His stuff was sharper and crisper than it had been in the other starts. The firmness of his pitches. He was throwing 4 to 5 (mph) harder than we’d seen him before. This was the best we had seen him this year.

– Troy Glaus on Ian Snell

It feels good to have my velocity back and not getting scared away from hitters. I challenged all of them, no matter who it was.

– Ian Snell

In a bit of badly timed regression to the mean, the “good” Ian Snell finally showed up against the Cardinals, setting them down in a disheartening loss Tuesday night. In his fifth start this season against St. Louis (the most of any pitcher), Snell returned to his old form, striking out almost a third of the batters he faced (eight of 26) for a dazzling 73 FIGS.

How did he do it? The one problem Snell had this season has been walks (he’s got a very good HR/G rate of 0.86), with a 4.5 BB/G rate. He gave only one free pass (to Skip Schumaker), aided by 12% swinging strikes (compared to only 7% for Braden Looper, who pitched a good game in his own right with a 59 FIGS).

So is Glaus’s claim that Snell was "throwing 4 to 5 (mph) harder" true? Let’s look at his season numbers from Fangraphs, then the Gameday data from last night’s affair:

So Glaus may have been exaggerating a bit, but the point is made: Snell was pumping an extra two MPH on his hard stuff Tuesday night. As for Snell’s comment about challenging everyone, he certainly appeared to have done that. But he also seemed that he challenged some hitters more than others, namely Pujols and Glaus.

Snell was bringing it against the Cardinal lineup, and he brought a little bit more when he faced down Pujols (including one strikeout) and Glaus (two strikeouts), at least on his fastballs. His sliders to the Cardinal sluggers, it would appear, had a little more taken off.

As dispiriting as the loss was, it’s important to keep it in perspective: Yes, it was the Pirates, but it was their best pitcher (who happens to be one of the best pitchers in the league when healthy). The Cardinals had been ahead of the curve in Snell’s previous outings against them this year (9.00 ERA, 4.74 BB/9), so it shouldn’t be too worrisome that he eventually had a good game. Now if the Cardinal bats can’t do anything with tonight’s starter Jason Davis (though Davis’s 4.55 lifetime FIP is almost the same as Snell’s of 4.50), it may be time to be concerned.

We were looking for a huge lift from him, and so far we’ve gotten it. So this is definitely not good news to see him leave the game. Maybe he’ll catch a break, and we’ll catch a break.

– Tony La Russa on Chris Carpenter

Carpenter had another ho-hum outing, striking out two and walking two of the 22 batters he faced, while keeping the ball in the park (under decidedly easier conditions — a 7-mph wind in from center — than the day before) for a 57 FIGS. As for the injury, let’s see a show of hands of all those fans who loved the Carpenter contract extension when it happened. A year and a half later, how do you feel?

He’s a good pitcher, first time we’ve seen him this year. There’s a reason he’s got 13 wins. He throws strikes and lets his guys play behind him.

– Skip Schumaker on Ryan Dempster

Let’s analyze that a bit. Schumaker’s phrase "lets his guys play behind him" is ballplayer vernacular for "has a high rate of balls put in play." Let’s start with that — does Dempster have an above-average rate of balls in play, something we looked at after the Wellemeyer-Myers matchup a couple of weeks ago:

Okay, so maybe it just seemed like Dempster was inducing more balls into play (at least he was relative to his season rate). In any case, Schumaker’s underlying assumption is that Dempster also has an accompanying high rate of those balls in play being turned into outs by his defense. Is that true? In short, yes. At .744, Dempster is getting well above-average DER (NL average: .693) from his defense, and he’s got the best defense/"luck" on his staff and fourth best in the league.

And as we all know most of us know, starting pitchers get wins largly as a function of their run support. So it’s no surprise to find out that Dempster is third in the league in Run Support.

When I’d get sent down in St. Louis, no one ever told me what I was supposed to work on. It wasn’t like it was anything mean. But I was going crazy trying to figure out if I did something wrong. Did I step on someone’s toes?

– Anthony Reyes, after his first start with Cleveland Friday

We just wanted to try and make it as easy and as comfortable for him as possible. We really wanted to work off of him, let him pitch his ball game and go about his business the way he goes about his business.

– Indians’ manager Eric Wedge

Wedge’s comments mark a stark contrast to how LaRuncan treated Iron Cap in St. Louis. With the Cardinals in need of some starting pitching, their erstwhile prospect got a chance to "go about his business" and tossed a nifty 65 FIGS in Toronto. Let it be a lesson to LaRuncan — and to GM John Mozeliak, who technically is LaRuncan’s boss, and therefore can and should trump them when occasion demands. On a side note: A year ago, who could’ve envisioned the strange sight of Reyes wearing an Indians uniform plunking Scott Rolen wearing a powder-blue Blue Jay uniform?

