ERV Boxscore for August 15, at Philadelphia
That was refreshing. We grabbed the game the by throat early and never let up. Well, Livan stumbled a bit out of the gate, but righted himself and pitched a fine game. Eddie Rodriguez stumbled on a nice lineup, too -- Schneider finally gets his due and moves up a slot, and the 3,4,5 & 6 hitters combine for a positive 4.67 WV, which totally rocks. Preston Wilson would have had a plus 4.0 WV if he hadn't grounded into a double play, but we must know by now that some things are indelibly part of the Nats experience, like the Guzman booted grounder.
ERV Win: Preston Wilson
ERV Loss: Brett Myers & Jimmy Rollins
3 Most Valuable Plays:
(1) P. Wilson's HR in the 3rd (2.20)
(2) P. Wilson's HR in the 1st (1.98)
(3) P. Burrell's Single in the 1st (1.46)
posted by DM @ 11:30 PM
6 comments
6 Comments:
Thinking about line-up issues, given the # of home runs, it looks like the line-up change wasn't that important for this game. We were going deep, not stringing together consecutive hits...
Schneider's night:
(1st, 2 out) 5 pitch walk
(3rd, 2 out) foul out on an 0-1 pitch
(6th, 1 out) ground out on a 2-0 pitch
(8th, 2 out) homered ona 3-1 pitch
For the most part, it seemed that Philly was trying to pitch around Schneider to get to the easy out of Castilla (which 3 out of the 4 times would have ended the inning). I propose that if the normal lineup were used, Castilla would have just ended the innings and Schneider would have started off the next inning those 3 out of 4 times. Then again, he still probably would have been pitched around to get to the easy out of Guzman.
Whatever. My position is that I felt that Schneider in the 6th hole made us more aggressive rather than having our easy outs break up our best hitters (3-4-5-6 from last nite)
I'm not sure that I'm convinced that "protection" for hitters is a reality, but it does seem that Wilson got better pitches to hit with Schneider behind him rather than Vinny.
The beginning of this article gives a great example of protection:
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/blog/entry?date=20050801&name=simmons
I couldn't find it on Baseball Reference, but who hit behind Bonds when he hit 73 homers as compared to when 2002 or 2003 when he didn't have 50 HR's (he had almost 150 or more BB every year)
I used to be anti-protection too, DM. I've seen the studies -- probably the same ones you've read.
But when you've seen teams IBB the #3 batter to get to Vinny Castilla, you've gotta think that there's going to be an outlier or two in the study.
Part of the problem with the production studies is probably akin to that BJ essay from a few months back -- the attempts to isolate the occurences get so bogged down by relatively small sample sizes and just random noise, that they might not actually say what you think they are.
I certainly don't know, but I'm entertaining the possibility of what my eyes are seeing.
My "gut" tells me that while the protection might be real when viewed in terms of only 2 hitters (e.g. #4 and #5 slot), there may be other effects elsewhere in the batting order that minimize or offset the benefits of protection which we don't notice. Something like moving Schneider up helps Wilson but hurts Schneider, so it may all be a wash.
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