News and Notes

I have a bunch of half-baked thoughts floating around in my head, so I thought I'd do the lazy-blogger thing and just write a news and notes column instead of a full-fledged analysis of anything in particular.  So, without further ado, here are a few things that have caught my fancy over the past week or so:

• Chris Coste now has just under 400 major league at-bats in his career.  He's hit .312, with a .360 OBP and .485 SLG.  His .845 OPS would rank him third in the majors and first in the NL among catchers with over 200 plate appearances last year.

• R.J. Swindle, the soft-tossing lefty in the Phils' minor league system that I profiled last week, has been promoted to the Lehigh Valley IronPigs.  He has kept up his master pitching in AAA.  He has pitched 6.33 innings, giving up 1 earned run and 4 hits.  Even more impressively, he has improved on his AA strikeout to walk ratio of 16:1 with his now 8:0 ratio.

• The Phillies have used only 12 pitchers all year, the same number they currently have on their roster.  Other than Brad Lidge starting the season on the DL and missing the first week, no pitcher has been injured.  Likewise, no pitcher used in a game (Tim Lahey, on the roster in Lidge's place, was designated for assignment before pitching in a game) has been so bad that he has been sent to the minors or released.

• As many analytical baseball fans have long suspected, there's a strong positive correlation between leaving men on base and scoring runs.  As Baseball Prospectus writes:  "Each of these relationships makes a bit of sense: the more runners you put on base, the more likely some are to get stranded there, and the more runners you put on base, the more likely you are to score runs."  That means the next time you get upset because the Phillies left another guy on base, you can comfort yourself in the fact that they tend to be a high scoring team and that's the price you pay.