Aaron Kennelly

I'm so happy Hawk was there to see it. "You gotta be bleeping me."

Good enough to rank fifth among our position players. :lol: And none of the five are Jason Heyward.

Nearly 6 now.

Stop being a bitch. We won take a deep breath and relax. I think we need to patch this panicky part of your emotional code up. http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/inkfish/files/2012/12/67e4e-fishonaline.jpg Tommy was part of the problem; he didn't even get a hit tonight. No post-game snack for him.

Adding +1 on the run differential just will not suffice. We are going to need that 20-run game tomorrow for me to forget about this.

Ugh, now we probably aren't even under-performing our pythag anymore, are we?

Filthy.

Won't somebody think of the run differential!?

Nah, we'll get out of this and tack on three more.

Addi can leap so high.

Addi! Getting that OPS where it belongs. He's asserting his blossoming superstar status.

I really don't get how people can be scared when this team is playing, to say nothing of being scared when we are up three runs. We are historically good. We win every game. I will not be scared until we are facing elimination in the playoffs and down at least six runs. I mean, I've expected us to win every game, for pretty much the whole game, in every game we've played, except that stupid Reds game that I didn't see.

If you haven't noticed, we don't lose this year. We could have given up 6 runs that inning and still won.

It's alright, Javy. I still love you. And Pedro is going to strike Kemp out here.

Gleyber was 3-3 with a double, a walk, and a stolen base. Contreras and Almora are both 2-4 with no K's. Almora also stole a base.

Thanks, Jon. Got us an extra inning and did it pretty quickly. That'll do.

A little late to the game thread, but let me just say that I love Javier Baez. We are so damn good.

HR/FB ratios are not crazy predictive. Soler's has a decent chance of going up, especially when the wind blows out. Yeah, looking at LD% and HR/FB% is a little silly right now. I mean, he's hit 24 fly balls all year.

Eddy Martinez homer.

Caratini has a .422 OBP.

They have to put money in the jar every time they time they ground out. It was full because of Ryan Zimmerman.

We still employ Gary Jones as our third base coach.

The two most commonly used advanced stats for defense are DRS and UZR. As a team, we rank second in UZR and first in DRS. According to these stats, we've saved somewhere around 15 or 16 runs above the average team with our defense. So, basically, our defense is saving a run every other game, on average, that an average defensive team would give up. That's a very significant amount. We could also look at things like our FIP, which is fielding independent pitching, which basically takes defense out of the equation. This stat is looking at walks, hit by pitch, strikeouts, and homers -- things a pitcher is solely in control of. So this puts everyone on a level playing field. There's no accounting for luck or good or bad fielding here. A team who has an ERA lower than their FIP has either been very lucky or very good defensively. Our FIP is 3.13 and our ERA is 2.48. Along the same lines, you could look at our pitchers' BABIP, or batting average on balls in play. This is looking at balls that our fielders have to make a play on. The second lowest BABIP in the league is the White Sox at .271. We are at .251. Now there is probably some other stuff going on here. BABIP isn't a perfect tool to measure anything. Some pitchers are going to get weaker contact than others -- Arrieta. Luck will skew things a lot. There could be some weird stuff happening because of defensive positioning. There's a litany of other things that can affect BABIP, which ensures that it won't be a perfect measure. However, when balls have been put in play against us, our fielders have clearly done alright at turning them into outs.

Zobrist looks bad because he is old and slow. He is sure-handed, though. So he can make up for his lack of range some. Also, we keep measuring him up against Javier Baez. So he looks worse in that respect, because we are measuring him against Javier horsefeathering Baez and not some other random second baseman. Zobrist certainly isn't good, but he's not bad enough to offset the awesomeness we have elsewhere. Soler is our only truly bad defender and he's only played 125 innings in the outfield this year. We have, like, four or five guys -- Heyward, Russell, Baez, Rizzo, Ross -- that could win a Gold Glove. How could anyone think our defense has been bad? I mean, have you seen these guys play?

According to BP, Berg has an 82% GB% this year, after being at 83% in Eugene and 73% in Myrtle Beach last year.