Cubs 4, Phillies 1 (5.28.16)

In Commentary And Analysis by berselius39 Comments

OSS: Kyle Hendricks threw a Maddux in my heart

Three up

  1. Kyle Hendricks had his best start of the season, going the distance with seven strikeouts, no walks and six baserunners. He probably should have got the Maddux, but some miscommunication between Heyward and Zobrist in the ninth turned a lazy pop fly into a leadoff double for the Phils. Hendricks now has a 2.93 ERA and 2.74 FIP to go along with a 20.3% strikeout rate and 6.4% walk rate on the season. There was some reason to doubt that he would even get a rotation spot going into the year, but now he is nine starts into the year with stats even better than last year's. Perceptions are starting to shift and maybe people will stop treating him as the prototypical fifth starter that you're more than happy to skip when there are off days.
  2. Jason Heyward had a great day at the plate, doubling in his first two PAs. The first one was kind of bloop-y, but the second was a laser beam that got to the wall in no time at all.
  3. Ben Zobrist is so hot that the Iranian nuclear program monitors might want to check his bat to see if he has a miniaturized thermonuclear device inside. He picked up two more hits today, including a double that scored Heyward in the first.

Three down

  1. The only big complaint was the Heyward/Zobrist ball lost in the sun/miscomunication in the ninth that blew the shutout. They're both new to the Cubs, and Maddon mentioned it as a teachable moment in his postgame presser. Luckily the Cubs already had a big lead, 4-0 might as well be 40-0 against the Phillies offense. SouvenirCity on the twitters wondered if something like that had ever happened in a no-hitter, and I imagined the late Milt Pappas going supernova on the mound if that instead of Bruce Froemming had happened.
  2. Hendricks was thrown out at home to end the second, in what was probably a bad send. Luckily he did not try to slide or anything, and may have had an outside chance at being safe it the call was reviewed.

Next up: The Cubs go for the sweep tomorrow afternoon with Hammel on the mound vs Vince Velasquez. 1:20 PM CT.

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Comments

  1. cerulean

    3. Only one homerun on a day like today. And they didn’t score at least seven runs more than the Phils to push their run differential past +130.

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  2. cerulean

    Also, ho-hitter?

    I don’t think that fits OV’s anti-domestic-violence policy.

    [Note: Login bug. Commie creds.]

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  3. Author
    berselius

    cerulean,

    (dying laughing), sounds like it is time to increase my browser font size, and buy David Ross’s scooter while I am at it.

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  4. cerulean

    538 is back up to 105 wins. If I recall, 107 was thier high water mark.

    Also, isn’t it great that the sim runs every single time a game finishes. The wait-for-stats-to-update is starting to feel more and more like waiting for the newspaper to see the standings.

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  5. dmick89

    cerulean,

    The other day I looked after the game and they gave the Cubs a loss a the Cardinals a win. I had to open At Bat to make sure I had witnessed the Cubs winning. 538 had it fixed a few hours later. They must do the updating by hand. That’s a lot of work.

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  6. cerulean

    berselius,

    Since most of seeing has to do with the brain and not the eyes, it’s probably not the eyesight that’s the problem. Are you sure you can be trusted at the tiller of a scooter? (dying laughing)

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  7. cerulean

    Royals, White Sox, and Indians in a temporary deadlock for first in the AL Central. Indians up 7–0 against the O’s.

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  8. Rizzo the Rat

    It wasn’t a bad send unless you have a problem with Hendricks exerting himself too much (which didn’t seem to be an issue given how well he continued to pitch). With two outs, you should be very aggressive in trying to score. I think the break-even point is around 33%, since you almost need the next batter to get a hit otherwise.

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  9. cerulean

    cerulean:
    Royals, White Sox, and Indians in a temporary deadlock for first in the AL Central. Indians up 7–0 against the O’s.

    Now 7–1. Cleveland will surely blow this lead. In the ninth.

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  10. cerulean

    The BoSox also blew a four run lead in the eighth, then took the lead in the top of the ninth before the Jays walked it off. Not a good day for Sox fans.

