Isolated power and the Cardinals' sudden surge

Lots of the talk about the Cardinals this young season has focused on the starting pitching rotation, especially the performance of guys not named Wainwright or Carpenter. Deservedly so, as the Lohse/Garcia/Westbrook/Lynn cadre has helped the club to a 2.61 team ERA, second in baseball. But the recent struggles of the leader in that category, the Nationals, show that strong pitching can be rendered moot without adequate offensive support.

However, in a development more surprising than the emergence of their arms, the Cardinals have delivered hitting in spades, especially for power. Even with the departure of Albert Pujols, the recent absence of Lance Berkman and Matt Holliday still struggling, St. Louis has a team batting average of .280, tied for second in the MLB with Boston. They also stand eighth in the MLB at isolated power, a figure derived from subtracting a team's batting average from their slugging percentage. Their current number is .163, up from .151 in 2011. The table I'm currently looking at doesn't include last night's games, but the Cardinals didn't play anyway, so referring to it is still pretty safe. 

I find that last stat especially intriguing. The teams ahead the Cards are as listed in descending order: Yankees, Brewers, Rangers, Orioles, Red Sox, Rays, Rockies. When you think about it, this assortment of teams is completely expected. Look at their home stadiums - Yankees, Rangers, Orioles, Red Sox: all play in noted hitters parks. The Rockies play in Denver and stick their baseballs in a humidor in an attempt to make them moist enough so routine infield pop-ups don't turn into 400-foot bombs. The Rays and Brewers are surprises, but their figures can easily be traced to their total home runs, as Milwaukee is fourth in the MLB with 29 and Tampa Bay is sixth with 28. The Cardinals are a bit further down, at eighth with 24. And again, this is largely sans the power Berkman and Holliday were expected to provide this season. Busch Stadium is also, according to ESPN's 2011 MLB Park Factors, a pitcher's park. These rankings compared teams' offensive stats at home to their offensive stats on the road and calibrated them on a scale of one (1). A final figure more than one means a stadium was a hitter's park and less than one meant it was a pitcher's park. Busch Stadium was #25 on these rankings at 0.896. So what I'm saying is that their home stadium having particularly friendly confines isn't really a factor here. 

Chris Lee/St. Louis Post-Dispatch

What is, though, is a number of players putting a charge into the ball with alarming regularity. David Freese's ISO is .227, up from .144 in 2011. Matt Carpenter's is .200, significantly more than the .164 he put up in AAA Memphis last year. Carlos Beltran's .205 is actually lower than his .225 mark from last season (which was actually sensational for him, we might get to that later) but is still well above the league average, which usually stands around .145. And Yadier Molina has suddenly turned into Mike Piazza. His .276 ISO leads the team by a large margin and puts him at sixth in the National League. Freese, Carpenter and Beltran are also in the top 20 in the NL. MLB-wide, Molina's figure places him above names like David Ortiz and Chris Davis. This means you can sabermetrically postulate that Yadier Molina has been a better power hitter than one of the most feared sluggers of the last decade, as well as a guy who almost hit the warehouse beyond Camden Yards' right field fence. Of course, .276 is well, well above Molina's career ISO (more than twice as big, in fact), but it is still undeniably impressive. 

So will this power surge last for the Cardinals? For each individual player, probably not. It's just statistically inconceivable that Molina will maintain his current pace, as his ZiPS(U) is projecting him at .151 for the season. Freese is striking out at an alarming rate of 27.5% and his BABIP (.417) is far above his average (.333), so he's due for a drop-off as soon as his hits start finding more gloves. Carpenter's slugging percentage, .467, is also a good deal more than his projected number of .385. But for the team, there's a good chance it could. Allen Craig is due for a call-up, and he's been tearing it up lately in AAA. Lance Berkman was hitting quite well before he got injured and will most likely maintain a pace close to that upon his return. So if each player avoids a catastrophic drop-off, the forthcoming reinforcements do their job and everybody else just makes sure not to hit like Jeff Mathis, the team could basically cancel out the offensive hole Pujols left. And that would be the sweetest revenge.

