Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Mark Ott Problem

After delving into the reports it didn't take me long to figure out the problem. All I had to do was look at the pitching reports. Does anybody look at these reports? They will tell you what is going on and what is wrong with your team in the pitching realm. If you do look at the reports and only the TOTALS section your seeing the big picture but it can be rather opaque. Delve deeper, HOME and AWAY will paint a bigger picture and EXTENDED will add to it. The reports for batting are the same way, just have to look at them to determine the problem, fixing them is another story. The Fielding report leaves a little to be desired because there are actually only two options available, Totals and Extended.

KC Home Pitching
Actually the entire pen is having a problem at home and that isn't evident on the road. The starting pitching at home is relatively fine except for Jonathan Lollar who probably doesn't have enough control. After looking at the Fielding reports I determined that it isn't defense. That leaves the real problem to park factors. KC is more or less an odd medium to low power hitters park, put the ball in play and there is a good chance for a hit. So the pen is getting eaten alive, with contact hitters.

For the most part after looking at the reports, it looks like the entire pen fears hitters at home. This is shown by the OAV, WHIP and ERA. If you want to know, I judge a pitcher by his OAV more than anything else, anything over .275 is bad and over .300 is real bad. Also, sometimes it is a pitchers role, some like to be a long reliever as opposed to a Setup type, some like to be a setup A, some Setup B and can change from year to year. The pitchers role has to be ferreted out and it isn't always easy. I only use Setup A and B for the pen, so I find out which role they pitch best in and leave them there. Starters actually pitch better in certain slots and I have never figured that one out as to why.

Even though the pitchers ratings look fine with the current setup. The only two things that I can think of that will help is a backup PC catcher or upping the Call Pen to a 4 for the entire pen except the closer.

The Call Pen at a 4 is the cheapest thing to try. When a pitcher runs into a jam, he will be given one chance (normally) to get out of the inning. If he fails, it is off to the showers. The down side to this, it could run through a pen pretty quickly. If you have a short pen, this could be bad if the starter doesn't make it to the sixth or seventh inning. This action is more advantageous to a long pen. For those that don't understand the concept of long/short pens, a long pen is mostly made up of pitchers that can pitch 2 innings or more while the makeup of a short pen is a bunch of 1 inning wonders with at least 1 and maybe 2 long relievers.

KC has two very good catchers at the ML level, unfortunately both are actually starters IMO. When the PC of one is 56 and the other is 60, the pen is not getting any help late in the game from this aspect. After looking at the minors, I came across two possibilities that could help, a 74 and an 85. The 74 would add 14+ points of PC, not exactly sure if is enough to help but could be a start, the 85 of course could add almost 25 to 29. The drawback of course, always one, it would cost a good part time hitter and maybe a little loss of arm defense behind the plate. Of course there is the chance that it won't help for some reason, I have had that happen also. The change won't be noticeable over night either as it will take a few games.

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