TruffleShuffle

the comments at the bottom are the best. - yes all guys that nobody has heard of get a 4 year $4.75M major league deal. articles like this are catnip for idiots.

too bad dave kaplan isn't here, he'd say that this is the only exercising aramis will do all year.

some guy threw 180 innings in the southern league last year. andy sonnanstione threw 185.2 innings in 2006.

bob howry was basically worth what the cubs paid him - he was better than his contract in 2006-07 and then worse in 2008. i believe you should say scott eyre. for that matter, jason marquis was certainly worth more than the $21M contract the cubs gave him. if you're going to bag on bad contracts, pick the right guys to bag on. but regardless of that, the cubs (a) can afford bad contracts more than the brewers, and (b) almost spent less per year on the guys you mentioned than the brewers spent on one of those terrible starting pitchers. the brewers aren't going to get better until they stop blowing $10m a year on pitchers who are, at best, back of the rotation filler.

yeah except they keep dropping pretty big coin on bums like braden looper, jeff suppan and randy wolf.

yeah it's not like you ever see guys like aramis ramirez, ryan church/jeff francoeur, josh willingham, jim edmonds, jhonny peralta, cliff lee, mike macdougal, sean casey, paul loduca, mike piazza, carlos delgado, shawn green, steve finley, roger clemens/david wells, jeff fassero, tom gordon or cliff floyd get traded within the division.

maybe losing 3 out of their last 4 to a terrible team like the cubs will wake the sleeping bear that is the 2010 st louis cardinals.

as long as they don't replace hendry with steve phillips... that idiot traded scott kazmir for victor zambrano!!!!

i'm sure norv turner will make the necessary adjustments at halftime

english please

Or unless you watched the game and noticed more movement on his pitches or enjoyed the way he got out of trouble in the first by striking out Rasmus on three straight off-speed pitches. What is frustrating about Shark is that he has all of the tools to be a good/great pitcher he just can't seem to put everything together. I agree that he e wasn't dominating by any means, but he showed enough to have hope that he might turn the corner some day. there were 3 line outs by cardinal hitters and a deep fly out by rasmuswith the bases loaded, and he allowed 11 baserunners in 5.2 innings. that's not good.

great outing for samardzija, as long as you look at runs allowed and nothing else.

Question. Did he fumble this much while he played at Iowa? He only really played one year at Iowa full time (he was a back up the first couple of years an played mostly in garbage time) but I don't remember him fumbling often. ESPN said he didn't fumble but I don't know if they just don't keep that stats on that or if it's actually true but now he definitely has issues with it. what happened to albert young at iowa? he really looked like he was going to be a star there, and then tailed off his last two years. i'm just curious because he went to my high school.

i feel like the cards should have at least 4 runs right now. samardzija still sucks.

http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/

drop justin upton add paul konerko

do people realize yet that alex gordon might just not be that good? he hasn't had a lot of success at the major league level in 3 years, he's got injury problems and now he's not playing 3B, which makes his bat less valuable. plus he's 26 years old. i know he hit the [expletive] out of the ball in college and the minors, but don't there have to be major questions about whether it's going to come together for him at the big league level?

i did an auction draft and one guy was on autodraft (which is a recipe for disaster - 10 team auction league and you're the only autodraft person). anyway, for whatever reason the thing just kept piling up RBs - it drafted 8 for his team when you can start a max of 3, and probably should only start 2 given the scoring system. it also gave him a lot of WRs, and completely ignored QB until it was the last vacant spot on his team, at which point it grabbed matt leinart. the scoring system also happens to favor starting two QBs a week, and his only one is matt leinart. awesome.

now that is a great ending.

hopefully when they enshrine wade phillips in canton they put him next to vince lombardi, because he is just that good.

i hope your entire team gets herpes

i think we've reached a new low. ONE post during a game.

Z has been relatively consistent when it comes to babip, and consistently below the league average. This season sticks out like a sore thumb. A lot of babip is luck, but you have to factor in some observational stuff, like how often a pitcher is being squared up by hitters. You can expect a guy who gives up a lot of ropes to have a higher babip than one who gets hitters to beat the ball into the ground a lot. In August, when Z really turned it on, his LD% dropped precipitously, and his gb rate almost doubled. That's not all luck. This year Z has a career high babip, his highest LD% since 2002 and has by far had his most fb heavy gb/fb ratio. If I had to hazard a guess as to why most of this year has been sub-par for Z, I would say it is because he has missed up in the zone more than usual, combined with decreased velocity and a bit of bad luck. the higher LD% would explain the increase in BABIP but not the GB/FB ratio. fly balls are turned into outs more frequently than ground balls. but here's something interesting. this fangraphs article says that in 2007, line drives were hits 73% of the time, ground balls 24% and fly balls 15%. when you look at an extreme ground ball pitcher - say, brandon webb - his expected BABIPs from 2004-08 were .310, .317, .310, .311, .297. his actual BABIPs were .295, .305, .293, .294, .297. i think there's enough information to say that webb has not simply been lucky his entire career. one factor could be infield defense, but i note the same trend with guys like derek lowe, aaron cook, chien-ming wang when he was healthy - the extreme GB guys post BABIP's better than their xBABIP. the explanation i can come up with is that all ground balls are not created equal, and their style of pitching is such that balls are grounded more weakly than against GB-FB neutral pitchers and fly ball pitchers. interestingly enough, in derek lowe's two worst years from 2002-09 (2004 and 2009), his LD% did not change greatly but his FB% went up (and hence his GB% went down). using the xBABIP formula, one would expect his BABIP to be lower in those years where he gave up more fly balls, but he actually had very poor BABIPs in those years. so perhaps this suggests that in 2004 and 2009, lowe was either missing his spots more or not getting as much sink on the ball, so the ground balls being put into play were, on average, harder ground balls than the ones hit in other years. one last semi-related note. i also came across this article on fangraphs that compared a fly ball-heavy pitcher (barry zito) to a ground ball-heavy pitcher (webb). what the author found was that while webb pitched down in the zone a bit more frequently than zito, webb's expected ground ball rate was just 48% versus 44% for zito. yet webb's actual rate was 66% versus 39% for zito. so the main reason that pitchers have a strong tendency in one type of batted ball is not because they consistently pound a certain part of the zone, but because of the way that they pitch. i always assumed that ground ball pitchers just pitched around the knees most of the time, but that does not appear to be the case.

http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=878