Note: stats from Fangraphs.com and MLB.com

Zack Cox and the "problem" of a deep team

Of all the Cardinals' recent draft picks, Zack Cox stood out to me the most at the time he was drafted. Not because he was hugely imposing physically or had a highlight video featuring him cranking moonshot after moonshot, but because of his raw numbers in college. He was drafted as a sophomore in 2010 out of Arkansas, and that season he set school records with a .429 average and 102 hits, gaining All-SEC First Team honors. That average is impressive as it is, but in a juggernaut conference such as SEC, with eight teams in the final ESPN/USA Today Coaches' Poll, it is especially good.

And for the most part, Cox has lived up to the expectations he set with his college performance. He had a very solid 2011, split between high-A Palm Beach and AA Springfield, where he hit .306 with an OPS of .797. The fact that he had 98 strikeouts to 40 walks isn't exactly a feel-good number, but nobody can really complain about his showing last season. However, Cox has had a very rough start to the season with AAA Memphis this year, straddling the Mendoza Line with a meager .203 average, greatly exacerbated by a 26.0 K%. But Cox is still on the Cards' 40-man roster and has shown obvious signs of improvement in his recent games with the Redbirds, getting a hit in the last seven, with multi-hit outings on April 24 and 26.

Chris Lee/St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Cox's path to the bigs is clogged at the moment, though. David Freese has gained the confidence of the management (and the hearts of the fans) at third base, and Daniel Descalso has shown that he's a capable fill-in when Freese has gone down with injuries. The possibility of converting Cox to a middle infield position isn't promising either, as Furcal, Greene and Schumaker are occupying those spots, and Kolten Wong appears to be on a fast track to St. Louis. Wong, by the way, is hitting .329 (sixth in the Texas League) in Springfield with an excellent .970 OPS. And just to make sure I'm covering all the bases here, Matt Carpenter/Lance Berkman have first base and the DH spot during interleague play will most likely be occupied by Allen Craig when he returns. So that leaves the Cardinals with someone who could turn out to be a very serviceable infielder, but with nowhere to put him.

One possibility is for the Cardinals to trade Cox. Though they are flush with infield prospects, the bullpen remains a weaker spot (the signing of Scott Linebrink supports that). Dealing Cox could allow them to take a chance on a younger, unproven arm with high upside or, if they court a team with limited infield depth - the A's or Blue Jays, for instance - they could get a deal for someone more at Cox's stage of development. Maybe even someone who just seems to have lost their way, like Brett Cecil. He was drafted 38th by Toronto in 2007 and has good stuff, including a fastball that has hit the low-mid 90s and a very good slider. He has popped in and out of the bigs in recent seasons and could be the next Cardinals revival project.

The team could also just keep Cox in the minors and watch him. His numbers in college and lower minor league levels have shown that he has very good pure hitting ability, and it could just be a matter of time before he comes around and starts putting up numbers to compete with the Cardinals' current infield contingent. Trading someone with as much promise as Cox due to there being too much depth could be seen as a very short-sighted move for the organization. Their bullpen might not be the best in the league, but it is also not preventing the Cardinals' from being a good team. Having someone like Cox waiting in the wings if disaster strikes supports sustainability within the organization.

Those are, in my view, some options the Cardinals have with Cox. Should I even be contemplating this? Am I completely off base? I'd be eager to hear your thoughts on this situation.

Dylan Bundy and the business of speculation

Being from the suburbs of Washington, D.C. and having attended MLB games long before we got the Nationals, I practically grew up going to Orioles games. That team has always sucked, for as long as I remember. One of the least popular owners in sports, a chronic lack of pitching and epic mid-to-late-season swoons have defined this team for me - a great stadium with crappy baseball inside. But the Orioles' chronic failure has certainly yielded some interesting young talent coming up through their system. Matt Wieters, Manny Machado, Jake Arrieta, Brian Matusz all carry considerable buzz, even if it doesn't always carry over to their performance (Arrieta and Matusz are examples of that point). It's always entertaining to speculate on those guys, if only to distract yourself from the atrocities committed on the field.

