[Note: The following is Part 3 of the United Cardinal Bloggers' progressive blog for the May 29 Cubs-Cardinals game. This post covers the second inning; Bill Ivie at Baseball Digest covered the first inning, and Mike Metzger at Stan Musial's Stance covered the third inning. For links to all innings, please visit the UCB site.]

With Carlos Silva throwing a lot of strikes — 11 of 17 pitches in the first inning and an MLB-leading 70.3% first-pitch strike rate (league average is around 59%) — Matt Holliday went up looking to hit and ripped a single to right field on the second pitch of his at-bat, a sinker. One of only five Cardinals with experience with Silva, the Cardinal left fielder faced Silva twice in a game in Seattle last year, striking out swinging on a slider and knocking a ground-ball single on a four-seam fastball.

Colby Rasmus also went up pumping, swinging through a sinker on the outside edge of the plate then watching a near-replica strike two call. After a ball high and away, Rasmus took pitch two inches off the plate for a horrible third-strike call by home-plate ump Hunter Wendelstedt. Silva starts to pick up confidence: All sinkers, all away to Rasmus.

To David Freese, Silva mixed it up a bit with a first-pitch changeup, with which he K’ed Ludwick in the first. Then we got some explanation for the seemingly resurgent pitcher’s early 2010 success: Cub Centerfielder Marlon Byrd makes a strong defensive play to snag Freese’s dying liner. Silva’s BABIP so far is a better-than-average .281 — his career norm is .312 — so we’re skeptical that people will be touting his praises as they are now come the end of the year. For Byrd’s part, though the Fox announcers quote Bob Brenly as saying Byrd is second-best only to Andruw Jones at coming in on balls from center, he has a career -2.7 UZR/150 (Ultimate Zone Rating Runs Above Average per 150 Defensive Games) in centerfield and only 1.0 UZR/150 in the outfield generally.

That brought up Yadier Molina, whom we were a bit surprised got the middle-game start over Jason La Rue, who has two home runs in 10 PAs against Silva. (La Runcan likely preferred the steady Molina for Adam Ottavino’s debut.) With Holliday festering on first, Silva worked Molina outside and in, alternatingly getting foul balls on the outer half and busting him on the hands. On pitch six, is Molina set up to go away? Yes, and Molina fouled it off. Sure enough, Silva came back inside on pitch seven with a nasty slider for a called strike three, right on the black. Molina asked for a clarification from Wendelstedt, who replied that it "touched the plate."

After throwing all fastballs — fast,yes, but uncontrolled — in the first, Ottavino unveiled his slider to Byrd, leading off the Cubs’ half, and induced him into a groundout to second.

Mike Fontenot, after fouling off a fastball, didn’t get fooled by Ottavino’s changeup up in the zone and tripled into the gap. But the Cardinal rookie found the strike zone again with his fastball and, with the infield playing in on Starlin Castro, he gets another grounder to second.

That brought up Koyie Hill, whom, with the pitcher on deck, Ottavino didn’t need to give anything too meaty. But he did, and got out of the inning, like his counterpart Silva and Alfred P. Doolittle, with a little bit of luck, as Hill lined out to Rasmus.

The big Cubs series starts today, so in the spirit of friendly competition, we’re doing a joint preview with Joe Aiello of the Cubbie blog View From The Bleachers. Joe invited us to provide some notes on the Cardinals to share with the Cub faithful — and with all the losing their team has done over the years, it takes a lot of faith indeed! — in the following categories. (Joe’s Cub preview follows ours.)

Who’s Hot / Who’s Not
Hot: David Freese has been the team’s most consistent offensive catalyst over the last month with an OBP of .389 and a SLG of .463. Felipe Lopez has rocked opposing pitching in nine games since returning from the DL (.385/.515).

Not: Slick-fielding shortstop Brendan Ryan has lost playing time to Lopez due to flakiness in the field and at the plate. Colby Rasmus started strong but his initial good luck has caught up to him (.306/.329 in May).

Team Drama
Tony La Russa’s lineup tinkering was an exercise in futility and ultimately contribued to and culminated in a tiff between Albert Pujols and the manager last Friday when the two exchanged heated words (Pujols has been back in his customary #3 slot ever since).

Injuries to 40% of the starting rotation have pressed prospects PJ Walters and Adam Ottavino into action. The loss of Brad Penny hurts, but the Cardinals won’t see much dropoff in performance between Lohse and either of the AAA callups. Ottavino, who will face the Cubs Saturday, was the team’s first-round pick in the 2006 draft but has stalled in his last couple of years in the minors, with a 4.95 FIP in 2008 and 4.55 FIP in 2009.

