Cardinal Pitching, Defense - Good Enough to win the NL?

In our last post, we looked at the Cardinal offense as compared to the rest of the NL playoff teams, and the last few NL champs, to see how they stacked up.

The results were not encouraging.

However, unlike rec softball, playoff baseball is not just about scoring runs. It's also about preventing runs from being scored by your opponent. OK, that's true in rec softball too, but its not as critical (You can win a softball game 35-29. Don't know if any playoff game has featured a score that ridiculous). So let's look at Cardinal pitching and defense.

Team Pitching

It's a well-documented fact the Big 3 (Carpenter, Wainwright, Pineiro) fueled the Cardinals' August surge to the NL Central pennant. They won't throw all the innings in the playoffs, however, so this will be a team comparison. I looked at ERA for the casual fan, and BABIP and FIP for the more statistically-inclined (and by way of explanation, BABIP is Batting Average for Balls In Play, which does have a defensive component, and Fielding Independent Percentage, which tries to take the defensive effect on ERA out). All stats are from the Fangraphs database.

Number in parens is the team's NL rank.

BABIP: LA - .283 (1), STL - .297 (5), PHI - .303 (8), COL - .306 (11).
ERA: LA - 3.45 (1), STL - 3.62 (4), PHI - 4.14 (6), COL - 4.23 (8).
FIP: STL - 3.80 (2), LA - 3.81 (3), COL - 3.98 (5), PHI - 4.38 (11).

If sports reporting is to believed, Los Angeles' starting pitching at the moment is in disarray (less Randy Wolf), but the body of their work doesn't support that. Based on their ERA and BABIP numbers their pitchers have benefited from good defense behind them, but their FIP says the pitching's been good too (for what it's worth, ATL leads the league in FIP at 3.65). St Louis' pitching has benefited slightly from their defense, but their pitching as we've seen has been outstanding.

The interesting thing to me is Colorado's staff has pitched better than ERA would imply. Philadelphia's staff has been worse than their ERA indicates, despite the addition of Cliff Lee, and Joe Blanton being one of the best pitchers in the NL since 1 June.

Looks like the Cardinals/Dodgers series will be a low-scoring one, and the Colorado/Philadelphia might be a high scoring affair.

Comparing the last 5 NL Champions in these categories, here's what we find:

All these teams were in the top 5 of National League teams in BABIP; only LA and STL rank in that range with 3 to play. Everyone's in the top 8 in ERA (all of the 2009 teams are too), with 3 of the 5 winners in the top 4 (again only STL and LA). There's a lot of variation in the FIP numbers, driven by the 2006 and 2007 champs; the other teams are top 5, and in 2009 that's Colorado, Saint Louis, and LA.

If any conclusion can be drawn from this small sample, it would indicate St Louis and Los Angeles most closely fit the profiles of most of the previous NL Champs, so they would have a leg up. Of course, this year's Phillie pitching staff looks a lot like the 2006 Cardinal staff, although that Cardinal team hit better than this year's Phillie team based on the stats I'm using in these posts.

BABIP indicates that good defense is a factor too (duh, right?). Let's look.

Team Fielding

Fangraphs defensive data is a bit limited, so I've looked at UZR. Their UZR/150 data was +/- 1 place of the UZR data.

UZR: PHI - 4, LA - 7, STL - 8, COL - 9.

As expected, UZR data tracks with the difference between ERA and FIP discussed above. PHI is a lot better defensively based on UZR than I thought prior to looking at the data.

Looking at past Champs:

2008 - PHI #1 in NL
2007 - COL #6
2006 - STL #5
2005 - HOU #5, STL #6
2004 - STL #4

Small sample size conclusion: Teams winning the league were ranked no lower than 6th in the NL in team defense (as evaluated by UZR). That would suggest only Philadelphia has the defensive chops to win the NL this year.

Conclusions

Cardinal Pitching is definitely good enough to win the NL. Their defense is decidedly average, and might not be good enough.

To summarize these 2 posts:

1. Need to be in the top 3 in wOBA. All playoff teams but STL meet that requirement.
2. Need to be top 5 in BABIP. LA and STL meet that requirement.
3. Need to be in top 6 in UZR. Only Philadelphia meets that metric.
4. Small sample size makes these conclusions suspect.

What we can say is, going into next week, the Phillies, Rockies, and Dodgers have better offensive numbers than St Louis, and only Los Angeles' pitching staff is comparable to St Louis'. And although Philadelphia has the best defensive numbers of the four, that advantage is offset by their overall below-average pitching. And it gives some credence to the belief the playoffs under the current format are ultimately a crapshoot; the team that just barely qualifies has just as good a shot at winning the whole thing as the team that's played .600 ball all year.

If good pitching stops good hitting, then LA or STL will win the league. If good hitting is more important, then Colorado is the team to beat.

Let's start already.

Cardinal Offense - Good Enough to win the NL?

