It was bad enough that the Cardinals had to play the role of party coordinator for the Cubs’ division-clinching celebration Saturday, but then they couldn’t even pull off a win against the Iowa Cubs on Sunday. To make matters worse, after Braden Looper’s excellent performance yesterday afternoon, the headline on the team’s MLB.com wrapup proclaims "Looper outpitched in Cardinals’ loss." And so the slow death of the Cardinals’ 2008 campaign lingers on.

First, Looper was outpitched in the same way that a team whose opponent scores five unearned runs on two hits is "ouhit." For starters (pun intended), Looper outpitched Ryan Dempster in FIGS, 69-58, striking out six (to Dempster’s one) and walking only one. And Looper wasn’t the only Cardinal pitcher to outperform his Cub counterpart: In each game of the series, the Cardinals had a better start:

In fact, by FIGS, Looper had the best start of the entire series (and the Cardinals’ three starters all had better starts than the Cubs’ — little did we know just how tough it would be for El Toro to follow up his no-hitter). If you’re not sold on FIGS (though we don’t know why you wouldn’t be), we can derive the pitchers’ respective tRA values, which use not only K, BB and HR, but also hit by a pitches, line drives, ground balls, outfield flies and popups (though they are only arguably a pitcher’s responsibility). In this, it’s true that Looper wasn’t quite as good, allowing 3.79 runs (per nine innings) to Dempster’s 3.69. Technically, then, Looper was outpitched, but it was hardly significant enough to devote a headline to (especially given that, considering the brevity of their outings, the tRA difference was even less). And we’ll bet a sawbuck that no one associated with the story took the time to look into tRAs. Furthermore, Looper had only a .583 Defensive-Efficiency Rate behind him; Dempster a .731. It wouldn’t be so bad in isolation, but the previous day’s headline — "Pineiro can’t keep Cubs from clinching" — also casts a Cardinal pitcher in a negative light, despite the numbers. We’re not sure who’s doing the copy editing for MLB.com, but the gaffe is particularly ironic on an article that begins "Statistics can be twisted, tormented and manipulated in any number of ways." Indeed, the same might be said of headlines of the mainstream media.

While we’re on the subject of the MLB wrapup, the normally reliable Matthew Leach writes:

The defeat left Looper with a 12-14 record on the year and only one start remaining. A year after he was held out of his final start to preserve an even-money record, he pitched much better but will have a worse mark to show for it. A won-lost record is hardly a fair way to evaluate a pitcher, but that doesn’t mean a losing record is fun to carry into the winter.

So while "a won-lost record is hardly a fair way to evaluate a pitcher," that’s not going to stop Leach from writing about and making an issue out of it. In fairness, we should note that Leach isn’t the only one picking up on the Looper Losses trope: Joe Strauss’s dispatch for the same game begins "Starter goes to 0-3 this season vs. Cubs and is assured of a losing record." The headline? "Looper feels frustration as his losses mount." We feel frustration as the stories predicated on dubious stats mount. For the record, Looper has been the Cardinals’ most and the league’s seventh-most "unlucky" pitcher in 2008 with a -4.46 Luck value (but he’s got a long way to go to match Anthony Reyes’s -8.45 last year).

"It’s not fair," accoding to Tony La Russa. He may simply be talking anecdotally about some bad breaks the team has gotten recently. But the numbers bear it out: In addition to the several injuries (or perhaps because of?), the team’s Defensive-Efficiency Rate has plummeted. For the first five months of the season, the Cardinals had a .696 DER; for September, it’s .674. The season for the Cardinals and their fans has been long enough. Can’t we just allow them to die with dignity?

This entry was posted by Pip on Monday, September 22nd, 2008 at 3:56 pm and is filed under analysis. 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.