Prospectus Triple Play: Houston Astros, St. Louis Cardinals, Texas Rangers

Houston
Astros

• Waste Not, Want Not: We’ll use an example from the Astros game
  against St. Louis on June 4, but any Houston fan could name a half-dozen
  others. Craig Biggio led off the game with a double to left
  field, bringing up shortstop Adam Everett.

  Nice start, right? On the way to a big inning, right? Wrong, if you’re Jimy
  Williams, who’s never met a pointless sacrifice bunt that didn’t seem like a
  good strategic decision, especially with Everett at the plate. So far in
  2004, Everett has 19 sacrifice bunts in 61 games, by far the most in the
  majors.

  So, as ever, Williams asked Everett to lay down a bunt. He couldn’t get the
  bunt down, and the Astros eventually stranded Biggio at second base.

  In James
  Click’s series on the sacrifice bunt, we learned that the threshold for
  a bunt in a runner on second, no out situation is .249/.305/.363–that is,
  if the batter’s numbers are below that threshold, a bunt makes sense.
  Otherwise, the batter should hit away.

  Everett is currently at .282/.316/.370 this year, which means that a bunt
  with a runner on second and no one out is a bad play with Everett at the
  plate (although, not as bad a play as you might think). And keep in mind,
  that situation is the best situation for a sacrifice bunt when you’re
  trying to maximize the number of runs you score; any other situation early
  in a game is an even worse time to lay one down.

  This is old news to most of you out there, but apparently Williams hasn’t
  gotten the memo on this. In a lineup that features four players with a VORP in double digits, Williams’
  penchant for throwing away outs and runs early in games is especially
  baffling, and if Houston comes up short in the NL Central, he’ll deserve a
  great deal of the blame.

• Striking out Father Time: Fourteen pitchers have won 15 or more
  games in the major leagues at age 40 or older. Last year, Roger
  Clemens joined that group, with his 17-9 season for the Yankees.

  This year in Houston, Clemens is trying to join another exclusive list. He
  finally lost to the Chicago Cubs on Monday, dropping his record to 9-1, as
  his ERA climbed to 2.46. His VORP on the season is 22.1, which means he’s
  already closing in on this list of pitchers who have posted VORPs of 30 or more in their 40s:

  
  PITCHER            YEAR   AGE   VORP
  ------------------------------------
  Alexander, Pete    1927    40   64.9
  Martinez, Dennis   1995    40   56
  Moyer, Jamie       2003    40   51.3
  Seaver, Tom        1985    40   50.8
  Spahn, Warren      1961    40   50.4
  Ryan, Nolan        1987    40   49.8
  Spahn, Warren      1962    41   49
  Quinn, Jack        1924    40   47.7
  Niekro, Phil       1979    40   46.2
  Quinn, Jack        1928    44   45.9
  Lyons, Ted         1942    41   44.7
  Young, Cy          1908    41   44.7
  Hough, Charlie     1988    40   42.4
  Ryan, Nolan        1989    42   40.1
  Quinn, Jack        1927    43   39.5
  Niekro, Phil       1984    45   39.5
  Ryan, Nolan        1991    44   38.8
  Alexander, Pete    1928    41   38.5
  Niggeling, Johnny  1944    40   38.1
  Wells, David       2003    40   36.1
  Jones, Sam         1933    40   35.8
  Spahn, Warren      1963    42   35.2
  Perry, Gaylord     1979    40   34.4
  Faber, Red         1929    40   33.4
  Jones, Doug        1997    40   31.2
  Young, Cy          1907    40   30.8
  Vance, Dazzy       1931    40   30.1
  
  

  This list is packed with names you might expect–Spahn, Ryan, Niekro, Young,
  Alexander. It’s no surprise to see Pete Alexander‘s 1927
  season, when he went 21-10, 2.52 for the St. Louis Cardinals, at the top of
  that list. Dennis Martinez‘s 1995 might come as a little
  more of a surprise.

  In 1995, Martinez posted a 12-5 record for the Cleveland Indians, and a 3.08
  ERA (vs. a league ERA of 4.63). That performance helped the Tribe to a
  100-44 record in the strike-shortened season before they eventually lost to
  the Atlanta Braves in the World Series.

  Jamie Moyer, Clemens’ comrade-in-agelessness, took the
  third spot with his 21-7, 3.27 mark last year, a stunning season that was
  obscured by the Mariners’ failure to catch the A’s in the AL West. Clemens
  might not climb to the heights at the top of this list, but barring a
  collapse, he seems a cinch to take his place as one of the most effective
  old pitchers in the game’s history, which is pretty good work for a guy who
  was given a Hummer H2 by the Yankees last fall in honor of his retirement.

St.
Louis Cardinals

• Why Don’t We Do it on the Road?: The ebb and flow of a season
  comes not just from a team’s performance over time. It also comes from the
  vagaries of the team’s schedule. A soft schedule or a lot of home games can
  lead to a hot streak, while a tough road schedule will often cause a little
  slide in the standings. But if you can play good baseball on the road
  against good teams, that’s when you can really make a move in the standings.

  That’s what the Cardinals did over the past month. After losing to Florida,
  3-2, on May 16, St. Louis was in fourth place in the NL Central, two games
  out of first. The Cards were embarking on a stretch where they played 20 of 25
  games on the road, including two visits to Wrigley Field to square off
  against the rival Cubs and a home-and-home against the Astros.

