5/16 GDT: Royals(Cameron) vs Cardinals(Leahy) 1:15 PM CT

[Randall Pink]

Soooooo…….this team is good? Fun yes but good too?

Fun yes. Good? No.

Why say you no? Starting pitching and pen are both settling down and the offense is above average. Replacing Victor’s bat with Noot’s should yield more offense too.

Yeah, but phins is actually right. This team isn't that good, but in this weird season, most of the teams are even worse, at least performance-wise.

I didn’t say they were THAT good just good. Relatively good. With the capacity to get better.

[phins]

Soooooo…….this team is good? Fun yes but good too?

Fun yes. Good? No.

Why say you no? Starting pitching and pen are both settling down and the offense is above average. Replacing Victor’s bat with Noot’s should yield more offense too.

Because their advanced data paints the story of a .500 to below team.

If you said which starter has the highest K% on the staff, you'd probably be shocked to know it's McGreevy at 18.8%. Not a single 19% K% on the staff.

McGreevy is 70th of 95 starters with 40+ IP.
Pallante is 76th
May is 81st
Liberatore is 83rd
Leahy is 84th

You prefer K%-BB%? The Cardinals as a starting staff are 28th out of 30. Only the Reds and Rockies are worse.

This is for a team that has had zero injuries to starting pitching thus far. If memory serves, they've only used a different starter than their five once this year (Hunter Dobbins). That means the above numbers haven't even gotten into the inevitable depth a team needs to get through a full season.

SIERA is a solid proxy for future ERA predictors if you decide not to use K%-BB% and the picture is fairly consistent here as the Cardinals skyrocket up to #27 out of 30, rather than 28th.

For the starters, luck numbers are showing up in their ability to strand runners, currently.

BABIP is 14th out of 30 at .288.
LOB% is 5th out of 30 at 77.1% of runners being stranded.

That will stabilize and more of those runners will find a way to score rest of season. You see that in their ERA - FIP numbers being 4th out of 30.

Flipping to the relievers, you see a bleak story there as well.

28th in K% at 19.8%, 24th in K% - BB%, 22nd in SIERA, 18th in BABIP, 7th worse on LOB%, which could normalize slightly if the bullpen misses a few more bats, so a tiny bit of upside there, but it's far more volatile in the bullpen.

For the hitters, the story is more optimistic.

12th in xwOBA, which is solidly above average. They have hit to a .319 wOBA and have an xwOBA of .324, so essentially flat to expectations.

13th in Barrel %, which is a proxy for how hard you hit the ball (factored into x stats, so not trying to double count, but merely show a few layers within).

With the home park suppressing offense slightly, I'd say the offense is earning what it is getting at the moment.

Layer in some upside for a Lars that stays completely healthy and hits like you hope, and you move that wOBA from a .319 to what we can expect to be more like .325 if you trust the x stats and layer on some home park suppression.

It all adds up to a decently above average offense, solidly above average defense (small hit when Noot replaces Scott), and a baserunning team that is decidedly average. That puts them 7th in WAR on the whole on position players. Good.

So you have a good position player group with some upside from Noot and Crooks, with a disaster staff on the mound and mostly just downside from health and projected regression.

The Cardinals are 10-3 in one-run games, whereas you'd typically expect that to be .500-.540 winning percentage rather than .769. Most already know this, but to point it out, regression to the mean in this case doesn't mean you should expect the Cardinals to go .300 in one-run games moving forward or anything, just that you should expect them to go .500-.540 moving forward. Which already means they're probably three games over their ski's on wins now.

Bucketizing the types of games they've run hot in:

One-Run regulation: 5-2 (call it one game fortunate)
One-Run extra inning: 5-1 (call it two games fortunate)
Two-Run extra inning: 1-0 (we will keep this one)

For me, and from an analytical standpoint, it sums up to a decidedly average to below team that will eventually run out of variance luck in one-run games and extra inning wins to settle back in around the .500 mark and be fun as hell to watch as the youngest team in baseball.