Checking out the stats from last year. St. Louis was last in the league in strikeouts and second in the league in walks......but middle of the pack overall in pitching numbers and won 91 games. How is that possible? lol. I'm not as worried about about the strikeouts slightly dropping if the young pitchers can just find a way to stay out of the middle of the zone more. Ideally, I want my bullpen guys to be able to get the K's....which has me a little curious what they do with Tapia.
I probably should have dug into that a little bit more, but the Cardinals got it done by having one of the best defenses in baseball, if not the best. The Royals actually should be able to boast something similar once they get Witt and Pratto on the infield with some combination of Lopez, Merrifield and Mondesi, so that'll help a lot.
My only question is how did the defense fair in the first half vs. the second half? We know Whitt struggled at 2nd early on and Hunter Dozier was at 3rd early on. Did the defense right the ship and help the pitching some? Without diving in, my gut says yes.
The defense did get better by DRS. Definitely helped getting Dozier off third and Soler out of right. Like I said in the comment above, I should have gotten into that, but things were getting long and I didn't, so that's a bad job by me.
Great article, thank you. Another feature of the second half, if I recall, was use of a 6 man starting rotation though, if it was during the late season fatigue time, or the sample size too small, that may not inform us as to whether it might be a good idea from the get go in 2022, to help the starters, on more rest, to not only go longer in their games to help the bullpen, but also to go longer into the season. Besides that, I am very glad that, in the early free agent frenzy, that we stayed pat with our draw poker hand, believing that we may already have a "Royal(s?) flush" (pun intended, or at least possibly close enough one one to not draw or discard (trade) in house on both our pitching and position player side. Or, another analogy (but knowing for sure if analogy if the proper term), what we have right now might be just what we need, so, instead of like Dorothy spending a lot of time in anguished hand wringing about what she needed to do, she finally realized that she just needed to click her heels three times and all was fine :) .
Checking out the stats from last year. St. Louis was last in the league in strikeouts and second in the league in walks......but middle of the pack overall in pitching numbers and won 91 games. How is that possible? lol. I'm not as worried about about the strikeouts slightly dropping if the young pitchers can just find a way to stay out of the middle of the zone more. Ideally, I want my bullpen guys to be able to get the K's....which has me a little curious what they do with Tapia.
I probably should have dug into that a little bit more, but the Cardinals got it done by having one of the best defenses in baseball, if not the best. The Royals actually should be able to boast something similar once they get Witt and Pratto on the infield with some combination of Lopez, Merrifield and Mondesi, so that'll help a lot.
My only question is how did the defense fair in the first half vs. the second half? We know Whitt struggled at 2nd early on and Hunter Dozier was at 3rd early on. Did the defense right the ship and help the pitching some? Without diving in, my gut says yes.
The defense did get better by DRS. Definitely helped getting Dozier off third and Soler out of right. Like I said in the comment above, I should have gotten into that, but things were getting long and I didn't, so that's a bad job by me.
Great article, thank you. Another feature of the second half, if I recall, was use of a 6 man starting rotation though, if it was during the late season fatigue time, or the sample size too small, that may not inform us as to whether it might be a good idea from the get go in 2022, to help the starters, on more rest, to not only go longer in their games to help the bullpen, but also to go longer into the season. Besides that, I am very glad that, in the early free agent frenzy, that we stayed pat with our draw poker hand, believing that we may already have a "Royal(s?) flush" (pun intended, or at least possibly close enough one one to not draw or discard (trade) in house on both our pitching and position player side. Or, another analogy (but knowing for sure if analogy if the proper term), what we have right now might be just what we need, so, instead of like Dorothy spending a lot of time in anguished hand wringing about what she needed to do, she finally realized that she just needed to click her heels three times and all was fine :) .