Cleveland Cavaliers to treat season ticket holders like gym members
March 9, 2015Video: Ezekiel Elliott and fellow Buckeyes dance at halftime of OSU game
March 9, 2015Less than 30 days until the Tribe is back in Progressive Field. Here’s the latest from Goodyear, Arizona:
• Friday’s Cleveland Indians game against the Kansas City Royals had a few noteworthy items. For starters (pun fully intended) Danny Salazar continued his high-strike out, high-pitch count ways as he delivered four strike outs, while also giving up three hits, a walk, and two earned runs in just two innings pitched. Veteran hurler Shaun Marcum came in after him and was in control as he gave up just two hits with no walks or runs in two innings pitched, striking out none.
• The Cleveland Indians and Los Angeles Dodgers apparently desired to see the result of the game in the headline as they managed a tie game Saturday1. The tie came as a result of a furious bottom-of-the-ninth-inning rally by the Tribe, which included two homeruns.
• The real story of the game on Saturday against the Dodgers happened much earlier, however. Corey Kluber made his 2015 Cleveland Indians starting debut and looked fine as he allowed one earned run in three innings pitched, giving up three hits and recording a single strikeout. Zach McAllister, he of the fifth-spot competition, came in next for his second look of the spring, once again pitching poorly. Zach Mac carried over his penchant for giving up hard hits in this game, but, unlike the Cincinnati Reds, the Dodgers were able to take advantage scoring four earned runs in three innings. On a positive side, McAllister did strike out three batters.
• Saturday was not a good game for the Indians hitters((At least until the bottom of the ninth was populated by minor leaguers.)), but Michael Brantley did manage to announce his spring presence by going 2-for-3 from the plate and stealing a base.
• The Indians defense made a couple of really nice plays as Yan Gomes and Tyler Naquin took turns picking Yasmani Grandal off2.
• On Sunday, the Indians continued to see most of the pitchers battling for the fifth rotation spot struggle. T.J. House gave up two earned runs (plus one unearned run) in three innings of work. He did well to limit contact and struck out two batters, but one of the hits he gave up was a homerun, which obviously hurt him.
• Oh, when blue hair is promised, blue hair must be delivered. Trevor Bauer looking like Thing 2 from the “Cat in the Hat,” while conducting an interview about how he is blessed to be part of this Indians rotation.
8 Comments
In terms of the pitching, I checked one stat and liked it a lot – Indians’ pitchers have a BB:K ratio of 13:45. I’ll take that. (And Indians’ hitters are at 22:41, too.)
Spring training with pitchers isn’t very telling. Some guys are going out there to work on one particular thing. So I wouldn’t put too much stock in any stats.
Glad to hear that Marcum is out there throwing though. Hope he can get back to the bigs. It’d be especially nice if it could be with us. 150 innings at 110 ERA+ will do just nicely.
Only “just nicely”?
And I might be starting to turn (only a bit though) on ST stats. The Sloan Conference had a solid piece researching this: http://www.economist.com/blogs/gametheory/2015/03/baseball-statistics
Yes, just nicely. I’m getting greedy.
Interesting piece.
It does make sense as strikeout and walk rates for both hitters and pitchers stabilize pretty quickly. Though the quality of opposition can be a big factor. I know b-ref tried measuring it, but I’m not sure how reliable, and I’m not sure if they’re still going to do ST stats this season, none are up yet.
I won’t argue with the numbers, but I just read too many stories about pitchers who are intentionally throwing a few mph under regular season averages or who are throwing a bunch of pitch X because they tweaked it over the off-season or…..
I guess I’m left wondering how much of that is just BS-narrative building.
But maybe the tweaking pitch X plays into the meaningfulness of the numbers. If a guy successfully tweaks a pitch that gets more strikes, we should see that success translate to the regular season, and if he fails and has to junk that pitch, that’s development time lost while other players are improving. Maybe that shot-from-the-hip idea is BS-narrative building too.
Hoynes tweets that Gavin Floyd getting MRI on right elbow. And no matter the result that test being ordered is never welcome news at the start of spring training.