A weird, weird slate of games today.

To start, Cody McKay had four hits. Four. That brings his seasonal total to seven.
How Bizarre
Roger Cedeno brought the thunder with a home run. His total bases, counting that shot? Six.
How Bizarre, How Bizarre

I’ll stop the OMC imitation now, but you get the idea. The floodgates opened on a close game when Ray Lankford singled… by hitting the roof in foul territory (the ball dropped fair, somehow.) The announcers made a huge deal out of Albert Pujols’ “slump”, at which point he crushed two homeruns, just absolutely smoked them out of the park. Woody Williams pitched another quality start. Truly we are in bizarro-world.

To top that off, the Cubs just can’t handle Rob Mackowiak and the unstoppable Pittsburgh Pirates, who’ve scored (as of this writing) 24 runs in two days against the vaunted Cubs pitching. R-Mack has three clutch home runs, as well.

Watch out for your lives, because I believe all of this is prophesied in Obadiah somewhere. Ah, yes, here it is:

1 The vision of Obadiah. Thus saith the Lord GOD concerning Chicago; We have heard a rumour from the LORD, and an ambassador is sent among the NL Central, Arise ye Cody McKay, and let us rise up against her in battle.
2 Behold, I have made thee small among the NL Central: thou art greatly despised.
3 The pride of thine rotation hath deceived thee, thou that dwellest in the north of the state, whose habitation is high; that saith in his heart, Who shall bring me down to the Pirates?
4 Though thou exalt thyself as the Favorite, and though thou set thy nest among the stars, thence will I bring thee down, saith CODY MCKAY.

The link is, in fact, this. Sorry. Now go check it out.

First, a plug to the folks at Baseball Mogul, who released the 2005 version yesterday, complete with some new graphics, an amateur draft, detailed transactions, and other cool stuff. If you like text games at all, BBM will waste all your free time. Awesome stuff, and it goes now for the bargain price of $20. As a veteran of 200+ seasons, I heartily recommend it.

Second, the site’s moving really slowly for some reason. I’m gonna hope I got mentioned somewhere and not consider the fact that it’s probably my host sucking it up.

Third, wow, how about Chris Carpenter? Yikes. Too bad he didn’t get the win, but I’m hoping now that Izzy’s pitching 96 again that’s the last blown save I’ll see. This would be much angrier were it not for the balk-off.

There’s got to be little more humiliating than Daryle Ward, whose Isolated Power last year was .011, crushing your pitchers for the cycle (in all seriousness congratulations to Heavy D, who appears to be getting his career back on track after an ugly 2003), so I guess it had to be expected that the Cardinals would fight back today. Lots of good things to glean from today’s win.

First, no bullpen meltdowns! King and Isringhausen both looked good, and Cal Eldred appears to once again have been lulling the NL Central into a false sense of security during April; as anyone who didn’t block it out last year will remember, his ERA hit a peak at 135.00 in early April of 2003, ending the month at 5.06, and recovered to be the best of the non-Izzy relievers. This year he went into May with an ERA of 9.82, but since then he’s lowered it four runs with a May number right at the Pfiester Line, 2.00.

Also note this nice bit of hope offered by the Post Dispatch, in which Izzy insists his poor velocity is simply the result of poor mechanics. It’s nice to see he’s aware of it, at least.

In the “Dusty Baker Should Be Pleased” department, our slumping first baseman walked four times today, going the rare 0-0. Those four walks are one more than the Cubs earned as a team in their loss to the Astros yesterday. Buster Olney will no doubt be disappointed in Phat Albert.

(I must say I’ve been rooting for Daryle Ward for a while, now; in my Out of the Park team his simulated self gave me several .900 OPS years as the lefty half of my first base platoon for less than a million bucks. Nifty. My brother has a similar story about becoming a Joe Roa fan when he pitched four perfect innings in a strat-o-matic game against my Runnin’ Redbirds. I feel that I got the better player out of the deal.)

Everyone’s probably watched some rain delay filler at some point; it’s the usually direct-to-video stuff that gets thrown onto the TV in emergencies when nothing else is available. The ten year old special highlighting shortstops of the future like some kid named Alex Rodriguez, Dazzling Dunks and Basketball Bloopers with Marv Albert and Frank Layden (which was AWESOME, by the way), that sort of thing. In that grand tradition, here’s some interesting Cardinals stuff to fill the great, sucking void Mother Nature stuck us with.

