Rox Talk - Week 7

The Week That Was

A 4-3 week against the Braves and Tigers. The Roxs currently stand at 18-25. Eleven games back from division leading Los Angeles in fifth place. Currently 7-10 at home and 11-15 on the road, the Roxs have matched its opponents 212-212, second week in a row(?) (expected wins is 22 versus historical wins at 19). On pace for 68 wins with 799 runs scored and 799 runs against.

Helton got his 2,000th hit! And a winning record for the week. Rox finally return home, having played the fewest home games of any MLB team at 17. This is either a good sign (?) or not since they are 7 - 10 at home this year. Teams seem to come into Coors just assuming they will hit. I wonder if players have a tendency to hit better when coming to Coors. I mean pre-Humidor this was a no-brainer question but since the ball doesn't seem have the same get-up-and-go it once had do players disregard this and still hit better?

Here is a table of the number of hits the team had 3 games before Coors, at Coors, 3 games after Coors and their season average (Giants is the average of only two games). In hindsight doing this table really has too many variables. A lot probably depends on what team they were playing before the Rox, after the Rox, on the road versus at home, and some of these games were played at Houston and San Diego. I guess the only meaningful number is the bottom line where teams scored about 7.2 and 7.7 runs before and after Coors and averaged about 10.7 hits while at Coors. Is Coors worth about 3 more hits to a team? If you figure teams get about 33 at bats per game then a team is hitting about .075 better at Coors.

And runs score...

Pitching was key for Week 7 with both the starting and relief pitching getting on the positive side fo the WPA curve. Looking at the graph the pitching is just up and down. No consistency and you have to have some pitching week in and week out to be successful. Maybe I shouldn't be so hard on Hurdle and perhaps we should be calling for Apodaca head?