And Dylan Bundy seems different so far. There is almost a mythical air forming around this 19-year-old righty from Tulsa. He was picked fourth for a reason: as a high schooler, he could hit 98 with his fastball and threw both a slider and curve well. And he's no beanpole, either, standing at 6'1", 195 lbs. But what Bundy has done in his limited minor league appearances is absolutely astounding. He has been starting games but not going for more than three to four innings, which is expected with a team dealing with a highly touted - and most importantly young - prospect. The length of his outings have not made them any less incredible, though, as Bundy has blazed through each one and made opposing hitters look like Little Leaguers swinging toothpicks. Through 13 innings and 40 batters faced, he has allowed zero hits and just one walk. That's right, zero hits, from someone one year out of high school and facing not just lots of guys who played in college, but guys who played in college and were really good. The number that stands out the most to me, though, is that Bundy has 21 strikeouts. He has faced 40 professional baseball hitters and less than half of them have put the ball in play. Bundy had numbers like that in high school, but against professional hitters? Holy cow. Video from his debut with the Delmarva Shorebirds of the single-A South Atlantic League ("The Sally) tells a large part of the story. Bundy can flat-out blow the ball past hitters. And he doesn't get any deception from his nearly straight over-the-top delivery either: his pitches just fly like heat-seeking missiles past bats. His curveball broke like crazy too, and throwing it (and his slider and changeup too) in complement with his fastball makes each pitch doubly nasty. His domination is simple and direct, nothing sneaky about it. This video of Bundy in an intrasquad game during spring training is also very telling. He is facing Adam Jones, Mark Reynolds and Matt Wieters, guys who have shown that they can hit major league pitching quite well (well, sometimes). He comes straight at Jones, throwing three fastballs right by him. Again, all killer, no filler (except that one ball to the backstop). He then induces a weak fly from Wieters and, with Reynolds, shows a lethal change of velocity and buckles his knees with a changeup. Now, I understand that this was early in spring and the hitters are still working on getting their timing back, but it was still an incredibly impressive display.

The caveat, of course, is that we are working with a very small sample size here. 13 innings is probably 1/10th of what Bundy is going to end up throwing this season, and there is no doubt that someone will eventually get a hit, someone will score a run, someone will probably hit a home run. And there is no PITCHf/x data on Bundy, so I have no objective way of comparing his stuff to big league pitchers or even other guys in single-A. His current form might just be a fluke, he might just be on a tear of epic proportions and only has so long before he crashes back down to Earth. But in the meantime, he has turned into an massively exciting prospect, someone Orioles fans can use to look forward to the future, when they'll surely turn around and revert back to early-to-mid-1990s form. Because, honestly, after the early season hot streak they're currently on goes cold like it always does, what else can they do?

A few happy thoughts, for a change

The last two games have hurt, to put it lightly. Two times going into the ninth with a 2-1 lead, two times blowing the save, two times losing on a walk-off to the Cubs, owners of the second-worst record in the National League, two times spoiling stellar starts by the starting pitcher.

But hey, let's not get too despondent. The Cards still hold a two-game lead in the NL Central (early season, yeah, I know), which will most likely be one of the weaker divisions in baseball. Four fifths of their starting rotation has an ERA under 2.50 (and we will discuss Wainwright later). St. Louis' team batting average of .271 is the highest in the NL by .009 points (places 2-5 are separated by .002). And seriously, this team still has won two out of the past six World Series. I mean seriously, we should feel spoiled, not having to remotely concern ourselves with anything like that "Our Time"stuff the Royals are doing. Plus, there are even some positives to be drawn from this game.

Adam Wainwright
As discussed in my first post on this blog, Wainwright was having a bit of an off year, to put it lightly. But  in last night's start, he pitched excellently - six innings, six hits, one earned run (which was the result of an atrocious call by the home plate umpire), seven strikeouts. He didn't have the best night in terms of throwing strikes (57:93 pitches), but looked very comfortable from the stretch and was able to step up in tight spots and contribute to the Cubs leaving nine men on base and going 1-9 with runners in scoring position (the one hit, the game-winner, came off Fernando Salas). His curveball was also fantastic tonight. He threw it 28 times, 17 for strikes, and often on the first or second pitch of the at-bat. It was actually his second most-utilized pitch behind his sinker, which he threw 34 times. Batters swung and missed at the curve five times (17.86%), the highest whiff percentage of any pitch. For the sake of comparison, in Wainwright's disastrous start April 19 against the Reds, he threw the curve only 17 times and only eight for a strike. Furthermore, the average horizontal break (in inches) of the curve was 9.25 last night, as opposed to 8.05 the 19th. It was a far better pitch last night, both in its movement and Wainwright's ability to control it. In fact, basically every pitch of Wainwright's broke more last night, and in significant amounts too (an inch or more as opposed to fractions). Simply put, Wainwright looked like his normal self, and despite the fact that he was robbed of a deserved win, this start should be great for his confidence and give him something from which to build.
Victor Marte

