Friday’s Follies

September 21st, 2012 | by Ray Flowers |

Miguel Cabrera is hitting .333 with 41 homers and 130 RBIs. He leads the AL in batting average and RBIs, and is one homer behind Josh Hamilton for the AL HR lead. That’s right folks, he is on the cusp of the Triple Crown. Will he win the award over everyone’s darling, Mike Trout? If late season performance sways voters than he surely will. Since the start of August, here are each man’s numbers.

Cabrera: .360-16-45-35 with a 1.145 OPS
Trout: .274-9-22-38 with a .811 OPS (Trout does have 15 SBs)

Thanks to Elias for this one. Chris Carpenter will be the first pitcher in the history of baseball to make his season debut after his teams 150th game played when that pitcher made 30 or more starts in the previous season. For more on Carpenter see my September 20th Mailbag piece.

Yu Darvish has had an up and down season, but he also has 214 Ks which are the 9th most for any rookie hurler since 1893. Of course he’s not really a rookie since he pitched for five seasons is Japan. Only once in those five seasons did he fail to record 200 Ks (he had 167 in 182 innings in 2009). He had 276 Ks in 232 innings last year for the Nippon Ham Fighters (I’m not making that name up).

I mentioned this at the BaseballGuys Twitter account last night, but for those of you that missed it – Eric Hosmer is on the cusp of something pretty impressive given just how dreadful his overall production has been. Yes he’s hitting .240 with 59 RBIs an a .686 OPS, but did you realize that he is just one homer from a 15/15 season? Those numbers stand out as there have been only 10 seasons of 15/15 by a first baseman in the 21st century with only three first sackers pulling off the trick more than once (Derrek Lee three times, Albert Pujols and Ryan Klesko two times).

I don’t normally look forward to Friday’s like most people do. Why? Because sports never stop. Think of it. When you are heading out to your in-laws for the holiday celebration in the car with the two kids in the backseat yelling, what are you doing? You’re listening to the radio (hence I work all the holidays for Sirius XM Fantasy Sports Radio). Also, what do you do on the weekends? You watch sports. Therefore, it’s pretty obvious what I’m doing on the weekend – I’m working, hard at this point covering the NFL (my Sunday’s start at 7 AM PST when I tweet start/sit for @SiriusXMFantasy on Twitter. The Tweeting ends at 10 A PST, I then watch the games all day, and then do the radio thing at 7-10 PM PST which means my Sunday’s are 15 hours of work. Of course there are worst things to be doing than watching football, trust me I get that, but it’s still a long day). So what I’m basically trying to say is that I do appreciate Friday’s now. Given that I’m in all day Sunday, starting before the sun comes, I had better enjoy my Friday nights cause it’s pretty tough to be focused at 7 AM Sunday if I’m all about getting bombed on Saturday night until 4 AM.

Oh Carlos Quentin, you are killing me in my NL-only league. I know you are always hurt, I knew that when I drafted you, but this is pretty awful my friend. In each of the past three seasons you have hit at least 21 homers while appearing in 130, 99, 131 and 118 games. So I was thinking, on the safe side, 120 games worth of action. With less than two weeks left in the regular season Quentin has hit 16 homers in just 81 games played. Ugh. Too bad too as he’s averaging a homer every 17.6 at-bats after posting a 2009-11 mark of 17.25.

Chris Young is another player killing me in my NL-only league. Young is doing his normal torpedo job in the batting average category with a .227 mark (career .239) and his OPS is .740 (career .755) as expected. However, it’s the counting categories that have been the disappointment. After appearing in at least 134 games each of the previous five seasons, and four times he’s hit at least 148 games played, he’s appeared in all of 96 games this season. After hitting 47 homers the past two years he has 14 this season. After stealing 50 bags the past two years he has eight thefts this year. Let me state it another way. The past two years Young has averaged 24 homers and 25 steals, yeah that’s damn good. This year he has 14 homers and eight steals. That’s awful. He’s also scored 36 runs after posting at least 85 runs in four of the previous five seasons. Unmitigated disaster meet Chris Young.

By Ray Flowers

Tags: Carlos Quentin, Chris Carpenter, Chris Young, Eric Hosmer, Miguel Cabrera, Mike Trout, Yu Darvish