Big Bats Emerge

Wrap, Box, Syracuse.com

Five home runs aren’t enough, and an intentional walk plus an unintentional walk lost the game.

Season: 19-12; Trip: 2-1

Wrap, Box, Syracuse.com

Bulls hitters hit three more home runs (Mahtook, Dykstra, and Arencibia), but this time the pitchers matched them with solid performances.

Enny Romero made his 2015 debut with the Bulls after a long getting-ready stretch that goes back to spring training. We were not particular fans of Mr. Romero last year, but he certainly had a solid performance yesterday. How long he sticks with the Bulls is likely to be the subject of intense speculation down St. Petersburg way.

Alan Dykstra has built an odd record since joining the Bulls. The 6’5“ switch-hitter has only had 3 hits in his 10 games for a batting average of .088. However, those three hits are a double and 2 home runs plus he’s managed 10 walks (including at least one intentional walk). That leads him to an extraordinary batting average/OPS gap. His OPS is .590.  He carried an OPS of .930 with Las Vegas of the PCL last year, with 74 RBI. Yesterday he followed up Saturday’s 2 run shot with a solo one in the 5th inning. We’ve been skeptical of Mr. Dykstra. Could we have been wrong?

Overlooked in the offensive stats was how often the defense made a difference yesterday. It was a double play that closed the deal in the Bulls favor on Friday. Yesterday it was three of them that made big differences.

Outside the game —

• The Tampa Bay Times is reporting that Grant Balfour has an end-of-May opt-out to his minor league contract. That certainly means that he won’t be around Durham after this month. 
• The Process Report has a nice profile of Andrew Bellatti written by Adam Sobsey, one of the co-authors of Bull City Summer*.

Matchup

The Bulls rode over to Buffalo yesterday for a rematch with the Bisons tonight. And, yes, it was just a couple of days since the Bulls were playing them at the DBAP. Interesting to see what’s happened to their numbers since we last looked prior to that series. The Bulls have gone from 9th to 6th place in batting average ranking, from 5th to 3rd in OPS rankings, and from 4th to 3rd in ERA. Meanwhile, the Bisons went from 5th to 10th in batting average, 7th to 13th on OPS, and from 1st to 2nd on ERA. But we still need to remember that this is early in the season and rosters are in  turmoil. Very hard to detect meaningful trends. But the Bisons have been on a tough run, losing their last six games.

*Possibly the best book available on minor league baseball. On the shelf at Quail Ridge Books and on half-price sale down in the ballpark store.

Durham Bulls Take First Place

click chart for larger view

Season: 16-11; Home Stand: 2-0
Wrap, Box, Standings

The Durham Bulls took over first place in the International League South Division with the win (and the Charlotte Knight's loss). This last week has been very pretty for the Bulls and their fans. Last night we saw Dylan Floro do his thing, pitching a scoreless 6 innings giving up only 4 hits and no walks.

We have to feel some sympathy for catcher Luke Maile as he began dealing with veteran (37 year-old) Grant Balfour. Balfour loves to spike pitches into the dirt and in his first Bulls appearance he did quite a bit of that. Nevertheless, Maile handled all but one of them, Balfour got two K’s, and the Bison’s stranded thier guy on 2B.

We’d guess that Mikie Mahtook was disappointed when Joey Butler was called up to the Rays after Desmond Jennings went on the DL. From a Bulls fan’s perspective, however, he is getting much more playing time and pumping up his numbers. In our view he should stick with the Bulls until the Rays are ready to put him to work full time. He faced big leaguer Daniel Norris of the Bisons and got an RBI single and a nice double off of him.

Nick Franklin showed off his major leaguer status in his long trousers and big leaguer’s “TB” batting helmet (didn’t notice that earlier). It’ll probably take a few more concussions before the big guys opt for something less attractive than what they’ve got. Ego is really something to see. Batting DH, Franklin drew two BB's, but he did appear to tweak something in his last AB. Hope not serious.

Outside the Game —

• Sorry to say that the infield looks even worse. Hope that some sort of magic happens as the year goes on. But it hasn’t happened yet.
• Bark in the Park last night. Fun to stroll through that area as we came into the park last night.
• Matt Andriese gets his first start as a 2015 Durham Bull at the 11:00 Education Day game today.

Great Trip; Bulls Headed Home

Wrap, Box, Providence Journal

To be honest, I spent all day Saturday getting ready for, and then enjoying, a Derby watch party. Although there was some big stirrings on the web that I’ll get to later.

