It's update time! Over the course of this season, I've written a few pieces that need revisiting. So, on this rainy Friday afternoon, I figured it's time to revisit them to see how the analysis fares now.
kERA: Have you noticed? Kyle Kendrick has been a little inconsistent this year. One day he's better than Roy Halladay. The next he's worse than Brad Lidge 2009. In an earlier piece, I wrote about the Kendrick ERA, or the kERA. This stat was the difference in ERA from a pitcher's best performances to worst. Through 13 starts, Kendrick had an 8.93 kERA.
Well, how's he done since then? Pretty much the same. He now has 17 starts. In the four starts since I last wrote about it, he has had two clunkers (4 earned runs in 4 innings and 5 in 6.33) and two excellent starts (3 in 9 and 1 in 6.67). His kERA has come down a bit, but it's still at a whopping 8.06. We really do have Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde on our pitching staff.
Moyerings: (Note: I updated this in a game recap the other night, but it's worth repeating here outside that context.) With every start, Jamie Moyer is wowing naysayers (including me!) who thought he was washed up and that the Phillies were hugely mistaken in signing him to a two year deal before the 2009 season. However, he's had a big problem with occasionally having a disastrous inning. Earlier in the season, I wrote about the two such innings that were ruining his otherwise great performance. I wrote about it to show how amazing Moyer had been so far. Little did I know that the trend would continue. After I wrote that piece, on June 11, he gave up 9 first inning runs to the Boston Red Sox. And he did it again Tuesday night. In the seventh inning of that game, he gave up 6 earned runs.
This disastrous inning trend is a big problem for Moyer and his stats. All told, in the four disastrous frames he's pitched this year, he's given up 25 earned runs in 3.33 innings pitched. With those innings, he has a 4.51 ERA in 107.67 innings. However, putting those innings aside, he has an incredible 2.50 ERA in 104.33 innings.
Cerberus: Since Carlos Ruiz, Placido Polanco, and Chase Utley have disappeared onto the disabled list, the Phillies have had an ugly cast of characters filling in. Greg Dobbs has a .189 batting average, Wilson Valdez is getting on base at a .274 clip, Brian Schneider has been hurt, Dane Sardinha is hitting just over the Mendoza line, and Juan Castro is . . . well, Juan Castro. Yet, somehow, these three positions have not been the weak spot in the Phillies lineup recently. I checked in on what these fill-ins did in the first few games after Utley and Polanco went on the DL on June 29, but haven't updated it to see if they've sustained their performance.
Amazingly, although their performance is no longer earth-shatteringly good, the three-headed monster has still done a very good job, as Valdez's and Schneider's late inning performances last night illustrated. As a whole, they've had a .286/.322/.518 triple-slash line, good for an .840 OPS. In the 10 games, they've had 7 home runs and 20 RBI. Of course, as always, there's no guarantee they keep it up, but what they've done recently shows that any problems the offense has had has not been because of these replacements.