One of the newer faces in the Cards' pen, Marte didn't make the team in spring training but got the call when Scott Linebrink's shoulder started acting up. His ZiPS (R) projection, which doesn't take into account Marte's recent performance, pegged him to be downright awful in 2012. Highlights include a 4.75 ERA, .307 BABIP, 4.25 BB/9 and a 4.48 FIP, all of which are solidly below the league average. But Marte got a very quick 1-2-3 seventh inning last night, throwing six pitches for six strikes, and he's been surprisingly solid for the Cards so far this season. His BABIP is currently an excellent .136 and he has consistently thrown strikes, only walking two. His 5.57 FIP is a bit of a concern, but that's mainly due to the two home runs he has given up. His xFIP, which replaces actual home runs given up with a pitcher's fly ball rate multiplied by the league's average HR/FB rate, is a much more serviceable 3.67. The main concern with Marte is his HR/FB rate, as 28.6% of the fly balls he has given up have ended up over the fence. However, his BABIP being as low as it is seems to suggest that stat will eventually level off. The contact rates on Marte's pitches is also very good, sitting at a solid 74.5% overall with an even better outside pitch contact rate of 58.3%. He's clearly got stuff that can induce whiffs. If Marte keeps up his current performance, he can lock up a spot in a very competitive bullpen, whose makeup is likely to change when Carpenter comes back.

Matt Holliday
His average of .215 is still low. But so is his BABIP (.224), which means the low average stems largely from his hits not finding spaces between fielders rather than Holliday striking out a ton. For someone who hits the ball as consistently hard as Holliday, that number should end up rising soon, and with it his average. He has had a decent series in Chicago so far, going 2 for 3 with a double and triple Monday and hitting the go-(but not stay) ahead homer  last night. He might have been 1 for 5 overall, but the importance of that hit, the main reason for his .412 win probability added last night, outweighed the other at-bats. Holliday appears to be coming around, and I think he has a good chance of breaking out this weekend against the Brewers.

Note: statistics and PITCHf/x data from mlb.com, brooksbaseball.net and fangraphs.com.

April 23, Wrigley Field, the ninth inning: Inside a blown save

I'm as die-hard of a Cardinals fan as you'll find, but there are some things I just don't like as much as I should about this team. Fredbird is one. In terms of baseball mascots, Fredbird's pretty good, much better than noted water gun assassin Billy the Marlin or the Cleveland's Slider, an anthropomorphic pink blob that seems to have emerged from a particularly dirty part of Lake Erie. But one time, when I was at a Cards game (can't remember which Busch it was), Fredbird was walking around and throwing t-shirts into the stands. He looked directly at me and motioned like he was about to throw (even through those dead mascot eyes, I could tell), but then tossed the t-shirt to some other kid further down. So yeah, young, impressionable me didn't take that so well.

Then there's Jason Motte. He's good, there's no arguing that. With his trusty companion Sir Glovington A. Wilson in tow, Motte was HUGE in the 2011 postseason. 2.19 ERA, five saves in five opportunities, a BABIP of .121...his more complex stats, like SIERA and FIP, skewed a bit high because he didn't strike out as many people in the postseason, but he was still pretty damn good. And he's been great in 2012, with 10.80 K/9, a .214 BABIP and 3.09 xFIP. But again, I don't like him as much as he as earned due to one bad experience. I live near Washington, D.C. and for my birthday gift last year, I got tickets to a Nats-Cards game. It was a pretty cool game and my dad and I had great seats, and the Cards were leading 6-2 going into the seventh. But then Miguel Batista and Trever Miller decide to screw up and eventually leave the bases loaded for Motte with the score tied. And THEN, Motte walks Laynce Nix to give the Nats the lead. I tell ya, nothing rustles my jimmies like bases-loaded walks. Motte then proceeded to give up an RBI single to Jayson Werth to put the lead at 8-6. Motte wasn't actually responsible for any of the runs and ended up getting the Cards out of the inning, but yeah, that's why I've never really liked him that much. I dunno, irrational grudges and such, what can you do. I mean, he did help ruin my birthday present.

