Cubs pitchers 1st inning woes the last two years.

[TrueBlueCubFan]

Is it me or does anyone else notice the problems Cubs pitchers have had in the 1st inning the last two years?

 

Is it a lack of preparation by Cubs pitchers or coaches or both?

Larry Rothchild & Dusty seem to go under the radar in this problematic area.

My guess it is coaching. This pitching staff has much more talent than the Cardinals, but struggle on knowing what pitches to throw early in a game.

 

Despite the injury problems, this team still should be a top 2 or 3 NL team in ERA every year. IIRC, they are either middle of the pack or in the bottom tier.

 

Thoughts??

[Electron Blue]

I've definitely been frustrated about this in the past.

 

But I'd like to see some stats that support it, since I think it may just seem like the Cubs struggle more than other teams since I only watch the Cubs.

 

Who's good at rounding up those kinds of numbers?

[Roast]

 

Who's good at rounding up those kinds of numbers?

 

Someone put out a call for Fred!!!

[burnt out cubbie fan]

I'm pretty sure that every pitcher has problems in the first couple of innings several times over the course of a year. You just notice it with the Cubs because you watch or follow almost all of their games every year.

[Fred Hornkohl]

             1   2   3   4   5   6   7   8   9   Tot
CUBS        57  78  73  99  61 115  69  71  50   673
Opponents   87  84  61  70 111  61  70  82  53   679

 

On average, the CUBS score 74.8 runs per inning, and they give up 75.4. Their total given up for the first inning is a little higher than you might expect, but I'm just as concerned about their offensive total. 57 first inning runs is not good at all.

[Derwood]

it's not just the runs, it's constantly seeing 1st innings that last 20+ pitches

[Mizzou]

I needed a break from writing a paper for my corporate ethics class, so I looked at some numbers. I couldn't find anything that broke it down by inning, but Yahoo breaks it down by number of pitches. For pitches 1-15, our starter's ERA looks like this:

 

(Player, 2004, 2005)

Maddux, 2.93, 6.67

Zambrano, 4.50, 9.00

Prior, 7.02, 5.40

Wood, 2.51, 2.25

Rusch, 4.56, 6.00

 

Clearly, with the exception of Wood, our starters as a whole are not very good in the first inning. What's the cause? Too few warm up pitches? Too many? Bad coaching?

[Cubzfan64]

I've noticed the same thing the last 2 years especially (without really seeing any stats that bear it out). The other thing that has really become irritating is the high pitch counts early in the games from our starters - if we have an excellent relief pen it wouldn't be such a big deal, but we routinely seem to have starters at 100+ pitches by the end of the 5th inning, even in games where we're ahead or low scoring games.

 

I'd certainly like to see a change in pitching coaches personally.

[JGalt73]

I needed a break from writing a paper for my corporate ethics class, so I looked at some numbers. I couldn't find anything that broke it down by inning, but Yahoo breaks it down by number of pitches. For pitches 1-15, our starter's ERA looks like this:

 

(Player, 2004, 2005)

Maddux, 2.93, 6.67

Zambrano, 4.50, 9.00

Prior, 7.02, 5.40

Wood, 2.51, 2.25

Rusch, 4.56, 6.00

 

In honor of wasting time (though mine is at work), I looked at OPS by pitch for Zambrano, Maddux, and Prior for this year - I did this a couple weeks ago now...

 

Pitch	  Avg	  Z	    Prior	Maddux
0-15	   0.782	0.419	0.691	1.051
16-30	  0.734	0.538	0.872	0.537
31-45	  0.744	0.619	0.634	0.844
46-60	  0.750	0.870	0.521	0.742
61-75	  0.651	0.616	0.521	0.688
76-90	  0.752	0.646	0.803	0.743
91-105	 0.608	0.445	0.703	0.624
106-120   0.725	0.659	0.729	0.500
121-135   0.564	0.393	0.800	

 

Prior's troubles come in pitches 15-30: whether this is a terrible inning #1 or inning #2 with the 4-5-6 hitters is open for debate (I don't have the patience to check the game logs). He's unhittable in the middle innings and then is hittable after 75 pitches and sees slowly diminishing returns over 90-105, 106-120, 121+.

 

Maddux is horrid in pitches 1-15 with a 1.051 OPS against. He's then steady and gets slighly better for the rest of his pitches.

 

Zambrano is unhittable early, gets hit at 46-60 pitches (3rd/4th inning back at heart of order?) and then gets better until after 105 pitches - which he sees too regularly (though I will not vent that here).

 

Avg here is for all Cub pitchers, so the variance of these 3 is included...

_____

 

Some of this is obviously skewed as you do not get to later pitches if you are bad early. However, it does appear that we have some extremes with Z great early and Maddux horrible early. As a team, we do have our highest OPS in our 1st 15 pitches and steadily improve over the game.