  They went 16-9 over that span, and now, after winning two games back at home against the Oakland A’s, sit on top of the division, two games
  up on the Reds and the Cubs, with the surprising Brewers just
  3.5 back, and the Astros 4.5 out of first.

  The Redbirds’ road record now stands at 23-12 on the year, a .657 winning
  percentage. Only 24 teams since 1901 have won games on the road at a better
  clip, topped by the Chicago Cubs in 1906, who went an unfathomable 60-15
  (.800) away from the West Side Grounds.

  Old-school baseball folks will tell you that pennants are won in September,
  not in May and June. But this year, the Cardinals and Cubs don’t play after
  July 20, and St. Louis and Houston will only play six times after the
  All-Star Break. If the Cards are playing in October, they’ll look back on
  this past month as the key to their season.

• Carpenter’s Tools: On August 13, 2002, Chris
  Carpenter of the Toronto Blue Jays gave up five runs to the Oakland
  Athletics and lost, 5-4. He didn’t throw another pitch in the major
  leagues until this season.

  Will Carroll has been talking about the difficulty of coming back from labrum problems in Under the Knife, but Carpenter is another pitcher who has beaten the odds, at least so far in
  2004. He’s got a 7-2 record with a 3.97 ERA, and that’s good for a 13.4 VORP.

  The good news, beyond his results, is that Carpenter has been throwing in
  the low- to mid-90s, in the same velocity range as before his labrum
  surgery. The bad news, if you’re a Cardinal fan, is that we still don’t have
  a lot of information on how pitchers recover from this sort of injury.

  Carpenter’s injury was a tear in the labrum, and he is still pitching
  through some pain. One thing to keep an eye on is his endurance, and what
  sort of workload he can–forgive us–shoulder. If he can continue to be
  effective through and past the All Star Break, it will be a big boost to the
  Cardinals, and more than they could have realistically hoped for.

• Higher Education: Maybe Michael Lewis should relocate to the
  banks of the Mississippi. In last week’s amateur player draft, St. Louis
  used just four of their 47 picks on high school players; that was the most
  college-heavy draft of any team.

Texas
Rangers

• Forever Young: In BP 2004, we wrote this
  about Michael Young:

  
  In a year when Young’s offensive production took a huge step forward, his
  fielding took a step backward, raising questions about his reputation in some
  circles as a world-beating second baseman. Young’s offensive spike came
  almost entirely from an uptick in singles–his isolated power rose only
  slightly, and his walk rate actually dropped–so there’s a good chance he’ll
  give some of it back this year.
  

  Well, that’s not quite what’s happened. True, Young’s not a world-beating
  second baseman any more. The Alex Rodriguez trade has
  turned him into a world-beating shortstop, at least to this point in the
  season. Right now, Young’s outperforming his 90th-percentile PECOTA
  projection, and he’s got the highest VORP of any shortstop in
  baseball (the second-best is Detroit’s Carlos Guillen, but that’s
  a story for another PTP).

  Why the jump? Young is showing a nice little bump in his isolated power,
  which has gone from .140 in 2003 to .184 so far this year. He’s also showing
  more patience at the plate with a BB/PA ratio of .062 in 2004, up from .051
  in 2003. There is still some cause for concern, as Young’s OPS is 259 points
  higher in the offensive Nirvana that is the Ballpark in Arlington. But a big
  home/road split at a higher level of production is something that the
  Rangers are more than happy to live with.

  This past off-season was dominated with talk of American League shortstops,
  with the A-Rod deal, the discussion of whether Rodriguez or Derek
  Jeter would play short in the Bronx, Miguel
  Tejada‘s signing in Baltimore, and Nomar
  Garciaparra‘s dwindling long-term prospects in Boston.

  Young was briefly in the news this spring, when Texas gave him a four-year,
  $10 million contract, a deal that many thought was overly generous. But if
  he continues to perform at this level, Young could make that look like the
  bargain of the year.

• Taking up Arms: Back on May 2, R.A. Dickey and
  the Texas Rangers beat Pedro Martinez and the Boston Red
  Sox, 4-1. The victory ran Dickey’s record to 4-1, and his ERA stood at 3.48.

  Then the bottom fell out. Dickey has since gone 0-5, with an 8.31 ERA.

  Currently, the Rangers are ninth in the American League in team ERA, at
  4.60. That’s a welcome change from the horrid 5.15 ERA that the Rangers staff
  posted in 2002, and miles better than the truly putrid 5.67 ERA Texas
  “achieved” in 2003. But as Dickey’s recent troubles show, there’s a little
  cause for concern. The Rangers’ ERA has been creeping up slowly over the
  course of the season.

  We all know that the Rangers are going to score runs–they’re tied with
  Boston and Detroit for fourth in the league in scoring. It’s the large
  improvement in their pitching that has kept them in the conversation with
  Oakland and Anaheim thus far this season; if they want to stay there, the pitching will
  have to stabilize.

• No Bull: The other half of the Rangers’ pitching equation has
  been a pleasant surprise, as their bullpen stands fourth in all of baseball
  in Adjusted Runs Prevented. Only the SoCal Axis–the Dodgers, Padres and Angels pens–have been stingier.

  The real surprise is that the Rangers have done it without anyone you’ve
  ever heard of. Jeff Nelson is the biggest name in their
  pen, and he hasn’t been dominating. On the other hand, Francisco
  Cordero has racked up a line of 7.4 ARP to go with his 2.08 ERA and 19 saves in 19
  chances, while Carlos Almanzar is 5-0 with a 2.90 ERA and
  5.4 ARP in 27 appearances as a setup man.