Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
May 02, 2006
West Coast Roundup

Barry Zito found his groove last night as he pitched 7 2/3 shutout innings against the LAnaheim Angels. He threw106 pitches, 66 for strikes. Zito's problem this year had to do with walks and home runs and he walked just two last night. He needed to pitch that well, as Hector Carrasco and the Angels pen allowed just one run on a double by Swisher and a single by Crosby. That was all the scoring as Oakland won 1-0. Despite what is considered a slow start by the Athletics, they're only 1/2 game out of first.

Los Angeles and Arizona played a low scoring game as well. The Diamondbacks used three doubles in the second inning to score three runs, and that's all they'd need as Claudio Vargas pitched six strong innings and the bullpen was nearly untouchable. Although they've blown three saves, the Diamondbacks bullpen is keeping the opposition at bay, allowing a .305 OBA and a .360 slugging percentage. The DBacks win 3-2.

Most of the scoring took place in San Francisco last night, where the Padres scored as many runs as the other five teams combined in a 10-4 rout of the Giants. San Diego only out hit San Francisco 12-10, but did a better job of bunching their hits, and added four doubles to the Giants one. Peavy threw strikes as he lasted eight innings for the win, with 74 of his 105 gaining a positive result.


Posted by David Pinto at 08:06 AM | Games | TrackBack (0)
Comments

Yep, it was retro night in the bigs. Back to 1967, almost exactly in terms of runs per game. There were 1-0, 2-0, and 3-0 games, a couple 2-1 games, a couple 3-2 games. Overall runs scored for the fifteen contests averaged 7.5 per game, very close to the 1967 number.

The big offense of the first couple weeks of the season has started to wither away. There were still a lot of April offensive records set, but that's mostly because of the high scoring in the first couple weeks and the fact that teams play a lot more games in April than they used to.

The average runs per game for April ended at 9.7, significantly lower than the average for the first couple weeks. My guess is the average will continue to drift down. Last year was the lowest scoring since 1992, and this year might go still lower. Things look to be running against the hitters right now.

Everybody will point at steroids (or the lack thereof) as the explanation. But baseball has generally moved into hitter-hostile parks like RFK and PETCO lately, and that may be the more important reason.

Posted by: Casey Abell at May 2, 2006 09:20 AM
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