Interesting Nuggets
Although Jason Heyward has received all the Rookie-of-the-Year love, the Cardinals’ David Freese is third among all NL third basemen and second among rookies to Heyward (1.9) in Wins Above Replacement (WAR), with 1.6. Fellow Cardinal Jaime Garcia leads all rookie pitchers with 1.4.

Trash Talk
The Cubs are so replaceable, they can’t even spell WAR.

From Joe Aiello:

If ever there was a chance for us to grab some ground on the Cardinals, this series is it. Both Kyle Loshe and Brad Penny have been placed on the DL for the redbirds, leaving them turning to a AAA pitcher in game two of the series against a hated rival. We’ve also been winning some games, albeit barely, against some good teams since the rough patch that ended with a series loss to the Pirates. Derrek Lee is slowly coming out of his slump, hitting the Dodgers hard all series and could be ready to help contribute to some wins.

The strangest issue around this team was the injury news yesterday. Carlos Zambrano was taken to the hospital with what they thought was appendicitis (turned out to be bad gas from the leftovers he ate in the clubhouse fridge – J/K). Word is that he’s available today out of the pen as he preps for what appears to be a start against Pittsburgh next series.

The other injury issue was Jeff Baker, who lost vision in one of his eyes. He’s been examined and we’ll know more soon. Maybe it’s just me, but we seem to have some weird injuries. Kerry Wood slipped in the hot tub. Felix Pie twisted his testicle (God only knows how). Mark DeRosa had irregular heartbeat issues. Sammy Sosa spazed out his back after he sneezed. Jose Cardenal had his eyelids swollen shut when he woke up one morning. Zambrano had a case of internet elbow. This is just another weird one. Let’s hope Baker is OK, because all I can think of is what happened to Kirby Puckett and his gradual degeneration that led to virtual blindness.

This should be a series we’re capable of winning if we take care of business in game two and squeak out a win against one of the birds good pitchers in game one or three.

Wednesday night’s starters, Jaime Garcia and Kevin Correia, combined for 10 walks, and yet neither allowed a run. At first glance, it seems like a mere oddity. But we didn’t realize how uncommon it is. According to Baseball-reference.com, only 28 other games (since 1952 or so) have had both starters deal at least four walks each and not allow a run:

Other notes:

• The Cardinals continue to run themselves out of scoring opportunities: In the first, their leadoff man was caught stealing and a runner was out at home to end the inning. Later, they killed a potential winning rally — first and third, no outs — with some of the worst baserunning of the season. For all of their other talents, this is a bad baserunning team. We first noted their lack of baserunning prowess nearly a month ago, when they were third-worst in baseball with a -4.3 EqBRR. The Cardinals are now 29th in MLB with -7.5 Equivalent Base Running Runs. Our eyes do not deceive us.
• Through two innings, El Gato had a strikeout, a walk, a wild pitch and a balk.
• Geoff Young of Ducksnorts had some kind words about a former Padre. Here was our exchange in the ESPN Baseball Tonight Live blog:
  

  Geoff: I’m glad to see Freese doing well in St. Louis. I always root for guys I saw play in the minors. Just wish we’d gotten something remotely useful in return.
  Fungoes: That’s gracious of you, Geoff. At the time, though, he wasn’t much more than a courtesy player in the Edmonds deal, was he?
  Geoff: No, Freese was legit. He was just blocked by Kouz and Headley. I am pretty sure Edmonds was the courtesy player in that deal.