    Good thing the Cubs were only ever known as the White Stockings.

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  11. Rizzo the Rat

    Rizzo the Rat:
    With two outs, you should be very aggressive in trying to score. I think the break-even point is around 33%, since you almost need the next batter to get a hit otherwise.

    Correction: with Heyward on second, the BE comes to 42%, I think.

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  12. Rizzo the Rat

    I think managers are probably too timid with two-out sends at third generally. They’re too afraid of looking bad if the runner gets caught. It looks better for them if the next batter fails to drive the runner in instead.

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  13. cerulean

    cerulean: If we assume the curve to be symmetric, which it is, whether they are playing 5 or 15 or 30 teams should cancel out. (This scenario runs into the ludic fallacy because such instances never occur in real life, but whatever.)

    The way I would solve it is by using a random number generator to give me a number from 1 to 2^81 and find that number in a cumulative summation of the 82nd line of Pascal’s triangle as an index for the win number, running it again and adding the two win numbers for a season total, then do that five times, discarding the four lowest, doing that 30 times and averaging the wins to the nearest integer. There is obviously a more elegant way, but I’m not a mathematician.

    My guess is 88 wins. Pure hunch.

    I wrote a little ditty to sim 1000 divsions 1000 times and settled on 88 wins. The highest win total I found was 116. (dying laughing)

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  14. cerulean

    A guard for the NO Pelicans broke into an apartment where he thought his girlfriend was cheating on him. It was the wrong apartment. He was shot dead.

    Three takeaways:

    Front doors are shoddy.
    Catching your suspected cheating lover in the act is just stupid.
    Guns are usually irreversible.

    Awful.

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  15. Mark

    Phillies haven’t scored 4 runs in a single inning all season, in over 500 chances. 4-0 IS practically as good as 40-0 versus them.

    Also, if that ball had dropped in a no hitter, the scorer would be lynched if he didn’t give an error to someone.

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  16. dmick89

    Who would you give the error to? Neither of them was really even that close to the ball and the scorer never gives an error to a fielder in that situation. I think they should. That’s definitely a ball that should be caught by the right fielder. That’s E9 in my opinion and even if it was at the halfway point between where it should have been made by Zobrist or Heyward, I’m giving an error to someone on that play every single time. However, they don’t and never have.

    I know Len and JD like to talk about team errors, but why bother? Errors are mostly a useless statistic anyway. Just assign the error to someone and be done with it. Pick a name out of a hat. Doesn’t matter how they choose to assign it. Someone should get an error on plays like that.

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  17. cerulean

    Velasquez has a K/9 over 10 and a BB/9 below 3. But he’s also a flyball pitcher. It’s gonna be a stressful day for him. How about a nice Wrigley welcome.

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  18. cerulean

    May hope is that their game plan is to nibble and the Cubs make him pay. But I can foresee that backfiring because these umps have been awful.

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  19. SK

    Umps seem to hate the Cubs’ hitters patience, especially Soler’s. He’s so good at laying off the stuff that’s just off the plate and they don’t like it for some reason.

    Also, the wind is apparently blowing out to right today at 16 MPH.

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  20. cerulean

    The Cubs are going to miss Kershaw in a four-game series. That’s fortuitous.

    Also, Hammel’s pitcher adjustment Elo is stil -23 after starting out at about -25 (I think). I assumed it would improve faster than that because he has been pretty good, if a little lucky. I would think 0 would be league average, but I don’t know. The knock on Hammel is his inability to pitch well past 150 innings. We aren’t there yet.

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  21. cerulean

    SK,

    Yep. Wunderground has WNW winds at 16 with gusts to 20. Let’s see Heyward and Rizzo get some long ball action. (Today would be a great Schwarber day, alas.)

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  22. cerulean

    A day like today, I would have put La Stella at second and Zobrist in left to get another lefty in the lineup. But whatever. Szczur can go the other way.

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  23. Rizzo the Rat

    cerulean,

    Velasquez has a rather pronounced observed reverse platoon split. It’s a pretty small sample, but that may have factored into the decision.

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