It’s the hardest I’ve ever seen him get hit. That never happens, it really doesn’t. It was one of those fluke type things.

– Skip Schumaker on Carlos Zambrano

His location wasn’t good at all. That’s the hardest I’ve seen `Z’ get hit in the last two years I’ve been here. I thought he’d throw the ball better. … But it happens to anybody. The Cardinals are a good hitting team.

– Lou Piniella

It’s hard to find many positives in the lost series this weekend, but here goes: If the Cardinals make it to the playoffs, and if they happen to face the Cubs in the championship series, they can look back to Saturday’s game as a confidence-builder that they can beat the Cubs’ ace. And with 16 runs scored and 12 allowed, the Cardinals actually "won" the series pythagorean style (.640 win %).

It’s more satisfying to stay consistent all year long, put up good numbers and help the team win.

– Jim Edmonds

Edmonds had his moment in the sun Friday, but his performance the rest of the weekend reminded us of why he would’ve been the Cardinals’ fourth outfielder this season. Give him credit, though: He has excelled as a Cub. It remains to be seen how Edmonds will close out the season, but one clue might be in his career monthly splits:

Suffice it to say that, since September is Edmonds’s weakest month, the Cubs may not want to rely on him too heavily. Another clue might be in his expected production, based on his trajectory prior to this season:
A third measure might be his projected rest of the season using the cool Marcel tool, which figures JEd to have a .265 GPA the rest of the way (down from the .308 that he has as a Cub).

It could be that Edmonds has found his old stroke at Wrigley. We’re not sold, but don’t tell those fickle Cub fans.

That was the game-changing at-bat that got us right back in it. Guys were tired. There had been some long innings and that was a lift.

– Troy Glaus on Chris Duncan’s pinch-hit, game-tying home run

Jerry Manuel must’ve been tired, too. How else to explain some of his moves? To be sure, the Met players lost the game on their own merits (or lack thereof), but Manuel’s backward managing didn’t help them. In the first, after Jose Reyes singled, Manuel turned over any momentum that created by having No. 2 man Endy Chavez sacrifice Reyes to second. With all due respect to Joel Pineiro, the Mets don’t need to be playing for one run in the first inning of the game. Of course, the root problem may be that Chavez is batting second for the Mets in the first place, but if you’re going to be bunting Reyes over in the first inning against Pineiro, wouldn’t the same strategy hold in the third inning, when Reyes led off again with a hit?

At any rate, fast-forward to the eighth, when Chris Duncan came to the plate representing the tying run (read: high-leverage situation!). The Mets must not have done enough homework on Duncan: Although in the regular season, Duncan was previously hitless against Feliciano, Duncan had homered off the lefty in a pinch-hitting appearance in the sixth inning of Game 5 of the 2006 NLCS (how soon we forget!). It’s easy to criticize in hindsight, but why not use your best reliever — who happens to be lefthanded — in the most important situation of the game? We’re happy to say that reports of Chris Duncan’s demise have apparently been greatly exaggerated.

It was just one of those nights where I missed 50 percent of my spots.

– Joel Pineiro

Pineiro threw 59 of his 89 pitches for strikes, or 66.3%. That’s about where his season average is (66.7%), so we’re not sure what he was getting at. Even though his line didn’t look that impressive, he actually pitched his third-best game of the season by FIGS:

There’s no justice in this game usually, but today there was.

– Tony La Russa

What does this even mean? Perhaps TLR simply meant that the Mets deserved to lose the game.

I just didn’t make the pitches. I fell behind, tried to come in and missed inside. And the last one wasn’t close either — four bad pitches. Our game plan was to attack him with the fastball away, because he tries to pull everything, and my stuff matched up good for that situation. It just didn’t work out that way.

– Chris Perez

Perez is now the worst on the team in BB/G, behind even Randy Flores (which is saying something). Perhaps we’re a little late to the party on this one, but the fact that two of Tony La Russa’s favorite relievers in June — Flores and Perez — are so walk-happy struck us that La Runcan is more tolerant of walks than of fly balls, the areas in which Flores and Perez are weak and strong, respectively, and in which Iron Cap Reyes is exceptionally strong (he leads the team in BB/G) and relatively weak.

For the life of us, we don’t understand the preference; can someone make a rational case for it?

I just got to where I thought it was going to be, and when I got there, it wasn’t. I just misplayed it, I guess. I think it cut, because I was right there. I was calling it, and all of a sudden, it was behind me.

