In their game against Matt Cain and the San Francisco Giants yesterday, the Cardinals shot out of the gate. They reached the typically stingy Cain for 12 total bases over the first three innings and scored four runs. But Cain stinted the rally and settled in to quash the Cardinal bats the rest of the way. The Cardinals didn’t score again until Yadier Molina hit a home run in the eighth that barely moved the win-expectancy needle to 6.4.

The following chart visualizes the Cardinal offense by inning (the line is Gross-Production Average each inning):

Cain not only has been getting better each year of his career but also with each inning of a game — or, at least, he doesn’t decline as much as most pitchers do over the course of a start:

After this afternoon’s sad showing, perhaps it’s better to dwell a bit on the recent past — as in Wednesday’s game, in which Jaime Garcia pitched one of the best games of his career. Shall we?

By Fielding-Independent Game Score, Garcia’s nine-strikeout start was the fourth-best of his four-year career:

Astute fans will note that three of his top four games have come against the Giants (two of which were in the city by the bay). And of the three nine-strikeout games that he has thrown, two were against the Orange and Black.

It’s not like the Giants swing a bunch of swiss-cheese bats — over the last three years, they have a league-average strikeout rate (18%). Perhaps it’s as Mike Shannon noted during the broadcast: The thick air of San Francisco gives Garcia’s pitches just enough extra heaviness that he is able to miss a few more bats.

Those two nine-strikeout performances were both in SF, so if the hypothesis is valid, we would expect to see more swinging strikes as a percentage of Garcia’s total:

Compared with his career rate of 17%, the 25% in the Frisco games may indeed bear out Shannon’s idea. It’s just a couple of games, of course, but it’s worth paying attention to. If we were really geeky, we’d be interested in the weather conditions during those games. (Okay, fine.) According to Robert Adair, temperature, barometric pressure and humidity affect the flight of a baseball:

The canonical 400-foot home run will go about three feet farther for every one-inch reduction in the barometer and as much as ten feet farther on a 95-degree July day in Milwaukee than on a 45-degree day. The effect of temperature differences on the elasticity of the ball will also have an effect on the distance a batted ball travels.

The conditions at AT&T Park:

Average pressure in St. Louis the last 10 years has been 1017, so it’s fair to say that the colder temperature, rather than the air pressure, contributed more to Garcia’s success, to the slight extent that weather conditions impact play at all.

If you check the record book, you’ll find that the Cubs once sacrifice bunted against the Cardinals in a game four times, and not one was the pitcher. And you don’t have to go back to the 1920s to find it — it happened Monday night.

One of these bunt-happy Cub attempts in particular raised the eyebrow of at least one fan, reader “Brandon.” In the eighth inning of a tie game, the Cubs’ third-place — and presumably best — hitter, Starlin Castro, tried to lay one down with runners on first and second and none out. In a play that Keith Hernandez would’ve been proud of, Lance Berkman pounced on the ball and began a beautiful 3-5-4 DP.

Though we are often skeptical of the utility of sacrifice bunting, the issue for both Brandon and us was as much whether a team should ever have its best hitter sacrificing as it is whether to bunt, period. We’re talking about a career .344 OBP hitter in Castro.

We ran the scenarios using the 2nd Guesser app, and the results surprised us. Based on a 73% chance of successfully bunting and Castro’s career OBP, sac bunting in that game situation was actually a good idea (win expectancy declines more if you hit away than if you bunt). Actually, bunting would’ve been a smart call for just about anyone on either team: At that bunting success rate, the break-even OBP point is roughly .440 (Berkman boasts the highest career OBP of anyone in Monday’s game at .409).

The catch, however, is in that bunting success rate, which the Guesser assumes to be 73% (which was the league average last year). It just so happens that, despite his considerable other baseball talents, Starlin Castro isn’t very adept at sacrifice bunting, successful at a below-average 57% rate. Plugging in that number yields a very different outcome: Instead of bunting being the wise move, it now becomes a wash (Net WE for hitting away is around 14, as is bunting). For the record, Big Puma has a 100% sac-bunt success rate — on one attempt.

Of course, the rest of the context is necessary to the overall calculation, too. Following Castro was LaHair, who, as Brandon notes, would’ve almost surely been walked intentionally. That would’ve brought up Alfonso Soriano, not a bad bet for a strikeout or inning-ending GIDP. It’s all academic at this point, of course.