And Monday night's loss to the Cubs did nothing to help my impression of Motte. I hate blown saves/leads, especially against the Cubs and especially when they result in a walk-off. Lets's take a look inside the inning, batter by batter. And I'm listening to Belle and Sebastian while I'm writing this and re-watching the ninth inning, so it's like a really weird music video.

Jamie Squire/Getty Images

Alfonso Soriano - 0 outs, bases empty

Motte misses high and inside on the first pitch. Can't fault what he was trying to do with that, just the location. The next three pitches are what we have come to know and love from Motte - three fastballs with which he comes right at Soriano, catching a big chunk of the plate and daring him to hit them. He fouls them off. Motte misses low and outside with a cutter, but then fans Soriano with a 98 mph fastball on the outside corner which probably looked even faster after the 92 mph cutter.  

Bryan LaHair - 1 out, bases empty

LaHair established himself as an unpopular guy in St. Louis, as he hit a grand slam in the Cardinals' home opener to help the Cubs play spoiler. Motte blows a low 97 mph fastball past LaHair on the first pitch. The next two pitches are balls, first a miss inside then out. LaHair whiffs on the fourth pitch and suddenly he's in the same situation as Soriano. Motte runs the count full when a 99 mph fastball misses wide. LaHair then proceeds to foul off SIX pitches, none of them slower than 95 mph. He walks on the 12th, a high and outside fastball. That was a hell of an at-bat, one that can rattle a pitcher and make him lose confidence in his stuff. 

Geovany Soto - 1 out, runner on first

Perhaps rattled by the previous at-bat, Motte walks Soto on four pitches, two cutters followed by two fastballs. The first three come close to the corners, but the fourth misses well low and in. 

Steve Clevenger - 1 out, runners on first and second

Matheny bring the whole infield together for a quick chat beforehand, most like to try to calm down his closer and communicate the defensive shift. Clevenger came in hitting .556 over 19 plate appearances, including 10 for 17 against RHPs. He gets the count to 1-2, the chops an inside cutter to Descalso at first, advancing the runners with a great piece of situational hitting. 

Joe Mather - 2 outs, runners on second and third

Mather has spent the majority of his career in the Cards' organization and he and Motte were teammates as recently as 2010. I was impressed with Mather's physical tools when he was in St. Louis, but he just never hit well or exhibited very good plate discipline. He seemed to be the typical AAAA player. But I digress, the at-bat. First pitch, low cutter for a strike. Motte goes back to the low heater (97 mph) to get the count to 0-2. It looks like his nerves get the best of him as he overthrows the third pitch and misses badly outside. Same with the fourth, a cutter which misses badly low. The count is now 2-2, and Motte is as desperate as ever to put the game away for good, wanting badly to avoid a duel like he had against LaHair. Motte's slider can be described as a tertiary pitch at best: Fangraphs indicates that he stopped throwing it in 2009 and PITCHf/x says he threw it 0.3% of the time in 2011. But he hasn't thrown it yet in this inning. So on the fifth pitch, he throws it, hangs it and Mather bangs it. His shot up the middle scores both runners. Ballgame.

The numbers

Simply put, Motte didn't throw enough strikes. The velocity on all his pitches was just fine, even a bit higher than his season average on the fastball of 96.6. But he threw 18 strikes to 13 balls. He threw 18 4-seamers and only half of them were strikes. If you're facing batters consistently fouling balls off and showing a good defensive hitting approach like the Cubs were in the ninth, you've got to at least pound the strike zone and force them to put the ball in play eventually. Motte wasn't able to do that, and the Cubs didn't let him off the hook. The majority of Motte's 4-seamers this season have been strikes, and he needs to keep it that way unless we want to see performances like last night become a recurring theme. And the slider: if you crunch the numbers based on the PITCHf/x data, it was the first one he's thrown this season. There really was no need to use it, as the previous batters didn't even hit any of his other pitches hard. It was just a bad decision made at a very inopportune time. 