• Speaking of Edmonds, with the Padres’ affinity for over-the-hill Cardinal centerfielders, we figure they’ll be interested in Colby Rasmus in about 15 years.
• Albert Pujols really isn’t that far off his regular self. His OBP (.420) is off slightly, and his power decline ("only" .533 SLG compared to career .625) may be due to a way-low 12.1% HR/FB rate, which will regress.
• Sorry, Matt Holliday: The 3-0 called strike in the fifth inning was indeed a courtesy call, but the 3-1 pitch was on the black.
• Entering last night’s game, Flip Lopez was third among MLB shortstops in wOBA (min. 80 PAs). He walked twice and singled last night — he’s an on-base machine!
• Rob Neyer noted that the Padres’ bullpen has been tremendous this spring. We seem to recall that their bullpen is always good. Indeed: The Padres relief corps is #1 in xFIP in MLB this year, was #4 in 2009, #15 in 2008, #1 in 2007, #3 in 2006, #1 in 2005.
• The overmanager La Russa let his righty — McClellan, in his second inning of work — pitch to the lefty Stairs. Trever Miller, not used, has struck out Stairs in all three appearances. It was curious that TLR would burn his top LOOGy on, essentially, Venable, rather than use him for Adrian Gonzalez or, of course, Stairs.
• We wondered along with Neyer whether any of the St. Louis writers were brave enough to press La Russa on it after the game. They don’t have any problem tweeting cheap shots at sabermetrics, but when it comes to confronting TLR, we wonder whether they have the courage of their parochial convictions.
• Heath Bell wasn’t going to let the upstart Rasmus repeat his ninth-inning heroics from last Aug. 16 (walkoff two-run home run).
• Bell simply gave Ludwick too many pitches in the strike zone. All five pitches were in the zone, and he might’ve gotten Ludwick, who sometimes expands his zone, to chase a pitch away.
• Speaking of former Cardinals who’ve go on to don the yellow and brown orange and blue grey, David Eckstein is the Padres’ shortest player, tied with five others who were 5′7”: Bip Roberts, Callix Crabbe, Doug Dascenzo, Jarvis Brown, Joey Cora.
• In case you were scoring at home, the foul sacrifice fly bunt in the ninth inning went, in retrosheet and MLB notation, 5/BP5F.1-2 (caught by 3B, Bunt Pop Foul, runner on first moves to 2nd). We think.
• Colby Rasmus’s stolen base attempt in the 11th was actually a worthwhile gamble.
• Geoff’s comment after the 11th-inning double play: "Thank you very much. Just when I thought the baserunning couldn’t get worse… it kicks into overdrive." That’s not the kind of play that wins games in May — and certainly not in October.
• Cardinals’ win expectancy went from around 82% to 44% in one play.
• Another zinger from Geoff: "Yeah, Mujica’s got a rubber arm… sometimes a rubber neck, too."
• Cardinal pitching allowed eight fly balls, so Hairston’s home run wasn’t necessarily bad luck, given the roughly 9.5% HR/FB rate for the league. More fly balls leads to more home runs. Comparatively, the Padres allowed only four.
• Holliday "led" all players with six outs made.
• Even very good teams go dry for periods. We grant that the strikeouts and bad baserunning are ugly baseball. The Cardinals have too much talent to continue like that, though. Certainly,they’re not helping themselves by running into outs and La Russa’s tinkering may not be a net positive. We think that merely keeping those baserunners around will lead to runs. See, they know how to get on base, they just don’t know how to stay on base, and that’s really the most important part of scoring runs, the staying on base. Anybody can just get on base.

The Cardinals struck out seven times against Jon Garland Tuesday as the Padres shut them out in San Diego. The first inning foreshadowed the offensive anemia, as the club loaded the bases with one out then watched helplessly as the next two batters failed to even put the ball in play.

If it seems like the Cardinals are striking out more often this year, it’s because they actually are. Their 21.4% strikeout rate is sixth-highest in the league and the highest for a Cardinal club since 2000 (curiously, the bookends correspond with the end of Mark McGwire’s playing career and beginning of his coaching career). As a traditionalist, we chafe at so many strikeouts, which seem to represent the worst and ugliest in hitting. And yet as a saberist, we’re bound to reassess our conventionally held beliefs in the light of additional evidence. Which leads to the question: Is the Cardinals’ high strikeout rate really cause for concern? Let’s look at the team’s strikeout rate and wOBA since 2000:

Yes, the team’s wOBA is way down this year (so far, at least). But is it really due to the inclined strikeout rate? That may have something to do with it, but based on the recent past, we certainly can’t attribute it in any significant way: If more strikeouts were bad for a team’s offense, we would expect to see a negative correlation between K rate and wOBA. Instead, a positive correlation (.27) exists, at least in this limited set of data. We can’t conclude that a higher strikeout rate means higher wOBA, but it’s even harder to say it means a lower wOBA.

So while it may make for bad-looking baseball — we’re still going to groan a bit when Colby Rasmus strikes out when all the team needs is a fly ball — strikeouts aren’t as bad as they look, and may, if anything, indicate something good about a team’s offense. To paraphrase that great thinker Cosmo Kramer, we may have to take it, but we don’t have to like it.