– Rick Ankiel

We’ve heard of rampant friendly scoring around the league this season, and Ankiel’s non-error misplay is the latest example. (We suppose that if he had played it better and gotten a glove on it, it would’ve been ruled an error.) Ankiel receives a lot of just credit for his amazing plays, but his fielding account needs to be similarly debited for his ostentatious (and sometimes errant) throws and misplays like Sunday’s blooper in the clutch.

That’s one of those things that makes you enjoy this level of competition. Both clubs had chances. Lot of heroics to get something going, a lot of heroics to stop them. What a great competition.

– TLR

The surest sign that the team successfully pulled itself up from the KC series by its bootstaps: After losing in extra innings, its manager talks of "enjoying the competition."

We got beat. but it was a great series and a great game. Today’s not one of those games where you’re walking with your head down and kicking stuff.

– Joel Pineiro

For his part, Pineiro was perhaps more lucky than good, striking out only one, while allowing a home run (53 FIGS). One of the reasons that the loss was so tolerable was the way the bullpen was deployed. We’ve complained on more than one occasion about how TLR seems to save his best relievers for last (sometimes resulting in them not being used at all), rather than deploy them in a best-first approach in extra innings (or in high-leverage situations). Sunday, however, the relievers appeared in some order of their expected FIP ERAs:

In retrospect, using the rookie Perez in the eighth was unwise. But we commend TLR for using Springer and K-Mac ahead of Isringhausen, Villone and Parisi (and resting the overrated Franklin and underwhelming Flores).

Except for last year, I’ve always been a .300 guy.

– Nick Stavinoha

True, the rookie has a lifetime minor-league batting average of .302. But we’d rather he focus on being a .350 guy — on-base percentage, that is (he’s subpar in our book with a .346 OBP in his minor-league career). Bragging about batting average, this guy clearly didn’t come up through Oakland’s farm system!

I wasn’t going to let (Pineiro) lose that game.

– La Russa, on bringing in Perez to relieve when the go-ahead run came to bat in the eighth

What a ridiculous reason for making a move.

We play the same every day. I don’t care if we’re up or down by nine or 10. Even if we’re down by a mile, we’re going to scratch for an inch because an inch is more than a centimeter.

– Ron Villone

Who says lefties are strange, anyway?

I think not only did our team need it, our bullpen needed it. For me personally, it’s an achievement I can always look back on. Obviously, it’s not a no-hitter, but I gave up only three hits in a nine-inning shutout. That’s pretty good, I’d say.

– Braden Looper

Who would’ve thought back in the spring of 2007 that one day — let alone only a year-and-half later — career reliever Braden Looper would pitch a complete game? His shutout Wednesday night in Cincinnati represents a culmination of sorts in Looper’s transformation as a pitcher.

While Looper’s shutout is the team’s only one to-date, it wasn’t the team’s most dominantly-pitched game this season, nor was it even Looper’s — he accomplished that in his previous start:

Not to take anything away from Looper, of course; as he said himself, it’s pretty good. It was perhaps fitting that Looper tossed his gem on the same night that another reliever-conversion project asserted himself likewise as a success story. The Athletics’ Justin Duchscherer pitched in 189 games in relief without starting (he started five games before that streak) doesn’t have near the relief bona fides that Looper had, but he too is showing that a thirty-something career reliever can offer more value as a starter, and that the difference between a reliever and starter is more of a continuum than conventionally believed.

Today our starter was really, really good. And that’s great because it sets the pen up. We’ve got four more games this week.

– TLR

People talk about "innings-eaters," and with 83 IP this year, Looper has had the second-best appetite on the team (behind Wainwright’s 91 2/3). More importantly (or more accurately), Looper is also second in total batters faced and in batters faced per start:

So if the bullpen is rested, TLR usually has Wainwright, Looper or Wellemeyer to thank.

It’s enabled me to get on top of the ball and keep all my pitches consistently down. All my pitches were down for the most part today.

–Looper

His seemingly self-inconsistent statement (was he saying that all of his pitches were mostly down?) notwithstanding, let’s compare Looper’s pitch charts from that 5/27 game against Houston and Wednesday’s performance:

Looper was indeed lower in the zone Wednesday, particularly with his fastball and sinker (or at least what MLB Gameday identifies as a sinker), which he featured less than he did two weeks ago. Give Looper credit: He’s worked hard to become — and remain — a starter, and it sounds like it’s because he listens to good advice on how to improve. It’s an example that the team’s influx of rookie pitchers will do well to heed.