2014 Cardinals: NL Central Division Champs!

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go birds
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Re: 2014 Cardinals: NL Central Division Champs!

Post by go birds »

dodgers in 2

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Felix The Cat
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Re: 2014 Cardinals: NL Central Division Champs!

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http://www.hardballtimes.com/staggered- ... abilities/
It’s that time of year. The brackets for the Division Series are set, and all eyes are focused on October baseball. As the regular season wrapped up, teams that clinched early had the luxury of manipulating their starters’ last few games to set their playoff rotations as they pleased. This postseason, you will inevitably hear something like “The team that wins Game One goes on to win the series X percent of the time” over and over again. This is why, whenever possible, the team’s best starter usually starts Game One.

But what if a team staggered its rotation? If a team were willing, it could punt Game One against the other team’s ace and then have the upper hand for the rest of the series by putting its ace against the other team’s No. 2. By opening the series with the No. 4 starter, the team would all but concede Game One, but then would have the pitching advantage through Games Two, Three and Four! All else being equal, this could work and makes some logical sense. Who wouldn’t trade Game One for the following three?

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go birds
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Re: 2014 Cardinals: NL Central Division Champs!

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do it, Mike. you won't.

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Felix The Cat
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Re: 2014 Cardinals: NL Central Division Champs!

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http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-stre ... yoff-team/
St. Louis Cardinals

Strengths:

Remember when we said that the Cardinals probably wouldn’t be able to sustain 2013′s clutchiness? Yeah, well, they did, outperforming their BaseRuns expectation by seven wins. By the raw performance data, the Cardinals are kind of a mediocre team, as their expected R/G of 3.76 is just barely ahead of their expected RA/G of 3.68, and in reality, the Cardinals didn’t beat those numbers by much. They distributed their runs into the important situations, though, going 32-23 in one run games, which is one of the primary reasons they won the NL Central.

Weaknesses:

It would be easy to cite the paragraph above as a weakness as well, given the variability of this kind of data, and we should remmeber just how poorly the Cardinals regular season hitting with runners in scoring position carried over to the postseason last year. But beyond just normal regression, the team has some real question marks. Allen Craig going bust and Oscar Taveras‘ terrible big league performance make right field a question mark, especially since playing Peter Bourjos in center field would force Jon Jay‘s terrible arm to right field.

On the pitching side, Shelby Miller‘s second-half turnaround eased some of the fears he helped raise in the first half, but he still doesn’t look like the same guy he was in the regular season a year ago, and Michael Wacha‘s health issues have dampened the team’s rotation depth. For a rotation that looked very good quite deep at times earlier in the year, the back-end starters are now a legitimate question mark.
I'd have placed the team's lack of power as the number one weakness since that's going to be an issue in every game but the #4 starter will hurt us once a series.

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ZigZagCardsFan
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Re: 2014 Cardinals: NL Central Division Champs!

Post by ZigZagCardsFan »

Felix The Cat wrote:http://www.hardballtimes.com/staggered- ... abilities/
It’s that time of year. The brackets for the Division Series are set, and all eyes are focused on October baseball. As the regular season wrapped up, teams that clinched early had the luxury of manipulating their starters’ last few games to set their playoff rotations as they pleased. This postseason, you will inevitably hear something like “The team that wins Game One goes on to win the series X percent of the time” over and over again. This is why, whenever possible, the team’s best starter usually starts Game One.

But what if a team staggered its rotation? If a team were willing, it could punt Game One against the other team’s ace and then have the upper hand for the rest of the series by putting its ace against the other team’s No. 2. By opening the series with the No. 4 starter, the team would all but concede Game One, but then would have the pitching advantage through Games Two, Three and Four! All else being equal, this could work and makes some logical sense. Who wouldn’t trade Game One for the following three?
Worked out unintentionally for the Cards when we threw Anthony Reyes out there for Game 1 of the World Series against the Tigers.

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Cheddar Tom
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Re: 2014 Cardinals: NL Central Division Champs!

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I would see an argument for staggering your ace if the Game Two pitcher is Dan Haren. But LA is throwing out Greinke. The Cardinals have an uphill battle no matter what.

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Jocephus
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Re: 2014 Cardinals: NL Central Division Champs!

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hold waino out for the whole DS. that'll show 'em.

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heyzeus
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Re: 2014 Cardinals: NL Central Division Champs!

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I hope we win

Vidor
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Re: 2014 Cardinals: NL Central Division Champs!

Post by Vidor »

Of course, the counterpoint to that strategy is that if you lose Game 1 with your crap starter, and your ace doesn't pitch well or somehow loses Game 2, you are f****d.

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Re: 2014 Cardinals: NL Central Division Champs!

Post by Spider John »

Felix The Cat wrote:http://www.hardballtimes.com/staggered- ... abilities/

But what if a team staggered its rotation? If a team were willing, it could punt Game One against the other team’s ace and then have the upper hand for the rest of the series by putting its ace against the other team’s No. 2. By opening the series with the No. 4 starter, the team would all but concede Game One, but then would have the pitching advantage through Games Two, Three and Four! All else being equal, this could work and makes some logical sense. Who wouldn’t trade Game One for the following three?

When did Ned Yost start writing for Hardball Times?

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