What didn't make The Maneater: Mizzou v. Kansas State part II

As always, here's the recap, but this post will hopefully fill in any gaps. Enjoy! 

• Dane Opel's home run in the bottom of the 5th might have been the hardest hit home run I've seen from a Mizzou bat this year. Opel's shot was on a line and almost cleared the trees beyond the 340-foot right field fence. He just cheated on an offspeed pitch on the inside part of the plate and ripped it. 
• A big part of how Mizzou was able to curtail K-State's offensive production in the series was holding the Wildcats' #3 and #4 batters, Jared King and Wade Hinkle, to a combined 2 for 19. King is leading the team with a .372 average and Hinkle has seven homers and 33 RBIs. By basically taking those two out of the game, the Tigers forced the Wildcats to rely on the rest of their lineup to drive the offense. They couldn't do that, and seven runs in three games isn't going to win many series unless you have a stud pitching staff, which K-State doesn't.
• Kayvon Bahramzadeh, K-State's starter, looked pretty good despite getting saddled with the loss. He only gave up four hits in his six innings, with two in the first, one coming from Opel's homer and the other on a seeing-eye single up the middle by Conner Mach in the sixth. After the two-run first inning, he settled in quite well. Bahramzadeh had five strikeouts and showed good velocity as well as the ability to make batters look silly with his curveball. He made Mach and Blake Brown, two very good hitters, flail wildly on that pitch to strike them out. I could see Bahramzadeh being a decent reliever should he get drafted.
• Once he got his offspeed and breaking stuff under control, Graves started to induce a lot of weak popups and flairs that were either jam shots or hit off the end of the bat. If he keeps his velocity up and can get his other pitches in the strike zone, the change of speed, not even the movement as much, could be a big weapon for him. 
• The biggest chances K-State had to score were in the third and sixth innings. In the third, Tanner Witt and Ross Kivett singled consecutively to put runners on first and second with one out. King flew out to Opel and it looked like Witt might try to tag up. He waited long enough for Opel to throw to second, though, and somewhere in between Witt decided to go for third, where Dillon Everett threw him out for the double play. That play seemed to kill any momentum the Wildcats might have had. In the sixth, Witt singled, stole second and was advanced to third on a King sac fly. Hinkle smoked a grounder to first, but it was right at Andreas Plackis' glove, and he went to first for the third out. 
• Eric Garcia is a better defensive shortstop than his .923 fielding percentage suggests. He has the range to make good plays to either side and the arm to throw guys out on grounders in the 5-6 hole, something he has done multiple times this season. He made a great play on a pop-up to shallow center today, running back and making an over-the-shoulder catch. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a UZR (ultimate zone rating) database for college ball, but if there was I bet Garcia's would be pretty good. 
• Ben Turner has the best OBP (.430) on the team. He is hitting .320 and has been hot as of late, but also has the most walks on the team, with 21. His plate discipline has been the key to his success. Maybe Tim Jamieson should stick him in the leadoff spot!
• Dusty Ross has quietly become a stud in the bullpen. While the closer role has shuffled between Jeff Emens and Jake Walsh and Eric Anderson's absence has drawn some awkward spot starts from Emens, John Miles and even Kyle Barbeck, Ross has stuck in his role and been very, very good this season. He has held opponents to a .220 batting average, the lowest on the team and a number that would place him sixth in the Big 12 if you were to go from the conference's April 19 release. 

Mizzou v. Kansas State: what didn't make The Maneater.

Before starting this blog, I was (and still am) one of The Maneater's baseball beat writers. I still cover these games, and there are things that didn't make into my game recaps (like this one which I have to fit into 550-600 words. So here they are.

