Chronicles of the Lads

MIDSEASON UPDATE
I thought I'd take a look at how our hitters and pitchers are doing, based on the same Base Runs formulation I used way back when before the season started. As it's based on runs per plate appearance, I needed some way to put hitters and pitchers on equal footing. As the league tends to average about .120 runs per plate appearance, I used that as the base. Hitters were compared to one-half of that figure, and pitchers to one-half above it. I park-adjusted that based on the fact that the Big A has been a good pitching park this year, so for hitters it comes out to how high their Base Runs per Plate Appearance is above .057, and for pitchers how much lower their BR/PA is than .190.

So, on a per plate appearance basis:

Rodriguez    .146

Glaus        .146

Guerrero     .131

Donnelly     .111

Shields      .109

DaVanon      .109

Anderson     .093

Guillen      .089

Figgins      .082

Escobar      .078

Gregg        .076

Ortiz        .075

Sele         .072

Lackey       .070

Erstad       .063

Washburn     .056

MolinaB      .050

Eckstein     .043

Kennedy      .043

Quinlan      .041

MolinaJ      .038

Percival     .036

Salmon       .030

Halter       .024

Colon        .016

Kotchman     .010

Mondesi      .008

Paul        -.028

Amezaga     -.032

Riggs       -.034

BTW, I don't know or care if that's supposed to be BR/PA above replacement level, or marginal win level or whatever ... I think things can get silly when you start trying to define that stuff. I'm just trying to put everyone on equal ground.

It should really be no surprise that K-Rod is our best player per plate appearance, and looking at Colon this way (worse than Halter!) shows just how bad he's been. It's also interesting to see that Troy Percival has been about as "good" as Kennedy and Eckstein -- and it was a bit surprising for me to learn that Erstad has been better than all of them. (Of course, I'm not taking defense into account here.)

Let's look how it stacks up when you account for playing time; the below represents the above figure multiplied to plate appearances to derive Runs Better Than Whatever You Want To Call This Threshold:

Guerrero     46.9

Escobar      32.6

Lackey       30.3

Guillen      29.8

Shields      25.9

Rodriguez    25.2

Figgins      25.2

Washburn     22.9

Sele         20.4

DaVanon      20.0

Ortiz        19.5

Glaus        18.1

Gregg        16.4

Anderson     15.7

Erstad       13.4

Kennedy      12.7

Eckstein     12.4

MolinaB       8.7

Colon         7.3

MolinaJ       5.1

Salmon        3.7

Percival      3.6

Quinlan       3.2

Donnelly      2.8

Halter        2.6

Kotchman      1.2

Mondesi       0.3

Riggs        -0.5

Paul         -0.7

Amezaga      -2.5

Again, no surprises to see Vlad at the top. It may seem surprising to see Escobar and Lackey so high, but it's not once you think about it. Kelvim Escobar has 416 plate appearances against him this season; John Lackey has 430. No Angel hitter has more than Vlad's 357.

You know how you sometimes hear people saying that starting pitchers shouldn't be elibible for the MVP because they only go every fifth day? This demonstrates how silly that thinking is. Even bad pitchers have more plate appearances against than good hitters have plate appearances.

Yet more proof of how much our starters have hurt us ...

UPDATE: I had a minor error in my spreadsheet that I have corrected, so this is a slightly different list than I had up yesterday.