Beyond strategy, we wondered just how often a team’s best hitter — or at least the hitter that the manager believes to be its best by batting him third in the lineup — sacrifices. Berkman, for example, has had a plurality of plate appearances batting third and has attempted it but once in 7462 PAs. So far this season, a #3 hitter has successfully sacrificed only twice (Josh Reddick and Jimmy Rollins), and it happened only 19 times last year. Most of the list includes players who are established bunters (Placido Polanco, 75%, Freddy Sanchez, 76%) or poor-OBP men (Jason Bourgeois, Xavier Paul) or both (Omar Infante, 68%/.319). One might note that in 16 of the 19 successful sacrifices, the play was a negative WPA.

And in case you’re wondering, that legendary third-place hitter Hernandez had a 67% success rate* sacrifice bunting to go with his .384 career OBP.

*Full disclosure: MLB average during Mex’s career was 78%.

Tonight’s starter, Jake Westbrook, has been enjoying a career year so far, posting bests in FIP (2.79) and xFIP (3.20). He has been getting the job done by inducing groundballs (a career-high 62.8% rate) and getting a bit lucky (better than normal strand rate and home-run rate per flyball rate). In the second of the two-game set, Kyle Lohse takes the ball, hoping to recover from a pair of so-so outings in which he struck out only three each time and fell prey to the vagaries of line-drives hit into play. Even with those starts, Lohse has been a reliable back-end starter, with a 3.33 FIP and 4.10 xFIP.

On the batting side, Lance Berkman has returned from the DL just in time to face Ryan Dempster, off whom he feasts (a .423 OBP and .581 SLG in 78 PAs). He may get a rest against Paul Maholm, with the recently activated right-hander Allen Craig, who has five home runs in 46 plate appearance, a team-high 10.9% home-run rate. Speaking of home runs, Carlos Beltran leads the league in circuit clouts with 13, hitting eight over his last 11 games … The Cardinals released lefty JC Romero and recalled righty Eduardo Sanchez. That leaves the staff with only one LOOGy, Marc Rzepczynski, who is less a one-out guy than a multiple-batter reliever. The Cubs have five lefthanded hitters on their roster, so Mike Matheny will need to be judicious. He might deploy against lefties Sanchez, who has a career 2.94 FIP against them … Neither the Giants nor the Cardinals have retired Frankie Frisch’s #3. The Hall-of-Fame Frisch ranks 50th on the career WAR list among batters, higher than all hitter retirees except Stan Musial. The Fordham Flash won a title and an MVP award with the team. Here’s hoping he’s next … Speaking of retired numbers, the Cardinals’ web site does not yet list their latest, Tony La Russa.

If you say Lance Lynn lost his first game, to quote Jeannie Bueller, you lose a testicle:

• Rafael Furcal led off two more innings by getting on base. He now has a .503 OBP when leading off an inning. The Cardinals are second in the league in runs scored. The two statistics are not coincidental.
• Despite the walks and the outcome, Sunday’s game was far from Lynn’s worst start of the year:
  

  Date	Opp	TBF	HR	SO	BB	FIP
  2-May	PIT	24	0	6	1	1.63
  14-Apr	CHC	22	0	5	2	2.23
  7-May	@ARI	21	0	7	4	2.58
  13-May	ATL	25	0	7	3	2.65
  8-Apr	@MIL	22	1	8	1	2.98
  25-Apr	@CHC	30	1	7	2	3.61
  20-Apr	@PIT	23	1	4	1	4.13

• The Cardinals started out fabulously but quickly fizzled. In the bottom of the first, they put runners on second and third with no out (and Carlos Beltran batting) — a run expectancy of 1.571 runs. Instead, they scored zero. That’s because, after two consecutive walks, Cardinal batters struck out three consecutive times. At least they didn’t hit into a double play, right?
• Tony Cruz allowed a passed ball in Sunday’s game, bringing the catchers’ total to four on the year. It doesn’t seem like much, but the Cardinal backstops’ rate of missed pitches (wild pitches and passed balls) is one every 191 pitches. That may not sound like much, but compared to last year, when they missed one every 398 pitches, it’s twice as often. Of course, it may even out over the course of the year.
• John Rooney noted that the Braves scored their runs “all with two out,” but what does that phrase mean? And why don’t we ever hear “all with one out”?
• Good to see Puma prowling the diamond again.
• The weekend’s matchup of the league’s two best teams ended in a decisive win for the Braves. They’re clearly the better team — at the moment.
• In the eighth inning of a 7-1 game, Chipper just watched ball four on four pitches like it was intentional. We’re not sure what has happened to Kyle McClellan, but it makes us sad.
• We won’t gainsay the decision to retire Tony La Russa’s number, though we will note that we think that the team has at least one other number that deserved  to be retired first (hint: It’s currently in use on the team and belonged to a player who has more career WAR than Red Schoendienst and Enos Slaughter).