Chad Moriyama Dodgers, Sabermetrics, Scouting
Los Angeles Times: Andre Ethier is done for the season. I don’t understand what took so long for this, and I’m not sure Mike Petriello does either. Perhaps now we can stop the inferences that Ethier just needed a stern warning in order to get past this injury.
MLB: Casey Blake had surgery. Oh.
MLB: Juan Uribe had surgery. Oh.
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Los Angeles Times: Steve Dilbeck admits he thought the Juan Uribe signing was a smart move. In his defense though, a lot of people seemed to be okay with it, or at least tolerant of it, including those from the sabermetric side.
Personally, I didn’t like it at all, mainly because people put a lot of weight into his Giants stint and seemed to forget about how much he sucked with the White Sox, but I could see the positional need for the team.
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Los Angeles Times: Bill Plaschke loves “God Bless America” during the seventh inning stretch at Dodger Stadium, which confirms my opinion that it’s stupid and pointless.
What’s even dumber is his bigger picture point though. Honestly, if it takes hearing a song at a baseball event to appreciate your life, this country, and the world at large, then you have much bigger internal problems to worry about.
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Dodger Thoughts: Jon Weisman asks what’s wrong with Chad Billingsley: his approach, his mentality, his mechanics, or his health.
For sanity sake, I’m going to rule out mentality, because nobody in the media or on the Internet can prove that to any meaningful degree. As far as his current approach goes, he’s throwing a normal amount of fastballs (55.4%) and cutters (21.4%), with no big drop in fastballs and rise in cutters like in 2009 (49.6% & 26.7%). I haven’t analyzed his mechanics yet, and perhaps I should later, but it doesn’t look like anything is abnormal.
As far as injury goes, we’ll never know for sure, but his velocity is steady. That said, his FIP by month is 3.34/2.97/4.10/3.55/4.83/3.77, so he was fine until August rolled around. He’s still struggling in September, as that FIP will inevitably rise after today’s poor effort. Not saying he’s hurt, but he’s certainly lost it since the end of July.
Thoughts?
I have no clue what’s wrong with Bills, but it’s extremely alarming because even in the starts where he’s done well or come out with so-so results, one thing has been consistent and that’s the overwhelming number of guys he seems to be allowing to get on base. I can’t remember the last time I watched a game that he’s pitched where there weren’t multiple innings of packed bases. Regardless of the outcome of his recent games, you can’t pitch like that on a regular basis and expect good results.
I’d be curious to see if he’s getting behind in counts more often than he used to. If so, then that may be part of the reason why he’s allowing more base runners. I just hope that whatever it is, they figure it out this season cuz it’s no fun watching your #2 guy always having to pitch out of trouble.
The progress he made with his control last year has evaporated.