Some questions (and a few answers) from the Cardinals’ weekend series victory over the Braves:

• How lucky did the Cardinals get in scoring 18 runs on Friday? In rapping out (and clunking out) 26 hits in Friday’s game, the Cardinals equaled the feat they last turned on Sept. 23, 1930. Of those 26 hits, not one was home run, and the 21 singles were two off the major league record set by the Houston Astros May 30, 1976. That performance has BABIP written all over it — an incredible .684, in fact (more than twice the normal rate of balls in play falling for hits). Indeed, we checked the Cardinals’ game logs from Baseball-Reference.com going back to 1956, and Friday’s game ranks as the team’s "luckiest" in the last 50 years and possibly ever:
  

  Date	Opp	Result	PA	AB	R	H	2B	3B	HR	BB	SO	BABIP
  08/22/08	ATL	W 18-3	55	44	18	26	5	0	0	9	6	.684
  09/26/04	@COL	W 9-3	45	40	9	16	2	0	1	3	14	.600
  08/26/61	SFG	W 8-5	43	31	8	13	1	0	0	8	9	.591
  08/13/08	@FLA	W 6-4	45	40	6	18	2	1	0	2	9	.581
  07/18/01	@HOU	L 11-17	47	44	11	18	5	0	2	2	14	.571
  05/25/63	NYM	W 6-3	39	32	6	12	3	0	0	5	11	.571
  05/17/75	@SFG	W 17-2	52	46	17	23	6	2	2	5	7	.568
  09/23/02	ARI	W 13-1	47	41	13	18	5	0	0	5	9	.563
  06/24/97	CHC	W 7-2	42	34	7	15	3	2	0	4	7	.556
  06/27/73	@PIT	W 15-4	50	45	15	22	6	1	2	4	7	.556

  We also checked that game in which the Astros set the record for singles. But the Astros had "only" a .568 BABIP. The other way of looking it, of course, is from the point of view of the Braves’ pitchers. The team DER for the game was a miniscule .350. Adam Wainwright perhaps didn’t know how right he was when he quipped, "That team had some bad luck. Everything that we hit fell. It was one of those nights where no matter what we did it was going to be right, and whatever they did was going to be wrong.” Well, not everything. Just around 68%.

• How much did Friday’s blowout impact the team’s Pythagorean Win %? Before Friday’s game, the Cardinals had a Pythagorean record of 70-59 (.543) and an actual record of 71-58. Though it was only one extra win for their real-life record (72-58), with the 18 runs added to their Runs Scored side of the ledger and only three to their Runs Allowed, the team jumped to a 72-58 (.554) Pythagorean record, a relatively large gain of 1.5 games.
• Anyone not convinced that the Save needs to be banished from baseball forever? Joel Pineiro "earned" the "Save" Friday for "being the finishing pitcher in a game won by his team," "not being the winning pitcher" and "pitching for at least three innings" (heck, even we qualified for the second criterion). We suppose it’s only a minor detail that he entered the game with a 15-1 lead with three innings to go. His Win-Probability Added? 0%. Leverage Index? 0.00. That’s right, he added nothing to the team’s chances of winning. Suffice it to say that it was the least deserved Save in all of baseball this season.
• When was the last time a pitcher had five plate appearances in one game? (Adam Wainwright on Friday)
• When was the last time a pitcher had five plate appearances in one game and only pitched six innings? (ditto, Wainwright)
• Who was to blame for the Lopez play Saturday? Felipe Lopez didn’t win any new fans this weekend. Saturday’s game was teetering close to the edge of the precipice for the Cardinals in the ninth, when, with the Braves batting with runners on first and second and two outs — and leading 5-4 — Martin Prado hit a simple grounder right toward second baseman Lopez. Lopez fielded cleanly, then paused — seemingly a full three-count — and threw to first. Safe! was the call on the field. Single! was the call up in the press box. What? Believe it or not, the official scorer made the right call in not giving Lopez an error, according to the rulebook. The relevant rule, which he calmly and resignedly pointed out after the game, is 10.12, clarified in a comment:
  

  Rule 10.12(a)(1) Comment: Slow handling of the ball that does not involve mechanical misplay shall not be construed as an error. For example, the official scorer shall not charge a fielder with an error if such fielder fields a ground ball cleanly but does not throw to first base in time to retire the batter.

  As the OS noted, the rulebook is anything but specific on many rules. Why this one, especially when it seems to be just the opposite of logical? To further confuse matters, the rules go on to say that an error should be charged

  (3) when such fielder catches a thrown ball or a ground ball in time to put out the batter-runner and fails to tag first base or the batter-runner;
  (4) when such fielder catches a thrown ball or a ground ball in time to put out any runner on a force play and fails to tag the base or the runner;

  So the spirit of the rule seems to be that the player who is too slow to get to the bag is culpable for his play, but the letter of the rule inexplicably makes a distinction between the assisting player and the player making the actual putout (one is excused for his latent play while the other is responsible). At any rate, we’ll give one cheer to Lopez for sticking around to face the music (which was more than Albert Pujols did) and two cheers to Adam Kennedy, who defended the player who has pushed him even further down the bench. But Lopez’s explanation — "Obviously, I don’t want to hit him in the back while he’s still running to the bag" — wasn’t exactly self-flagellation, even if it was technically true. Being the new kid on the block (and essentially deflecting the blame onto the team’s leading hitter and longest-tenured player), Lopez might’ve taken some responsibility and let Kennedy do the explaining for him. We’ve noted before that Pujols is sometimes not always around the bag when a play is made, and his deep positioning (questionable, with the righthanded Prado batting) was at least partly responsible for the "single." Here’s a rough screen cap, via MLB.com:
  It’s taken at about the time Lopez fielded the ball; Pujols is well off the base at that point. It’s not entirely clear who was to blame, but one things is for certain: the rulebook regarding errors needs to be changed. We don’t care who gets the error, but that’s not a hit.

• Will anyone remember Pujols’s play an inning earlier?The ugly play overshadowed a daring and brilliantly executed play by Pujols in the eighth inning: With Mark Kotsay on second with a leadoff double, Pujols fielded Prado’s grounder and pegged Kotsay going to third. Pujols’s instinctive play turned out to be worth the risk; if, in the worst case, Pujols had failed to get Kotsay, the Cardinals’ WPA would’ve been 25.5%. Playing it “safe” and putting out Prado would’ve put it at 38.3%. But his success upped it to 51.7% — a risk-reward scenario of 12.8%-13.4%.
• What are the Cardinals going to do about their corner-outfielder glut? This season, including Sunday’s heroics by Brian Barton and Joe Mather, has been a reminder of that Jamesian proverb that "True shortage of talent almost never occurs at the left end of the defensive spectrum." The team has four corner outfielders — Barton (4.92), Mather (5.63), Ryan Ludwick (8.14) and Skip Schumaker (5.68)– who boast better RC27 than anyone at catcher, second base and shortstop (not counting Felipe Lopez’s 7.89 in 15 games). The point is that corner outfielders (at least average ones) are easy to find. Strong middle infielders — something that the team may want to do something about this winter — are not. Perhaps the best way for the athletic Mather to find a spot on the 2009 team would be to try his hand at second base next spring.

This entry was posted by Pip on Monday, August 25th, 2008 at 3:49 pm and is filed under 10 questions. 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.