• Kansas State left their starter, Matt Applegate, in the game for a really long time. Which was odd, given that he gave up a lot of runs, as in 13, with eight earned. And these runs came early, with nine in the innings he stayed in the whole time and the other four in the seventh inning, in which he stayed in long enough to have all the runs be listed as earned for him. Maybe K-State's bullpen was depleted, maybe they didn't want to use anyone who could make their way in to the starting staff, I don't really know. But it seemed weird that they left him in when the game was basically done and he was serving as someone to simply eat up pitches. He threw 134 pitches, which is a lot even for someone who stays in during a winning effort. 
• Andreas Plackis seems like a genuinely great guy. He started the season as the primary first baseman, but was knocked out first by Landon Lucansky and then by Gavin Stark. He didn't seem bitter at all when I talked to him, though, and thought of his bench time as "character building." I don't have an emotional investment in anyone at this position, but I'd be fine if Plackis ended up locking it up. And if he hits like he did Friday, that'd be doubly great for Mizzou.  
• When second baseman Dillon Everett came up, some of the young fans at the game would chant "Dill-on Ev-erett." It might have been the cadence inspired by his name or the chant in general, but it was genuinely creepy. So there's that. But Everett has shown that he really isn't a good hitter. I thought he would be coming around during the Tigers' 10-game winning streak, but he has shown that he just hasn't. He's still hitting pretty close to the Mendoza line, at .209. And he hasn't been the best situationally, as he failed to get a sacrifice bunt down in the second inning, even with multiple chances. He's a decent defender at second, but he's been far from that offensively. 
• In their four-run first inning, Mizzou had more runs than hits (three). That ratio swung back and forth throughout the game, and it eventually ended up at 14 hits, 13 runs. You can look at that in a negative or positive light: either they capitalize on walks and errors or they need lots of walks and errors to score as many runs as they did. You can really look at it either way.
• Again, Mizzou's baserunners were subject to a TON of pickoff attempts. This has happened enough that you really can't prescribe it to a certain team. The Tigers really don't steal that much (Blake Brown has the most with 13 and Brannon Champagne has 9), but coach Jamieson said that because Brown stole in the first inning last night, it put pressure on Applegate to be a bit more vigilant with whomever got on base. 
• Brannon Champagne has been on base in 28 straight games, the second-best streak in the Big 12. It's huge for Mizzou to have someone like that at the top of the lineup who can consistently do that. He has been one of the only people in the lineup (Everett being the other) that hasn't been shuffled around the batting order.
• In the bottom of the fifth, Blake Brown hit an unbelievably high pop-up on the infield. Every K-State infielder converged on the mound like a drum circle and Applegate ended up catching the ball not a foot from the rubber. So that was kinda funny to watch.
• Rob Z had a great start, and basically every one of his pitches can be used as an out pitch. Once he starts throwing strikes a higher percentage of the time, he's going to be really, really, really good and most likely a pretty high draft pick. He's only a sophomore, so there's no telling how far he can get. 
• There were no 4/20-related promotions to speak of. The Taco Bell ad in the eighth is a regular occurrence. 

Adam Wainwright isn't very good...

...right now, at least. Adam Wainwright is a good pitcher. A great pitcher, actually, if you look at his career stats and his stuff in general. I mean, a fastball that sits in the low-to-mid-90s plus a changeup plus one of the nastiest 12-6 curves in the game, the one that turned Carlos Beltran's knees to gravy to end the 2006 NLCS, Mr. Wainwright has some nasty stuff. He used to be a closer, and now he seems to be able to throw that sort of stuff with the length of a starter. In his magnum opus 2010 season, he won 20 games, struck out 213 batters and had a BABIP (batting average on balls in play) of .275. That means the hitters that Wainwright didn't strike out rarely even hit the ball hard. He was dirty, and his 2009 season was much of the same. Wainwright has clearly shown that being one of the best pitchers in baseball is typical of him.

But then there's this season. He is recovering from Tommy John surgery in 2011, so getting right back to where he left off wouldn't be very likely. And he had a good spring training, with a 1.45 ERA and an opponent's batting average of .169. The regular season, though, has hit Wainwright with all the kindness of a brick to the face. He's 0-3 so far and has been roughed up pretty good in every one of those starts. Wainwright's ERA stands at 9.88 and his OBA is .310. That's, well...bad. His most recent start saw him give up seven hits and four runs over five innings and allow two homers to the Reds. Not much progress there. So yeah, not an auspicious start. But where does the main problem lie? I dunno, let's look at the numbers over the SSS (small sample size, credit to tom s. of Viva El Birdos) of two starts (because that's as far as Fangraphs goes) first!