You could check out this enjoyable Joe Strauss article, perhaps the first ever, about journeyman reliever Doug Creek, who was trying to make it back to the majors when a family crisis intervened. It’s cool to learn more about someone who was, for me, just another faceless LOOGy.

ha ha ha.

Read this article over and over. It’s very calming.

The NL figures to have a new MVP, says Dan O’Neill. Isn’t it sad to see a living legend like Barry Bonds struggle through a year like he is now? Some people just need to learn when to hang ‘em up, and now that Barry’s OPS is only 1.384 it looks like it’s his time.

John Mabry’s back in a Cardinals uniform, which means we now have approximately one bench player who can hit. In honor of another 1996 Cardinal rejoining the team I will once more pretend the NLCS never happened that year.

If you’ll all remember, the playoffs were called on the count of a mysterious alien invasion that year and awarded to the Yankees to fulfill the little-known “The Yankees Always Win” clause in the collective bargaining agreement.

PECOTA and ZiPS, two of the most recently made projection systems to hit baseball, are certainly not the only representatives of their kind, but for someone like me, who spends most of his time on the two BPs, Prospectus and Primer, they’re the most visible. With enough of the season gone by that sample sizes are no longer all that small, I’ve decided to dig up the numbers for our Cardinals regulars and see how they’re performing, compared to their projected selves. However, with Primer’s controversial (I’m not a fan, at least, but it certainly looks nice.) redesign I have no idea where the ZiPS numbers are, so for the moment, PECOTA it is. I’ll update if I find them.

Leading off…
Tony Womack got off to a hot-enough start to give him an extra two months as a starter, but since May has returned to THE Tony. Here’s his April: .351/.415/.509. May: .224/.254/.254. PECOTA’s .245/.288/.309 is within “reach” if Tony continues to backslide, but he stands currently at .282/.331/.371. As he’s on pace to steal 39 bases he’ll likely continue to manufacture outs with the best atop the leadoff spot for the forseeable future.

Next up is Ray Lankford. I of course am going to be more optimistic about Ray, my favorite player since 1995, than I am about Tony, but both have slumped a fair amount in May. As Go Cardinals has noted, he’s maintained his ability to get on base but has lost almost all of his power in May, posting a punchless .224/.345/.306 thus far. PECOTA guessed at .226/.338/.378, and I’m inclined to agree that his power will return somewhat.

Albert Pujols has proven a highly valuable major disappointment so far into the year, proving how much value he can lose while still being a good hitter. .281/.378/.563 is what Cards fans have had to settle for so far; who knows how long we’ll last as contenders with a .940 OPS at first. PECOTA, with its penchant for regression to the mean, predicted an even 1000 OPS, .323/.412/.588 after his MVP-like 2003. Since May he’s lost some peripheral glory, falling down to an .840 OPS, but his last week of splits are certainly nice to look at.

Jim Edmonds is another guy who’s always supposed to be at the end of the road, but he’s helped to carry the offense while other players are struggling, and is currently at a .275/.366/.577 clip. PECOTA predicted .277/.382/.530, pretty close, but most frighteningly expected him to last fewer than 400 at bats with its playing time guess. Injury proneness aside, he’s yet to miss a game this year.

Scott Rolen’s finally getting the MVP-buzz year he’s been on the verge of for some time. With Pujols slumping he’s gotten a lot of national attention by going .333/.393/.575 and playing his usual insanely good defense after playing hurt much of 2003. PECOTA presumed he’d lose some value, as a third baseman with nagging injuries would be expected to, and end up at .277/.369/.499. He’s currently performing at a level they gave him a 10% chance of reaching.

When fans of his former teams told me Reggie Sanders was streaky I didn’t give it a whole lot of thought, but I’m certainly aware of it now. After playing extremely well early, to the tune of .321/.352/.702, he’s spent May hitting like a pitcher, and not Woody Wiliams, either; .164/.193/.236, shockingly low for anyone, let alone an outfielder. His season-long numbers have obviously taken a beating as a result. .259/.290/.518 brings to mind Joe Carter or Dave Kingman. PECOTA believes .263/.332/.475 is about right, but he’ll need to take some walks for that to happen.

