You Can't Make This Stuff Up

Baseball is a great game because we can atomize everything about it yet tomorrow always presents a surprise. To wit:

Evan Gattis leads the Astros this year with seven triples. He had one triple in his entire career previously.

Royals rookie Paulo Orlando’s first three career hits were triples. Victor Martinez has three lifetime triples in 6,400 plate appearances.

Jenrry Mejia managed to face 27 batters between suspensions that will sideline him for 242 games.

You think the Tigers are out of it? On June 30, the Yankees were in third place in the AL East, four games above .500. Less than a month later they have a seven-game lead and a 57-42 record.

Clayton Kershaw in July: 3-0, 0.27; two walks/45 strikeouts; three extra base hits allowed, all doubles. He’s back.

The last time the Cubs were no-hit, before Cole Hamels got them, Gomer Pyle USMC was the top-rated comedy on TV.

Carlos Ruiz has served as Cole Hamels’ battery mate 207 times, most in the Majors. With Hamels on his way elsewhere and Ruiz riding the pines, that number may not change.

After 101 games, the Astros were tied for first place. Time travel back to April 1 and read that statement.

Nats’ reliever Drew Storen is third in the Majors in saves, sports a 1.73 ERA, has allowed just one home run and fanned five times as many batters as he’s walked. And he’s about to lose his closer job to Jonathan Papelbon.

Jose Fernandez since returning from Tommy John surgery: 4-0, 2.53; 10.4K/game; WHIP under 1; 5-1 K/BB ratio. Pretty much the same as when he got hurt last season.

Julio Teheran has a 2.37 ERA at Turner Field and a 7.24 ERA on the road. 

Nick Markakis’s resume included 141 lifetime homers when the Braves signed him this year. He’s hit one out in two-thirds of a season. Rays rookie catcher Curt Casali has seven homers in 50 at bats after hitting just 30 in five Minor League seasons.

The Baltimore Orioles won 18 of 23 at one point in the season but they’ve also lost five in a row three separate times. The Chicago White Sox lost five of six before their current six game winning streak. The Minnesota Twins lost six of seven, then won nine of 10, then lost 11 of 14 then won seven of eight, then lost 9 of 13, then won four in a row, then lost seven of nine.

Scoring is up this year, if ever so slightly, and strikeouts are down, by a similar margin. Game times have fallen by nine minutes. Rah.

You're Never Alone With A Schizophrenic Batter

Would you like this defensively solid left-fielder batting in a key game for your team:

.320/.349/.563, 24 HR 74 RBI in 100 games? 

Not just yes, but hell yes, right? That's Rockie Carlos Gonzalez.

So you write Gonzalez's name in the lineup, and you get this -- .262/.279/.385, 10 HR 54 RBI, 10BB, 130K. What happened?

First, let's recognize how utterly abysmal that is. A .279 OBP is cactus enema bad, and the result in this case of a player who walks less than Stephen Hawking. It's 48 points worse than Bud Harrelson's embarrassing lifetime mark. It's 15 points lower than Mike Hampton's lifetime OBP.

Yes, that's the pitcher Mike Hampton.

How did an All-Star caliber outfielder morph into an over-matched Double-A wind machine? Simple: The Rockies are playing a road game.

Carlos Gonzalez is a terror at Coors -- .375/.414/.730, 38 HR 94 RBI, 28BB 68 K. (I've doubled his home and away counting stats so you can compare them to his overall performance.) That's Mark McGwire on andro. But for some reason, Cargo can't hit anywhere else. This is good information if you're his manager. You'd probably want to make sure he's in the lineup in Denver, but you might want to give him a breather now and then elsewhere.

It also casts a shadow on his overall performance for the year, as documented at the top of this post. It raises the question of whether he's just a thin-air artifact who's not really the .320-with-power hitter his overall numbers suggest.

In an effort to spare a deceased horse further injury, I won't detail how Charlie Manuel gets the same raw deal when he expects to send his .281/.373/.578 first baseman to the plate and this shows up -- .231/313/.453 because the pitcher is right-brained and Ryan Howard turns into Eddie Gaedel when facing lefties. Suffice to say that it's very hard to make convincing MVP arguments for a guy who can be so easily neutralized.

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