Is Ludwick "clutch"?

In his weekly chat Wednesday, Joe Strauss sneaked in a personal reflection about how "clutch" he found Ryan Ludwick to be as a Cardinal:

I’ll say this. Even when in a funk, Ludwick found a way to contribute in RBI situations. Coincidentally, the Cardinals have struggled badly in those situations since his departure. (Lud’ led the league in average w/RISP at the time of his trade.) The deal confused a team that was in first place at the time. When offensive help failed to arrive, it made it easier to rationalize the club’s spastic production.

Strauss and his colleagues have trotted out the "clutch" trope a lot this season, but does it even stand up on Strauss’s on terms with Ludwick? It’s true that in 2010, Ludwick has a .377 batting average with runners in scoring position and was even better with RISP and two outs, at .383. But go back a year and you’ll find that Ludwick batted only .323 with RISP and was decidedly unclutch with two outs, hitting a feeble .211. What gives? How could a guy be so awful in the clutch one year, then so money the next? The answer is simple: Anytime you split stats to yield a smaller sample, you’re going to see more variance. Further, correlation does not imply causation. Plenty of research on the subject of clutch hitting exists; w riters of all sorts — present company included — need only avail themselves of it.

Speaking of stats, Strauss came in for some deserved criticism for his proud ignorance in dismissing new ways of thinking about how to evaluate pitchers:

There increasingly appears a campaign to discredit pitcher wins as a consideration. They are considered by some as a derivative of "luck," much like RBI, in the estimation of some spreadsheet voters. Law didn’t give the vote to Lincecum. However, there is an increasingly strong smartest-guy-in-the-room element that frowns on more traditional numbers now assigned the pejorative "peripherals." Personally, I thought Wainwright the NL’s best pitcher in 2009 only to later be informed he was merely "luckier" than Lincecum. Who’da thunk?

It’s particularly rich that Strauss strikes a "smartest-guy-in-the-room" attitude while petulantly complaining about the type and dissing "spreadsheet voters." We guess the irony is lost on him. Or perhaps he’s so smart that he is above irony.

Meanwhile, the chief cause of Strauss’s insecurity, Keith Law, addresses the win stat in a calm, well-reasoned article (subscription required) that begins:

More than a century ago, it’s true the starting pitcher had more impact on whether or not his team won a game, and that may be why the "win" statistic for a pitcher was invented in the first place. When my good friend Old Hoss Radbourn started 73 games and completed all of them in 1884, perhaps his total of 59 wins meant something, since he threw every pitch, took nearly 300 turns at the plate, and might have even slipped something into the other teams’ Gatorade.

Will Strauss take the time to read it and open his mind, or will he continue to demagogue the issue in an effort to keep his followers ignorant and worshipful?

A meaningful milestone
It’s easy to criticize some stats for being meaningless, so we’ll offer up some stats that we think do have meaning, such as total bases. TBs has the additional benefit of being easy to understand — trust us, we ran it by our seven-year-old daughter, who was able to comprehend it. So as others celebrate Albert Pujols’s 10th 100+ RBI season, we commend him for his frabjous feat of 10 seasons of 300 or more total bases, which makes him only the eighth in history to do so:

We should remember that both Pujols and Barry Bonds played in the steroid era. But as long as we’re overlooking that small fact, we may as well celebrate using some worthwhile stats.

Molina out, Anderson in?
The season of slow-moving Yadier Molina has ground to a halt, according to Derrick Goold:

So Molina, in all probability, won’t be playing any more this season after he underwent an MRI on his right knee Thursday in St. Louis.

With the Cardinals out of playoff contention, Molina’s shutdown is a perfect opportunity to see what directionless prospect Bryan Anderson can do. Rather than platoon him with Matt Pagnozzi, whom the club probably doesn’t need to see perform on the big-league stage, seeing as he is likely destined for backup status next year, Anderson should get the rest of the starts this year. The team has something to gain — a possible showcase of his talents — and nothing to lose, except a few more games.

Why wait to dump Lopez?
That’s a question that Bernie Miklasz and others have asked. It’s really a simple answer, in our opinion: Hope and expectation that he could produce. Given Lopez’s career numbers and 2009 season, it was reasonable that he would regress to his norms. Most people recognize the futility of arbitrary data points — excepting Miklasz, who has a bad habit of slicing time periods to fit his hypotheses — so it was right to wait for Lopez to produce. The problem was that, whether due to injury or personal issues, he never did. If the behavioral problems were that much of a concern, the the team wouldn’t have signed him in the first place. Players aren’t automatons, so just because the Flip experiment didn’t work doesn’t mean it was a bad experiment.

Fish-on-fish violence
Carp allows slam; Cards blanked by Fish — MLB.com

Metaphor alert
Cards gain steam on Reds by bashing Friars — MLB.com

His back was so bad it had its own body parts with injuries
Padres’ Hairston back on DL with leg injury — AP

Never scratch with a migraine
Twins’ Hardy scratched with migraine — AP

"I remember that guy!"
RHP Brackman recalled by Yankees — AP

Bottom stories of the day

• Cards score. . . but so do Bucs — Stltoday.com
• Cardinals field familiar lineup today — Stltoday.com
• Jack Clark pulls out as FSM analyst — Stltoday.com

Of Stars and Scrubs
Baseball Prospectus’s Eric Seidman weighed in on the Cards’ collapse this week, explaining that "The Cardinals are widely considered to have a stars and scrubs roster." He laments that "Both Pujols and Holliday are legitimately great and Rasmus is looking more like an offensive force every day, but aside from those three, nothing in the lineup stands out." This sounds like an accurate and useful analysis, but on second glance, is it really that unique of a situation? Depending on the definition, "Stars and scrubs" could describe just about any team except the Yankees. For mid-to-small-market clubs like the Cardinals, "stars and scrubs" is more like a recipe for success rather than a disaster waiting to happen, as Seidman infers. Don’t believe us? How would you describe the main players on the 2006 championship team?

Was the team that left spring training any worse than that club? The reality is that the Cardinal "scrubs" didn’t play to their expectations, which were certainly above replacement level, whether because of injury, bad "luck" or simply a down year. It may not have been a "perfect storm," but the team had several different elements come together to sink their season. The original composition of the team wasn’t one of them.

This entry was posted by Pip on Friday, September 24th, 2010 at 4:11 pm and is filed under around the horn. 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.