While I was working on my preview for the Cardinals/Rockies series, I compared a couple of statistical metrics to see how the teams stacked up against each other, specifically UZR (defense), FIP (pitching), and wOBA (hitting). The Cardinals came up as solidly middle of the pack defensively (expected), top 15% in pitching (also expected), and lower half offensively (19th in MLB).

What? A Cardinal team featuring Albert Pujols and adding Matt Holliday couldn’t be in the bottom half of MLB offensively, could it? Had to be a mistake.

SO I looked a little deeper. For the 2009 season, and looking just at the NL this time, the Cardinals rank 8th in wOBA, 10th in OBP, and 5th in ISO. How does that stack up against the other potential playoff teams in the NL?

wOBA: 1st – PHI, 2nd – COL, 3rd – LA, 6th – ATL, 8th – STL.
OBP: 1st – LA, 2nd – COL, 5th – ATL, 8th – PHI, 10th – STL.
ISO: 1st – PHI, 2nd – COL, 5th – STL, 10th – ATL, 11th – LA.

Most Cardinal followers have spent a little time talking about the pitching dominance, but a lot of time talking about how much the lineup has improved since Holliday joined the club (and to a lesser extent, Lugo; DeRosa hasn’t hit well since coming over). But by the numbers, the Cardinals haven’t really improved since adding Holliday to the lineup:

Cardinals in June (pre-Holliday):
10th in wOBA (COL -1, PHI – 6, ATL – 12, LA – 13)
10th in OBP (COL – 1, PHI – 9, ATL – 11, LA – 13)
4th in ISO (COL – 1, PHI – 3, ATL – 9, LA – 12)

Cardinals in August (only complete Holliday month with data):
10th in wOBA (COL – 3, ATL – 5, PHI – 6, LA – 12)
9th in OBP (COL – 3, ATL – 4, LA – 10, PHI – 13)
12th in ISO (PHI – 1, COL – 2, LA – 9, ATL – 11)

The biggest surprise here is how Holliday has had minimal impact on the team’s overall success getting guys on base, and how his addition has not enhanced the lineup's isolated power numbers (given the big drop in ISO statistically), although granted that may be a reflection of Ludwick’s power outage and Albert’s cooling off period.

But what it does show is a season-long issue with getting guys on and hitting for extra bases. This team’s offense is spectacularly average in the NL, even as currently constructed. We’ve recently been reminded of that, given how they’ve struggled to win against quality pitching. So that offense ranked 19th in MLB I discovered in the preview post wasn’t an error – they struggle with the bat in their hands.

What does this imply for the playoffs?

Looking at the last 4 NL Champs, here’s how their numbers stacked up in each category.

2008 (PHI) – 3rd in wOBA, 7th in OBP, 1st in ISO.
2007 (COL) – 2nd in wOBA, 1st in OBP, 8th in ISO
2006 (STL) – 1st in wOBA, 4th in OBP, 2nd in ISO
2005 (HOU) – 11th in wOBA, 13th in OBP, 9th in ISO (by comparison, the 05 Cardinals ranked 4th, tied for 2nd, and 8th, respectively)

Three of the last 4 NL Champs led the league in one of these 3 categories, and those years each pennant-winner was in the top 3 in wOBA. What happened in 2005? Houston arguably had better pitching, and pitched better in the NLCS than St Louis did (read: Roy Oswalt).

However, based solely on the ability to put guys on and drive the ball throughout the lineup, the best bets on winning the NL appear to be Colorado, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and St Louis, in that order. Should they make the playoffs, Atlanta would be ranked between LA and STL.

We’ll take a look at Cardinal pitching versus all these staffs, to see if their pitching can mitigate this disadvantage, tomorrow.

You Can't Win If You Don't Score II

Same story as last night - little run support, great start, bullpen gives up the lead. 3-2 loss.

It's frustrating, as the Cubs have dropped 2 in Tampa to the Rays. As a side note, James Shields is on my fantasy team, and pitches today against Chicago, all but guaranteeing the Cubs will win.

Kyle McClellan had given up only 2 HR in 35 and 2/3 innings going into last night. As the Cardinals only gave him 2 runs to work with, it's hard to lay the blame on the bullpen; but it is frustrating to watch, especially considering the Royals hadn't won in 37 tries when trailing after 7.

And Brian Bannister hadn't won a night game since Aug 2007.

So on to today. I was pumped for Reyes' start, only to learn he's on the DL with an 'irritated elbow'. Odd that the team would announce him as the starter then place him on the DL. Anthony Reyes' strange trip through Cardinal land continues. Brad Thompson takes the hill in his place against arguably the best Royals starter this season, Zach Greinke.

We gotta salvage one.

I hate to give credence to any blather about the AL being better than the NL, but when the worst team in the American League is 6-2 against the National, like the Royals currently are, you got to wonder.

I'll be posting over at C70 at the bat starting tomorrow morning through next week; stop by and see me there. There will still be content here, if you just can't live without your daily Stance fix. It's like Starbucks, but without the Borg-like business model, smarmy attendants, and shitty coffee.