Investing & Maybe Fantasy Baseball

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

If you read my pitcher rankings for this week you’ll see I saw a glimmer of hope with Jarrod Parker because he was a two start pitcher @Cleveland and @Seattle. Well I just finished watching his start and it was the worst start I’ve seen all year. All four home runs he surrendered were pitches that missed (or were left) up in the zone. Throughout the entire game there were runners on base; he was pitching behind in the count more often than not and bounced a lot of balls in the dirt. I’m not surprised he’s tied in the Majors with five wild pitches. There’s something wrong with Parker and I have no problem if you want to drop him in ten team mixed leagues.

Similar to Parker, Jeremy Hellickson has underperformed to begin the year and today was a continuation of his poor performance. Even though he was staked to a seven run lead he was only able to throw five innings while allowing three earned runs, six hits and four walks. The reason for his struggles was the command of his pitches was loose all game, which lead to him throwing a lot of pitches outside the strike zone. Since his command was off he also used a lot of pitches to try to make the perfect pitch, being overly cautious instead of being aggressive and challenging hitters.

Speaking of overly cautious, Andrew Cashner pitched a solid game against the Double-A lineup known as the Marlins. However, I bet fantasy owners who started him today (or this week) were expecting more than three strikeouts. His problem throughout the game was throwing the ball for strikes, only throwing 57 percent of them. With a fastball that sits in the mid-90s I wish he would have used it more often in order to generate more swings and misses, but according to the Padres TV commentators the Padres coaching staff wanted him to pitch more to contact so he would have quicker innings and therefore go longer in games, which he did; this year was the first time he pitched into the seventh inning.
Joel Hanrahan left the game today with an arm/elbow injury. I don’t how long he may be out, but if you’re looking for the pitcher next in-line I would say its Junichi Tazawa.