Apologize to him. The team hasn’t been taking care of him very well. Apologize. ‘Sorry, man, you deserve better.’ … I’m just disappointed we didn’t do more to win the game and for Anthony. It’s embarrassing.

— TLR

Unless the team’s lack of production for Reyes is some kind of conspiracy or Reyes’s pitching somehow contributes to the scoring dearth, there’s no need to apologize to Iron Cap. And "embarrassing" isn’t the word we’d use, not any more than it’s embarrassing to hit like they did no matter who their starter is (then again, we’re not hung up on starting-pitcher wins and losses). But at any rate, it’s worth looking into.

Since we have no reason to suspect a conspiracy, let’s look at Reyes’s pitching style to see if it might deviate in a way that causes offensive laxitude. The first thing that comes to mind is that Reyes rarely pitches deep into games. Another way of putting it is that he throws a lot of pitches per batter. Yesterday was a case in point, as he threw 4.3 pitches per batter, and he leads the team’s starters with 4.2 PPA. But while we’ve often heard that a pitcher who throws a lot of pitches per batter can have a deleterious effect on his defense (e.g., they start leaning back on their heels, etc.) — though, in fact, the Cardinals play their most efficient defense behind Reyes, with a .736 DER — we’ve never seen anything to correlate that tendency with a pitchers’ teammates’ offensive malaise.

It’s there, but I don’t ever pay attention [to his record]. I don’t ever read stats, papers or anything. I don’t look at it, so I don’t see it.

– Anthony Reyes

Iron Cap’s manager might want to take a cue from Reyes and not read the papers. While we don’t commend the pitcher’s stats embargo, at least he’s not paying attention to the wrong stats. If he did decide to check out some of his numbers, he’d be satisfied (if not pleased):

• 3.16 dERA yesterday
• 3.77 FIP (2nd on team, 30th in league, better than Barry Zito, Ben Sheets and Roy Oswalt)
• 15.3 Line-drive % (10th in league, 2nd on team behind … Kip Wells?)
• 8.0 K/G (10th in league)
• 2.54 K/BB (16th in league)

For the most part, he’s one of those guys you don’t understand when you don’t have a good game. He’s the kind of guy you want to face when you come to the park each day … Guys are pressing. When you can’t put it together, you see guys trying too hard or searching for something. That’s a guy you walk away from the game saying shouldn’t have beat us.

– Aaron Miles

Miles is starting to sound like Albert Pujols talking about Tom Glavine. It’s one thing to come to the ballpark expecting to have a tough game against Jake Peavy. It’s quite another to come to the park thinking you’ve got a good shot at the win. As we noted Friday, after the Peavy-Wells pairing, the Cardinals had good reason to like their chances in the ensuing two games. And they conquered the often-perplexing Chris Young. Losing to Germano is probably therefore even more discouraging than a whitewashing by Peavy. The Cardinals have now been shut out six times this season, but Sunday’s offensive pittance represented the very worst shutout of the year in terms of total runs created. Whereas in other games — like Friday’s, when they plated none against Peavy — the team has usually generated at least one run of offense but simply failed to touch the five-sided base. Here are the shutouts by runs created (technical version):

Interestingly, only one of the shutouts has been hurled by a lefty (Capuano). But when we look at the Cardinals’ worst offensive performances by runs created, more southpaws are indeed responsible:

We’ll see what Babyface Thompson can do tonight as the Cardinals continue their road trip agains the Dodgers. Even if he repeats his encouraging outing from last Tuesday, the Cardinals will need to score more than .21 runs.

This entry was posted by Pip on Monday, May 14th, 2007 at 1:17 pm and is filed under quotebook. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.