Where have you gone, Andy Van Slyke?

This has been an interesting topic to me all year. Judging things like route-running on TV is really hard, so for most of the season I didn't really think a whole lot about McLouth's fielding. I saw that he'd made no errors all year and just kind of took a pass on worrying about it. When I came home in June, the one thing I noticed in the two innings of the Yankees game that got rained out was that it seemed to me, from my vantage point on the right field wall, that he was getting awful jumps on balls hit over his head. I noticed the same thing from left field the next day at the Rays game and then noticed it again on TV about a week later, at which point I mentioned it and was brandished for drawing a judgment from only seeing one or two games in person, so I dropped it. Still, the thought has stuck in my head for a bit and I noticed that today Dejan mentions it in his morning link dump. Specifically, he links to this post at BBTF , which discusses defensive runs saved an...

Today's PG talks about Ian Snell's inability to pitch in on batters. Being a curious and intrepid blogger, I pulled his "ultra-normalized" pitch location chart down from Dan Brooks' Pitch FX site. The graph treats every hitter like a right-handed hitter with a normalized height and strike zone. It should be read like a gamecast at-bat, meaning the hitter is on the right and the outside of the strikezone is on the left (at least, I'm pretty sure that's how it should be read). Snell's pitches are triangles (actually, all the Pirates are the triangles, so most of the triangles are Snell, you get the point) with strikes in red and balls in green. Looks like an undisputed case of Kip Wells disease to me.

If there's one thing that's really bugged me about the Pirates this year (OK, actually there's like 42 things, but this is #1), it's the way Ian Snell's pitched. He and Gorzo have been equally bad, but I kind of expected it out of Gorzo (mostly because I figured he'd be hurt this year). Snell's ugly start gnaws at me because I can't figure out why he's been so bad and there's no real obvious reason for his dropff. I'm not someone to sit around and let something bug me when I think I can figure out the answer, so I've been digging through Dan Brooks' fantastic PitchFX tool for Snell's starts to see if I can figure out what's different this year. This is the first year that the PitchFX data for every start are available to the public and the numbers I can find from last year are very incomplete. Instead, I'm going to compare the numbers from this year to what I found in the Bill James Handbook 2008 for Snell. He doesn'...

Adam LaRoche, May 6th, 2006 : .207/.318/.467, 5 HR, 31 Ks Adam LaRoche, May 6th, 2007 : .167/.271/.284, 3 HR, 33 Ks Adam LaRoche, May 6th, 2008 : .206/.289/.333, 3 HR, 33Ks I've said this again and again, but LaRoche didn't break out until almost June last year. It's early May and he's nearly got his OPS to .700, which was a number he battled with until June 30th last year (first topping it on June 6th). In his past nine games, he's hitting .355/.444/.613 with two of his three homers and two of his four doubles. It certainly seems possible that the LaRoche breakout we've been waiting for is just about here. It's incredibly frustrating to watch LaRoche flail around at the plate in April, but it's really something we're just going to have to accept for as long as he's our first baseman. If all of his off-season work only served to help him break out of his slump on April 26th (the beginning of that nine game stretch I mentioned above) as opposed to...

Soooo... April is over and the Pirates are 12-12. And somehow, they've done it with three blown saves from closer Salomon Torres. Understandably, everyone is upset with Sully's performance in the closer role. Everyone is especially upset because the guy we traded our closer for is batting like .133 right now. Still, there is something that's bothered me about how Torres has pitched so far. The rallying cry around LaRoche from people like me who keep defending him is that he's a slow starter. He never hits well in April and he always heats up with the weather. Maybe he needs to hit the weight room or whatever in the off-season to hit his stride earlier, but that's the way it goes for him and that doesn't look like it's going to chance. But what about Torres? Starting in 2004, when he became a full-time reliever for a full season, he's had three very good years. Let's look at his April splits vs. the rest of his season. 2004 : 5.06 ERA, 1.31 WHIP, 2.53...

The Stats Geek dedicates his latest article to our newest #5 man (in name only, I'd bet he pitches out of the four slot to alternate lefties and righties), Tony Armas Jr. Like some other stuff I've read about Armas, the prevailing opinion seems to be "better than Chacon" and "look at his career ERA, he can't be that bad." The major flaw I see in that thinking is that Armas, at 29, already appears to be on the downslope of his career. He hasn't posted a full season ERA+ over 100 since he was 23 (100 is league average, ERA+ explanation here ) and in fact, in a pitcher's park ( EDIT: ERA+ is independent of park factors, so the fact he pitched at RFK doesn't matter here. I knew that, but it kind of slipped my mind when I wrote the post, still, the point is that he's sucked lately and that doesn't change.) the past two seasons his ERA+ has been in the 80s, which is very Chacon-like ( Chacon 's ERA+ for us last year was 82 while Victo...

As I like to do at this time of year, I've been playing around with Baseball Musing's Lineup Analysis tool and the ZiPS projections to take a look at the Pirates 2007 offense. As usual, everything is subject to change with a trade or something and I do know that this is incredibly hypothetical stuff we're dealing with here. The first lineup I looked at is the one I guessed at the other day, Duffy, Wilson, Sanchez, Bay, Nady, Doumit, Castillo, Paulino, and using Duke's 2006 hitting stats for the pitcher. Using the 1998-2002 model, the tool predicts 4.361 runs per game for that lineup , or about 706 runs over162 games. That was the closest I could get to the 680 that the Replacement Level Yankees Blog got using CHONE projections and Diamond Minds, and I think it's pretty close considering that that exact lineup won't play every day and whatever we use off of the bench likely won't match the production, plus there are differences in the projection systems an...

Doing some browsing on the internet looking for something Pirate-related to talk about has finally brought me some inspiration today. While browsing the BBTF blog I found a link to this interesting post by the Baseball Crank. Using the new toys at Baseball Reference , BC compared a bunch of pitchers across generations to see how they pitched in their wins compared to their losses (just read the whole post, it's worth it). He found that as much as people bitch about wins and losses as a useful stat, things evened themselves out over time and in general even great pitchers pitch very well in their wins and poorly in their losses. This is incredibly intriguing to me, though I suppose maybe I shouldn't be that surprised. Still, career-wise, Shawn Chacon has a better ERA in games that he's won than Chris Carpenter , it's just that he pitches well enough to win on a much less consistent basis than Carp does. Anyways, I've decided to have some fun with these splits and...