Edgar Renteria had a pretty obvious peak year in 2003, and PECOTA believed he’d fall to .294/.356/.426, but no one expected him to fall all the way near his 2001 levels to .278/.321/.381. He’s another May slumper, hitting .262 with hardly anything in the way of walks or extra base hits after having a decent April.

Mike Matheny, whipping boy for all due to his light hitting antics, has actually been one of the few Cardinals hitting in this barren May. It’s not just his usual hot April, either, with an .800 OPS in May bringing him up to .288/.333/.440 on the year, well above what PECOTA expected, .236/.304/.329. In fact, PECOTA felt he only had a 10% chance of reaching .277/.352/.403, so the power he displayed is far and away one of the flukiest things the Cardinals have reaped benefits from this year. A Mike Matheny who also happens to be a league average hitter would be very valuable, very valubale indeed.

There’ll always be players that shock the world and perform very well or very poorly over the course of a long season, but it seems like nothing is as we’ve expected so far in 2004. I’ll do the pitchers later, if I can get over my seething hatred of Woody Wiliams for his outing today. 6-1 isn’t insurmountable, though, when we have the hot bat of… Mike Matheny!?

The streak is over at 57 2/3 innings, but that does eclipse Urban Shocker’s minor league record. His current ERA is 0.18. That is all.

Beau Chapman’s the latest Cards fan to be bitten by blog fever, so I figure I’ll pay it forward and do the same thing for him that the established blogs did for me when I started by directing a few visitors over.

The site’s called The Psychotic Cardinal and he’s kicked it off with a good appraisal of Woody Williams in particular and La Russa’s pitcher use in general. It’s good stuff, and I’m sure there’ll be more. It is, all in all, a much better idea for a start than mine, which was to not post for two months.

(I’ll have a link up on the sidebar when I’m on the computer that has the file for that frame.)

Thanks to the folks at The Hardball Times 2004 Win Shares are live for people like me, who are far too lazy to set up a spreadsheet themselves. For those not in the know, a Win Share is a statistical unit created by Bill James to allocate credit for wins to each player on a team. Each win is divided three ways, so if you want to see how many wins a player contributed to his team you divide their total by three. For reference: 10 win shares is considered rather low for a regular, 20 is an all-star-like season, 30 is a possible MVP year, and 40 is a legendary year. The scale is different for pitchers because they play less; Eric Gagne scored 24 last year and earned a Cy Young.

In 2003, the Cardinals leader was (three guesses!) Phat Albert, who led all of baseball with 41. (Barry had 39 in considerably fewer appearences.) We also had 20 win share seasons from Edgar Renteria (25), Scott Rolen (23), and Jim Edmonds (22). What was the problem, then? After that there was a three way tie… with 13. (Matheny, Woody, JD Drew.) Between the second basemen (Cairo, Hart, Vina) the Redbirds managed 15.

This year the Cardinals have been led by Scott Rolen, who is playing much improved defense this year after a gimpy back sapped his range in 2003; only Mike Lowell has more than Rolen’s 1 win share on defense. Rolen’s 8 offensive shares have him tied with Lowell with overall win shares at third. Rolen is, presently, on his way to the MVP year his hall of fame case could use; a straight projection, obviously a bit high, gives him 40.

Jim Edmonds is next, with 6 win shares; he’s also lived up to his reputation as a sterling defender, as he’s tops among defensive outfielders.

Interesting stuff:
Woody Williams has earned .2 win shares this year, although he’s projected to pitch 200 innings; that’s a goose-egg when you use Win Share rounding.
Sean Casey, Scott Rolen, and Mike Lowell are only two win shares from Barry Bonds, who very recently was hitting .460. Win Shares measures value, not ability, so clutch hitting, not usually something one can repeat, factors in heavily.
Rounding out the top 5 players in the NL? MARK LORETTA, who has earned 3 win shares with the glove, a pace that would lead him to a Bill Mazeroski-like year. Our second baseman, Tony Womack, has earned 3 total win shares.

They really are a fun stat. Check out this year’s here, last year’s here, and for more information and a Win Shares encyclopedia with every player who played from 1875 to 2002 try ordering the book here. I’ll be using this concept to fill space at regular intervals throughout the year, so I suppose you could stay here, too.