April in the Rear View Mirror

Yesterday's Recap
Well yesterday's game was a microcosm of April. Sort of decent starting pitching, at least enough to allow the team to win, then a blown lead by the bullpen, followed by the inability for the team to score runs or at least hit while men are on base. Another loss. A miserable road trip at 1 - 5 especially when 3 games are against a team that isn't supposed to win more than 70 games this year. Meanwhile the D-backs won again and continue to be the class of the NL. The Roxs have dug a big hole!

April in the Rear View Mirror

Well at least April is over! One good thing...134 games to play! I imagine after the excitement that was last season the Roxs were anxious to be playing again. Maybe a bit too excited. The opening festivities probably didn't help much as the constant reminder of what they did continued to play on the big screen day after day. Think the D-backs didn't notice how they were humbled last October? Anyway baseball has a short memory and the Roxs need to move on and remember how they got there. Decent starting pitching, no errors, timely hitting, and good relief. What April showed was that Cook can pitch, defense needs some shoring up, hitting needs to be consistent, and relief is still the toughest job in baseball. Obviously last year showed that starting horribly isn't a death sentence but I don't think you can hope for a torrid finish to just get you into the playoffs again. What do the numbers say?

Historical Winning Percentage vs Pythagorean Winning Percentage:

Playing below average. Frightening thing is that they tend not to play well in May either. I do think though that only 10 of the first 28 games being at home was a big reason for the record woes. Coors Field is a tremendous home field advantage that does help the team get on track.

Runs Scored vs Runs Allowed Historical:

Well basically the Roxs didn't score alot of runs (below average) while allowing more runs than average. Based on projections (83 wins) scoring 825 runs and allowing 802 the Roxs just ain't scoring in April (the straight line is number of runs to reach 825 after 162 games)!

Team pitching is averaging about 5.2 inning a start, with about 3 K's per start, and averaging a game score of about 46 (remember 50 is a quality start). Team batting is averaging about 4 runs per game but leaving about 8 baserunners stranded and striking out about 7 times a game!

Interesting trend of this analysis is that last year at 10-16 the Roxs scored 10% of their plate appearances and 30% of the runners that did get on base scored. This year at 11-17 the Roxs again scored 10% of their plate appearance (114 runs and 1,145 plate appearances) and scored 30% of the runners that made it safely (114 runs and ~380 base runners).