Quotebook: Diamondbacks 4, Cardinals 2
I threw a lot of pitches early in the game, I threw a lot of pitches to get out of innings and things like that.
Ah, "things like that." Perhaps Suppan is referring to the high number of balls that he allowed the Diamondbacks to put into play, many of which fell for base hits. When your strategy is akin to that of slow-pitch softball pitchers — let batters hit the ball — some of those are going to find holes. Sad to say: Suppan’s — and the Cardinals’ — strategy is not working. Suppan’s expected FIP is now an untenable 5.08, and given that his xFIP has been rising steadily over the last four years, it’s not going to get any better. It’s time to pull the plug.
Gutierrez came on in as tough a situation as you can put him in with Pujols and the bases loaded. That’s what everybody pays to come see in this ballpark.
- A.J. Hinch
The pace of the game was not entertaining.
– Tony La Russa
Indeed, give Hinch and Gutierrez credit. In addition to Albert Pujols’s rally-killer, the pace explains why we saw so many fans on the Metrolink before the game ended. We sympathize with fans who figure three hours — not to mention nearly four — is enough time to determine a winner. But we’ll never understand those who, barring medical emergencies or family needs, leave a perfect-weather afternoon game early.
Yeah, we had some chances. We definitely didn’t create as many chances as we should have. We should have had more opportunities than we had. And the ones we had, we could have done more with those. I am not going to get into explanations.
– La Russa
There’s no need to try to explain. As we’ve noted before, runners left on base are an indication of offensive potency, rather than of ineptitude. Given some randomness in a single game, occasionally a team get what the Cardinals did Wednesday: A lot of runners on base without many runs to show for it. If we understand that scoring runs is not a function of some mythical, exceptional clutch-hitting skill but of sustained ability to avoid outs, this makes sense, inasmuch as sometimes those hits or walks come at the beginning of the inning rather than with a runner on third. But for the most part, runners on base translate to runs, and fans and writers shouldn’t get too bent out of shape over it. Leaving runners on base certainly beats the alternative of getting few runners on base.
We had a chance today to sweep, and it seemed like in any situation we could get a big hit today, we didn’t come up with it. Why, for whatever reason? I don’t know. Hopefully, when we get in this situation again, we can turn this streak around.
According to RB Fallstrom, St. Louis has won the first two games and lost the finale of a three-game series the last four chances at home, and eight times overall. That may be a case, like getting hits with runners in scoring position, simply of randomness. That is, if a team wins two-thirds of its games, sometimes those two wins will come at the beginning of a series. The more important statistic, like aggregate hitting ability in the batting with RISP argument, is that the team is winning two-thirds of its games. It also might be a sign of the team lacking a killer instinct. We’ll see if it continues in the second half.
I’ve always said I’d like to play here again.
And we would like you to, Dan. We dare say that a Haren-Wainwright-Carpenter trio for October would be pretty dominant. So, Josh Byrnes, what do you want?
If so inclined, the SABR guys could make a case for Holliday. Though I doubt that any of my SABR friends would do that.
— Bernie Miklasz
Why would Bernie doubt that? He makes a strong case for the Cardinal leftfielder himself, picking up on what we thought was the strongest argument that we used in our ESPN piece: Matt Holliday leads all NL outfielders in WAR. How would anyone make a case against him?