Pirate game. That means that I missed the Post-Gazette refreshing it's stories at midnight. Which means I missed this : In a stunning reversal of a summer-long drama, the Pirates and top draft pick Pedro Alvarez last night agreed to terms on a revised four-year, major league contract worth a guaranteed $6,355,000, according to three sources intimately familiar with the talks. Dejan has many more details in the article, so I'd recommend that you check that out. Without knowing who initiated these talks and who got this deal done, I'd say that this is great news for the Pirates that is going to make other teams very, very unhappy. The Pittsburgh Pirates' #1 concern has to be the Pittsburgh ...
Read more