Investing & Maybe Fantasy Baseball

To begin the game it was vintage David Price. He was pounding the strike zone, working both sides of the plate while striking out two. However, this was short lived as the next six innings the Blue Jays had runners on base every inning. Some of the hits allowed were of the bloop variety and he pitched well enough to win the game, but this wasn’t, yet again, another Cy Young performance from Price. His fastball averaged 93-94 mph, which is still down from last year, but the best takeaway from the game was he threw a fastball at 95 mph with his 108 pitch of the game. The biggest trend about his fastball is not the velocity, but the substantial decrease of times he’s throwing it. Last year he threw the fastball 55 percent of the time to righties and 81.5 percent to lefties. This year its 41 percent to righties and 77 percent to lefties. His fastball still has enough velocity to be used a lot more and if he starts using it more he should see better results than he’s had this year.

Of course after the day after I write an article chronicling Eric Hosmer’s hitting struggles, he goes out and hits a home run. If you watch the home run you’ll notice the ball was on the outer half of the plate. Hosmer’s problem isn’t with pitches on the outer half; .439 slugging since 2011. Instead it’s pitches on the inner half. Yesterday he didn’t see any pitches on the inner half, but I’m glad he got his first home run and I want to see the adjustments he continues to make.

Like Price, R.A. Dickey pitched well enough to win the game and flashed (in bursts) the pitcher we saw last year. The knuckleball, at times, had great breaking movement and other times it fluttered in the zone. The velocity of the knuckleball was primarily in the mid to upper 70s and not the 80s we saw last year.

Since being acquired by the Royals on Jeremy Guthrie, in 21 starts, 2.86 ERA, 1.15 WHIP, 15.4 percent strikeout rate and 5.9 percent walk rate. I’m believer and he should be owned in all leagues.

After his start yesterday Ryan Vogelsong increased his ERA to 7.78 and WHIP to 1.73 for the year. If you read my fantasy guide you will have seen I saw this coming. I’ll admit I didn’t think he would be this bad, but the the low three ERA pitcher of 2010-11 was not coming back.

If you’re a frustrated Eric Hosmer owner like I am you will want to read my fantasy breakdown in my debut article on Eric Hosmer at Through the Fences.

I’m sure by now you’ve all heard about the botched call in the A’s game last night, but if you want to see it again here you go. Also if you want to see another #umpshow look what happened to Joe Maddon and in Houston last night. Luckily for Tampa Bay and Houston those blown calls didn’t effect the outcome of the game.

Mike Minor was pretty good, throwing 63 percent strikes while only allowing four hits, three walks and seven strikeouts. He did run into trouble in the second inning with the bases loaded with zero outs. However, he was helped out by an amazing throw by Evan Gattis to throw out the runner tagging from third base. The best stat I’m seeing with Minor is he’s not walking anyone; his walk rate so far is 4.6 percent while last year it was 7.7 percent last year.

I had a chance to watch Ricky Romero and Allen Webster implode. Of the two, Romero looked better, throwing quality strikes in bursts. The weirdest factoid about Romero’s start was of the seven batters he faced had three of them had 0-2 counts, which tells me suffered from bad luck because a couple of the hits he allowed a couple of weak hits. Webster was very sharp against the first batter he faced, throwing a lot of quality strikes and one really good changeup. However, after that he could not command any of his pitches and when he was able to throw strikes, they were right in the middle of plate. When the ball is thrown in that location, major league hitters will barrel up those pitches and that’s what happened last night.

Below is Webster’s pitch frequency heatmap.

On Monday James Shields’ pitched brilliantly (against Chris Sale), pitching eight scoreless innings and only allowing four base runners while striking out nine. The Royals had a 1-0 lead entering the top of the ninth inning and the Ned Yost, the Royals Manager, brought in Greg Holland to close the game out. Holland proceeded to allow three straight hits to the first three batters, filling up all the bases with zero outs. As this was happening Twitter blew up; the consensus was it was a bad move to bring in Holland. When I was watching the game I didn’t mind bringing in Holland. As we all know Holland gave up the lead and the game went into extra innings.

I may be a day late with this rant, but I was listening to the Baseball Show with Rany and Joe and it got my creative juices flowing. My rant is about the lineup construction for the game. Below is the lineup. Why was Eric Hosmer batting fourth and Salvador Perez batting eighth? Since 2012 Hosmer has a slash line of .231/.296/.313 against lefties while Perez has a slash line of .357/.394/.601. It’s obvious Yost wanted to go right-left-right with the hitters, which is extremely useful during the late innings. However, why punt the first 5-7 innings in favor of a small advantage in 1-2 innings? Perez should be hitting fourth and it’s not even close. Why is Chris Getz is playing while Miguel Tejada, who has a slash line of .274/.327/.448  against lefties, sitting on the bench? What’s the point of having players with platoon advantages such as Tejada of George Kottaras if you’re not willing to deploy them appropriately. I’m not trying be a revisionist, but if the lineup was optimal the Royals may have scored more than one run against Chris Sale and could have won the game.

Athletics manager, Bob Melvin, changes his lineup every day to play to his rosters strengths and the opposing pitchers weaknesses. The same is also true about line construction with Joe Maddon, but he gets enough credit already. I’m not a Royals fan but I did predict them to win the AL Central and I’ve watched many of their games. Needless to say I’m rooting for them to do well and they have enough talent to make the postseason if they roster is deployed properly, but I don’t think they will be.

1. Alex Gordon
2. Alcides Escobar
3. Billy Butler
4. Eric Hosmer
5. Lorenzo Cain
6. Mike Moustakas
7. Jeff Francoeur
8. Salvador Perez
9. Chris Getz