What’s the deal with blown saves? Erstwhile St. Louis Cardinals closer Ryan Franklin recently blew up on the mound for the fourth time this season, then blew up at fans for booing him. In response, people flamed him on the radio and internet. All this over a few blown saves.

Don’t get us wrong, we don’t particularly like blown saves, either. But blown saves are, if you will, overblown. Don’t believe it? The Cardinals, whose relievers shut out the Braves for four innings in their 5-3 win Friday night, lead the National League Central with a 15-11 record. They also lead the league in blown saves.

The reality is that blown saves don’t really negatively correlate with winning percentage. That doesn’t mean they’re good, but it probably means that they’re not an indication that the Mayan apocalypse is upon us. This makes the certain freak out over every last one of them a little tiring. The preoccupation also tends to crowd out other aspects of the game that matter as much or more.

Happily, St. Louis fans will be spared any headlines Saturday about which closer du jour coughed up the lead Friday night. But partisans in Atlanta (Craig Kimbrel), Minnesota (Alex Burnett) and Boston (Bobby Jenks) will be stark-raving mad about their relievers’ blown saves after Friday night. And that doesn’t even include Detroit’s Joaquin Benoit, because in a non-save situation — so he couldn’t get a blown save — he surrendered a walk-off grand slam to Carlos Santana.

All of this is part of the problem. Like its ugly brother, the save, the blown save is a blunt object wielded to bash relievers into easily identified goats.

Consider these weird facts:

• A pitcher who enters a tie game and gives up the lead can’t get a blown save.
• A pitcher who enters with a four-run lead and gives up the lead can’t get a blown save.
• A pitcher can get a blown save if the go-ahead run scores on fielding errors.
• A pitcher who blows a save can also get the win.
• A pitcher can be charged with a blown save even though a run may not even be charged to him.

A blown save is merely a half-inning sample of a ballgame. That means that a team has at least 17 other half-innings in which to win any particular game. What do you call it when the starting pitcher allows a run in the fourth inning with a 7-4 lead? Or a sixth-inning reliever who comes into the game down 3-2 but allows a run to increase his team’s deficit? We don’t call it anything, of course.

The upside-down world of the blown save was on display during the Cardinals’ mid-week series in Houston. The team’s most dominant reliever, Eduardo Sanchez, pitched notably worse than Mitchell Boggs, the pitcher expected to replace Franklin in the closer’s gig. Yet Boggs was saddled with the scarlet letters “BS,” while Sanchez wore an “S” like he was Superman. To top it off, Fernando Salas “earned” a save Thursday night by throwing a wild pitch (on which the inning ended with a runner tagged out trying to score), then pitching one inning with a four-run lead. “Hey, nice work, Fernando Salas,” quipped broadcaster Dan McLaughlin, we hope mockingly.

It’s no surprise that Franklin, though successful in the past, has had a hard time closing games. It’s because he has had a hard time getting hitters out, relying as heavily as he does on defense and the vagaries of “luck” (with career rates of 4.9 K/9 and 2.7 BB/9, he has one of the highest rates of balls put into play). Regardless of the situation: He has allowed at least one baserunner in every game in which he has pitched this year.

Rather than focus on the non-qualitative blown save, let’s instead take a smarter look at relief pitchers. Until someone determines that saves are a special, repeatable skill — rather than simply a function of opportunities and how good a reliever is in any context — let’s just check out strikeout and walk rates, for starters.

For example, Sanchez entered Friday’s game with 14 strikeouts and one walk in eight innings, and in six minor-league seasons, the 22-year-old posted 9.9 K/9. With dominance like that, he’s going to succeed in relief, whether he enters with a four-run lead, in a tie game or down one run. Sure, he’ll blow a save every now and then, but so does Mariano Rivera

It’s a fact that the top two career leaders in blown saves — Goose Gossage (112) and Rollie Fingers (109) – are in the Hall of Fame. Almost always, more variables explain a team’s lost than a single hapless pitcher’s inability to obtain three outs on a particular night, so try not to attach too much significance to the Blown Save in isolation.

[This story was originally posted at ESPN SweetSpot.]

Tomorrow ESPN will feature the most-pleasant surprises for each team during April. For the Cardinals, we picked Kyle Lohse.

When the Cardinals lost ace Adam Wainwright for the season, the pressure suddenly shifted to their starting rotation. In particular, the spotlight turned to Lohse, the righty who made only 40 starts in the two seasons since signing a hefty 4-year, $41 million contract extension. Given that from 2009-10 his ERA was indistinguishable from his strikeout rate (though, to be fair, his expected FIP was much lower), expectations were tempered. So his 2011 campaign thus far — five Wainwright-like starts with an ERA of 1.64 — has been the most pleasant surprise for the Cardinals. He is inducing groundballs like never before (48.6%) and limiting self-inflicted damage with a walk rate (1.17 BB/9) that Cliff Lee would be proud of. And he’s currently tied for fourth in the NL in WAR among pitchers.

Will he continue? The odds say no. His adjusted ZiPS ERA projection for the rest of the year is 4.46. His success is somewhat illusory, based as it is largely on a .202 BABIP — 100 points lower than his career average — despite a line-drive rate (21.5%) that is inline with his career rate (20.9%). And his career-high groundball rate notwithstanding, his HR/FB rate (3.1%) is bound to climb. But through the first month of the season, he is a big reason — the fourth-biggest by WAR — that the Cardinals are in first place. And for him to have taken, even if temporarily, Wainwright’s spot among the league’s best pitchers — Halladay, Johnson, Hamels, Lincecum — is the biggest and most-pleasant surprise of all.

