One Day Left

With one day left in the season, and so much left to be decided with the Rays/Sox and Braves/Cards tied for the Wild Card, you gotta love it. I hope the Rays and Cards make it. Just my personal preference.

Adam Dunn is having one of the worst seasons in the history of baseball. He was threatening to become just the second player ever, Rob Deer is the lucky winner, to have a batting average that is less than the players strikeout total. Oh Dunn has that trick pulled off with 177 punchouts and a .159 average, but it won’t officially be recognized because he is a handful of plate appearances below the number needed (502) to qualify for the batting title. In addition to that dreadful bit of news, Dunn has also lost one of the most impressive homer streaks in league history. From 2004-10, Dunn hit at least 38 homers in every season. This year he’s scored 36 runs. I don’t know what to say other than this is, like I wrote at the top, one of the worst performances in the history of baseball.

Matt Garza is one of the most consistent pitchers in baseball. He only went 10-10 in his first year in the NL, but he did strike out a career best 197 batters in 198 innings. Garza has made at least 30 starts and thrown at least 184.2 innings each of the past four years. Even more than that, look at his BAA marks – .245, .233, .248 and .245. How about his WHIP you say? I thought you would never ask – 1.24, 1.26, 1.25 and 1.26. I’m not making that up. Check it out.

Micah Owing is 8-0 as a reliever for the D’backs (he did make four starts). Bartolo Colon made 26 starts for the Yankees and recorded only eight wins.

Brandon Phillips is one hell of a ballplayer. He’ll end the 2011 season, he has a strained left quad, hitting .300 with 18 homers, 82 RBI, 94 runs scored and 14 steals. Since he joined the Reds in 2006 he’s tied for 4th at the position with 124 homers, he is 4th with 486 RBI, he’s 5th with 524 runs scored and 3rd with 135 steals. Like I said, he’s a hell of a ballplayer.

Jimmy Rollins would like to sign a 5-year contract this offseason to take him through his 38 year old season. I don’t know if anyone will give him that long a deal, but he proved he still has a lot left to give after an injury plagued 2010 season (Rollins has 16 homers, 63 RBI, 87 runs and 30 steals in 141 games for the Phillies). He’s also hit .271, a three year high. Moreover, for the 7th straight time in which he’s appeared in 135 games he stole 30 bags with 10 homers, 50 RBI and 75 runs. Those aren’t fantastic numbers, but for a shortstop they are strong.

Alfonso Soriano was nowhere near as bad as Adam Dunn, but it’s not like he hasn’t had some issues of his own in 2011. Soriano has hit 26 homers with 88 RBI, solid totals for the Cubs’ outfielder. Here is where it gets interesting. Soriano is hitting a terrible .244, and given that he has walked a mere 27 times, his OBP this season is a sickly .289. As a result of not getting on base very often, and the fact that 81 percent of his at-bats have come out of the 6th and 7th spots in the lineup, Soriano has scored only 50 runs. I’ll save you a trip to the calculator. That means Soriano has scored 52 percent of his runs on his own home runs.

By Ray Flowers

A Risk Worth Taking?

Besides me, who else is counting on Oliver Perez to have a big second half? From time to time I write about my National Fantasy Baseball Championship (NFBC) team, and that league consists of 15-teams with 30 players per roster. Given the depth of the penetration into the player pool, there are always a handful of players on each roster that might cause someone to pause if they are used to traditional 10-12 team leagues. So before you think – Ray is a doofus – realize we are talking about some pretty deep rosters here. Back to Oliver Perez.

Perez is one of the names that I picked up off waivers this season. A risky play? For sure as the man walks more batters per nine than just about any starter in the game, but oh does he look dominating when he is on. Problem is, that rarely occurs. Here’s to hoping it occurs, more often than not, the rest of way. That might be a fairly large wish though — perhaps I’ll leave that wish for the tooth fairy.

Why did I grab Perez? Well, after Andy Sonnanstine seemed to forget that the name of the game wasn’t to allow a run per inning (he has a 6.61 ERA), and Ian Snell thought he would try to pitch his way out of Pittsburgh with some awful work (5.36 ERA, 1.62 WHIP), I realized I needed something other than a staff consisting of names like Jamie Moyer. So I took a shot an picked up Perez, weeks ago, in the hope that he would come through. What other waiver-wire guy in a 15 team league has k-per-inning potential?

Another hurler with a similar skill set down to the potentially prolific K-rate as well as the atrocious walk rate is Brandon Morrow of the Mariners who we also picked up on the cheap off the waiver-wire (by the way, isn’t the picture above one of the best you have ever seen? For those of you that don’t know – a form of rookie hazing in baseball is having the youngsters carry the veterans gear, often in things like little girls backpacks). Possibly the only pitcher in baseball who has a more difficult time throwing strikes than Perez, Morrow has thrown 174 innings in his career while waling 115 batters leading to an embarrassing average of 5.95 walks per nine innings pitched in his brief career. Of course, his stuff is untouchable as his K/9 mark of 9.62 is superb. Obviously the kid has talent to burn, but until he starts throwing strikes more consistently he will be maddening to own (he should return from the minors to make a start of July 25th if everything goes according to plan).

The third arm in our Trifecta of Terror is Joba Chamberlain (and yes I’m still not sure if the terror will be most acutely directed toward opposing batters or my blood pressure). Joba clearly hasn’t performed as hoped for in his transition to the starting rotation as he has only four victories, a 4.25 ERA and a 1.56 WHIP through 17 starts this year. Still, his K/9 rate is 7.89 which is a strong mark, and if you add in his work out of the bullpen he has a 9.70 K/9 mark over 213.1 career innings. However, like the other two mentioned above, he is walking far too many batters, though by comparison his 4.25 BB/9 mark actually isn’t that awful.

So is rostering these three guys a risk worth taking? My club need wins and strikeouts, and these three could bring that. In fact, I can pretty easily dream up a scenario with the trio striking out nearly a batter per inning the rest of the way, but the key is will they be able to locate their pitches better, because without that, there ratios could be outright destructive. I know it’s a risk, but sometimes you have to take that leap of faith when the alternatives are guys like Vincente Padilla, Jeff Suppan and Micah Owings. I’m going to close my eyes, pray really hard, and hope these three potentially dominating arms are in fact dominating and not destructive to my fantasy squad. One can hope can’t he?

By Ray Flowers