In the Cardinals’ 9-5 win Friday over the Angels, Brad Penny’s early departure invoked the rarely used Rule 10.17b, otherwise known as the one time when the pitching win is awarded at the official scorer’s discretion rather than simply by deign of who the pitcher of record was when the winning team scored its ultimate winning run. Regular readers know that this blog has no love lost for pitcher wins and losses, but we’d like to dwell not on them as statistics but more on how they occur in this curious occasion when the scorer is momentarily freed from the shackles that otherwise bind him to the antiquated practice of attaching wins and losses to pitchers. Let’s review the actual rulebook for Rule 10.17b:

(b) If the pitcher whose team assumes a lead while such pitcher is in the game, or during the inning on offense in which such pitcher is removed from the game, and does not relinquish such lead, is a starting pitcher who has not completed
(1) five innings of a game that lasts six or more innings on defense, or
(2) four innings of a game that lasts five innings on defense,
then the official scorer shall credit as the winning pitcher the relief pitcher, if there is only one relief pitcher, or the relief pitcher who, in the official scorer’s judgment was the most effective, if there is more than one relief pitcher.

Rule 10.17(b) Comment: It is the intent of Rule 10.17(b) that a relief pitcher pitch at least one complete inning or pitch when a crucial out is made, within the context of the game (including the score), in order to be credited as the winning pitcher. If the first relief pitcher pitches effectively, the official scorer should not presumptively credit that pitcher with the win, because the rule requires that the win be credited to the pitcher who was the most effective, and a subsequent relief pitcher may have been most effective. The official scorer, in determining which relief pitcher was the most effective, should consider the number of runs, earned runs and base runners given up by each relief pitcher and the context of the game at the time of each relief pitcher’s appearance. If two or more relief pitchers were similarly effective, the official scorer should give the presumption to the earlier pitcher as the winning pitcher.

Lest the scorer get too cheeky, section c clarifies things further:

(c) The official scorer shall not credit as the winning pitcher a relief pitcher who is ineffective in a brief appearance, when at least one succeeding relief pitcher pitches effectively in helping his team maintain its lead. In such a case, the official scorer shall credit as the winning pitcher the succeeding relief pitcher who was most effective, in the judgment of the official scorer.

Rule 10.17(c) Comment: The official scorer generally should, but is not required to, consider the appearance of a relief pitcher to be ineffective and brief if such relief pitcher pitches less than one inning and allows two or more earned runs to score (even if such runs are charged to a previous pitcher). Rule 10.17(b) Comment provides guidance on choosing the winning pitcher from among several succeeding relief pitchers.

In the game Friday, five Cardinal pitchers relieved. Of them, Jason Motte received the win. Win-probability added is a useful (if incomplete) statistic by which one can judge "the most effective" reliever. After all, it essentially measures what pitcher wins are trying to: how much during the pitcher’s time in the game did his team increase (or decrease) its chance of winning (it suffers from the same fatal flaw as wins because it attributes a team’s offensive production to the pitcher).

Let’s review the WPA for the relievers from Friday night then:

If we’re using WPA to award the win, Motte was properly granted the W. (We mentioned this to the official scorer after the game, to which he replied, "Mitchell Boggs’s mom just called and wants to talk to you.") So how often does the "right" man get rewarded? Let’s review some Cardinal pitchers since 2003 who were awarded wins , their WPAs and the pitchers who had the highest WPA:

So the official scorer has chosen wisely more than half of time over the last few years, and we might charitably say a clear majority of the time if we include those cases in which the WPA difference was fairly negligible. In the 5/7/06 and 9/18/2004 games, the starting pitchers (Sidney Ponson and Chris Carpenter, respectively) actually had the most WPA but were of course precluded from the decision (through no fault of the scorer, of course).

On the other hand, a most egregious misapplication of scorer power occurred in the doling out of decisions for the 7/28/04 game. Jason Isringhausen had a much higher WPA than Eldred, who was credited with the win. The catch was that Izzy qualified for and earned the save. That scenario raises an interesting dilemma for an OS: Can a reliever who normally qualifies for a save in that situation be awarded the win instead? The rule for getting a save merely specifies that the pitcher cannot be the winning pitcher, but rule 10.17b doesn’t appear to preclude such a pitcher from the win. In this day in which Saves are as valued (and as repugnant) as wins — probably even moreso for relievers — to pull off such a move a scorer would need some courage — and perhaps a bodyguard. The player’s mother wouldn’t be the only person he’d hear from.