[Note: Agree, disagree? Please vote in the accompanying poll.]

In the weekend series against the Reds, the Cardinals attempted a hit-and-run three times. None succeeded. What happened?

First, let’s review the game situation for each.

Some observations:

• In all three games, the Cardinals either had a lead or were tied.
• In all three games, the attempts were made relatively early in the game.
• In the first two attempts, the Cardinal batter had a platoon advantage.
• In the first two attempts, the odds of succeeding on missed strike were very low (Molina, Berkman running).

For a hit-and-run to succeed, a team has to have either a very good baserunner, a very good contact hitter or preferably both. As noted, the baserunners in the first two attempts were slow; Ryan Theriot, the runner in the third attempt, has a good-enough stolen-base success rate of 74%. So what about the hitters?

The Cardinals, perhaps interestingly, lead the National League in contact rate so far. (They also were tied for best in the league last year.) But the team stats don’t matter for any particular hit-and-run; what matters is the contact rate of the batter. Using career contact rates, here’s how the 2011 team stacks up:

So while the Cardinals didn’t have their speediest guys on the bases, they at least had a couple of their best contact men batting. The platoon advantage is germane here because hitters generally hit better in such situations. Indeed, we can deduce that Molina has an even better contact rate against lefties, because he strikes out less against them: K% of 8.3%, vs. 9.9% against RHP. Same with the left-handed Descalso (20.0% vs. LHP; 18.3% vs. RHP).

Another relevant factor is the count. Depending on the pitcher’s predilection and ability to throw strikes in certain counts, the batter may see a pitch inside the zone. Although for the most part, hitters who make good contact on pitches inside the zone also tend to make good contact on pitches outside the zone, some batters — like Molina and Nick Punto — are better “bad-ball” hitters, relative to their ability to hit balls in the zone. Others — like Pujols and Colby Rasmus — are relatively bad “bad-ball” hitters:

With three-ball counts in the latter two attempts, Molina and Pujols were probably expecting strikes. And they got them: Molina missed a low fastball down the middle, and Pujols waved at a changeup under his hands.

Sometimes the hit-and-run pays off, sometimes it doesn’t. The strategy is occasionally worth it, regardless of the outcome (e.g., hit-and-running with Molina, a notorious double-play candidate). If Tony La Russa is going to employ it, he at least improved his odds with some adept contact hitters last weekend.

After starting the season anemically, the Cardinal offense has recently been a beacon of health. Their cadaverous batsmen averaged a mere 2.6 runs per game in their first eight games; they’re now flush with tallies, averaging 8.4 over their last eight. Have they suddenly remembered how to hit, were they shamed into action by a blog post or is something else going on?

As with much in baseball, small samples tend to distort things, in positive and negative ways. Couple that with the idea that some of what happens in baseball is the result of “luck,” and it’s not unthinkable that a team would have a couple of back-to-back eight-game runs that make it seem like two different ball clubs were playing. Such is the case with the Cardinals, who were never as bad as they seemed as they started 2-6, nor as good as they’ve been going 6-2 recently.

Their batting average on balls in play explains a lot of the change in fortune. Over the first eight games, the Cardinals had a BABIP of .252. Over the last eight? .396. For those short stretches, the rates are, respectively, abnormally low and abnormally high. But over the season so far – still far too small a sample – it’s a more-reasonable .328 – the same as the division-leading Reds and .32 points higher than the team finished in 2010.

BABIP is partly a function of line-drive rate. Indeed, the Cardinals are hitting the ball squarely now, with a LD% of 19.0, according to Baseball-Reference.com. Looking at the two halves of the team’s season start, we might be able to tell whether hitters did start making better contact, whether because they’re “seeing the ball better” or for whatever reason. But the team’s line-drive rate for the eight-game periods is nearly identical at 16.1% for the first eight games and 16.2% for the second eight (presumably the discrepancy between the 19% and 16% is due to some inconsistencies in the way batted balls are counted). So that indicates that the Cardinals were simply getting “unlucky” to start, and their luck changed recently, since “luck” is one of the remaining variables in BABIP (and we can assume that they didn’t suddenly start running faster).

No doubt, the recent uptick in scoring – and the attendant increase in wins – has been reassuring. It’s likely that the Cardinals won’t keep it up, though – but neither will they finish the year as the feeble hitters that they began as.

With the sky above the Cardinals falling, it’s natural that a few Chicken Littles are worried that Albert Pujols is succumbing to the effects of, the hypotheses alternatingly go, pressure from the team’s slow start, his unresolved contract, his elbow, the effects of age or the fact that the Cardinals haven’t yet signed his two sons (okay, we made the last one up). And to be sure, his performance after eight games isn’t very Karl FarvmanAlbert Pujols-like: .167 AVG, .257 OBP, .267 SLG. But as a few have noted, slumps happen, and slumps that occur at the beginning of the season stand out because they don’t yet have the offsetting effects of regression.

Most would agree that Pujols had a typically awesome campaign in 2010, in which he hit 42 home runs and boasted an OBP of .414. Did he ever go through the kind of slump that he’s experiencing to begin 2011? Of course he did — many times. The following is a list of eight-game periods during 2010 in which Pujols performed even worse, actually (less than a .257 OBP):

He did have a bad last part of April, but because he sprang out of the gate with a .518 OBP in his first eight games (including four hits on Opening Day), his stats did look quite as bad as they do in this April’s slump.

Now it could be that Pujols won’t repeat his 2010 season; we’ve argued in the past that he probably won’t. But that doesn’t mean that he suddenly feels all sorts of pressure, etc., and is somehow a compromised player. He’s merely going through a slump — just like he did many times last year.