Well, first off, there's the BABIP. It's .320. When guys are making contact with Wainwright, they're hitting him hard. His very high 6.38 FIP (fielding independent pitching) supports that assertion. We can narrow the problem inherent there down to three things; either Wainwright's stuff simply isn't as good this season, with his secondary pitches aren't up to snuff, allowing opposing batters to adjust to his fastball much, much easier (hypothesis A), or he's just not as tight, mentally and mechanically, as in the past and is just making a lot of mistakes (hypothesis B). So there's that.

But then we have his K/9 ratio. It's 9.35, which is pretty damn good. And that number's going to stay pretty even after tonight's start, as Wainwright struck out five in five innings. This means that he's been able to get his out pitches to work well enough to send guys packing fairly consistently. So that basically eliminates hypothesis A. He's got pretty good stuff this season, at least good enough to get whiffs on a fairly regular basis. As I'm about to explain, hypothesis B has a pretty good amount of stuff backing it up.

First, there's all the home runs Wainwright's given up. He's given up five in 13.2 innings for a ratio of 3.3/9 innings. That's far, far higher than his past tree seasons, when he's kept that number around 0.6. There's also his HR/FB (fly ball) %, 37.5 through two games, which means fly balls Wainwright has given up have been finding their way into the seats quite a lot. And with two he gave up tonight, that number's not going to change very much. It's very high.

Credit: Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

Now, you might say "Well duh, Ian, the guy's just leaving a lot of balls up and dudes are hitting them far in the air, just professional baseball-hitter-people are paid to do!" And that's partly true. But there's a wrinkle in this; through two games, Wainwright's GB% (percentage of balls in play that are ground balls) is 55.6%. That's actually very good, better than figures he recorded in his previous three full seasons. And that shows us that he isn't necessarily a fly ball pitcher this year, not at all. That's a number comparable to what Jake Westbrook, a sinkerballer, has shown in past seasons. And the point of being a sinkerballer is to throw the ball with the hope of the batter actually connecting and grounding out. And then there's the final number, which might tie everything together: left on base percentage (LOB%), a statistic measuring the percentage of baserunners a pitcher strands on base, AKA doesn't let them score. Wainwright's LOB%, through two games (again, after his last start things probably aren't going to change much) is 30.6%. That's quite poor, as the league average in this statistic usually hovers around 70%. And how this helps package all the other stuff about HR/FB and GB% that I was talking about, I am about to explain.

What this basically says is Wainwright has given up a good amount of big hits at inopportune times. Timing plays a pretty big role here. His GB% indicates that he hasn't been that bad at leaving the ball up a lot and has overall been pretty good at getting the ball down. The HR/FB% shows that when he does give up fly balls, they often go quite a long way, and his low LOB% tells us that a lot of these home runs (and a bunch of the other hits he's given up) have driven baserunners in. Which is true, as three of his five homers allowed came with runners on, including a grand slam on April 13 by the Cubs' Bryan LaHair. So when Wainwright has messed up, it's often been with runners on and resulted in the ball traveling a long way away from home plate.

Let me clarify, lots of these stats are just through two games and I have not conducted a full pitch-by-pitch analysis on Wainwright. But to me, the gist is that, this season, Wainwright has made mistakes (as all pitchers do), but they are in a higher quantity and have often come at very inopportune times. Most likely, he is just not as integrated with the flow of the game as he has been in the past, and mechanical and mental lapses have resulted in him not making the pitches he needs to in tight spots. He has shown with his strikeout numbers that his out pitches are there and with the GB% that his overall location has been decent. Now he just needs to smooth out the rest of his approach and get guys out when he needs to. He has a good pitching coach in Derek Lilliquist and ample experience in the regular and postseason. I have confidence he'll find his groove soon. And unless the rest of the rotation stays on their current tear, the Cardinals are going to be praying that he does.