But we did note that Matt Andriese had his first appearance in a Bulls uniform. Last year he was the Bulls hardest working starting pitcher, starting 25 games and pitching 162 innings with a stellar WHIP of 1.24. The Rays gave him two starts and 3 relief appearances, but just 13 innings so far this year. At least with the Bulls he will get some innings in.

Wrap, Box, Providence Journal
Season: 14-11, Trip: 5-2

Nice end to a very successful road trip, particularly the 2 out of 3 against the PawSox.

Not to take anything away from the Bulls hitters, but the game was charted to be Boston pitching prospect Brian Johnson’s show. Instead, after just 2⅔ innings his season’s ERA blew up from 0.86 to 3.42. That’s a bad day.

Mikie Mahtook’s first home run of the year, a deep fly ball that the wind blew out of the park, put the go-ahead runs across. By that time, however, Johnson’s lack of command was evident. On the short day he had 3 wild pitches and 5 walks to his credit.

The odd, and somewhat sad, stat of the day was Vince Belnome’s first RBI of the year. He drew a bases-loaded walk. Have not yet seen Mr. Belnome look in synch. We can hope.

Outside the game —

The Humberto Quintero (a catcher playing for the PawSox) story blew across the web Saturday morning.

After we wrote it up here, we got a tweet from Snorting Bull that there was video of the incident on the PawSox’s Facebook page. We put up a comment here.

We were not alone.

• Cork Gaines over at RaysIndex expressed his outrage.
• Daniel Russell at DRaysBay had some choice words and then chased down the encounter with Hak-Ju Lee and posted that.
• Mark Tompkin of the Tampa Bay Times talked to Rays manager Kevin Cash.
• Dan Perry at CBS and Mark Townsend at Yahoo commented.

We noticed that Mr. Quintero did not play in either Saturday’s or Sunday’s game. Probably a good idea.

Rosterization —

• Joey Butler, who was having a good year with the Bulls, got put on the Rays 40 man and called up. He went 1-3 today. 
• Interesting comments about soon to arrive Grant Balfour at Rays Colored Glasses.

Bats Alive in Rhode Island; Hitting Trends

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Season: 13-10; Trip: 4-1

Wrap, Box, Providence Journal

After a very early day game in Allentown, Pennsylvania the Bulls were off to Pawtucket, Rhode Island. There Jim Patterson flew in from “extended spring training” for his second start of the year. He did just fine. And he was followed by young Jhan Marinez (terrific), Bryce Stowell (premier middle reliever), and Ronald Belesario.

Meanwhile the Bulls hit three home runs, something they’ve only done once before this year. The first was a game-opening hit by Taylor Motter. The second was a three-run affair by J.P. Arencibia. And the third was a solo shot by Corey Brown.

We saw the very ugly, and endlessly replayed, play by Pawsox catcher Humberto Quintero. Mikie Mahtook was on second and attempted a steal of third. Luke Maile was at bat. Maile simply stood in the box and Quintero launched his throw to 3B right into Maile’s gut. Not OK, and Maile obviously felt it. But much worse was Quintero acting as if it was Maile’s fault. Would expect better from a 35 year-old veteran. Then things got very testy after a collision between Quintero and Hak-Ju Lee at second base later on in the game.

It was May 1 and the speed of game changes are in effect. A Pawtucket batter had a strike called in him because he was not in the box when he should have been.

Rosterizing —

• As noted, Jim Patterson is back from extended spring training
• Matt Andriese, who had five appearances with the Rays (two starts)  has been optioned to the Bulls to make room for Alex Colome. Probably will show up soon.
• Grant Balfour, a once great closer, and former Bull, has signed a minor league deal with the Rays and will be coming to the Bulls to see if he can regain the form he had with the Rays and the Athletics. The Australian should be fun to watch.
• Everett Teaford, who went up a couple of days ago, is on his way back.
• I don't think I've mentioned that Kirby Yates has gone on the disabled list. Fits with what we've seen since he came back to the Bulls.

Chart — Hitting

This is one way to look at the Bulls’ hitting performance. I’m using OPS (on base percentage + slugging) as a metric. That’s not my favorite batting stat, but for my purposes of trying to discern team trends, it’s OK. 

What is OPS? Well, it’s a combination of numbers you see on the scoreboard at each game. It is an effort to measure a player’s batting skill beyond batting average. It starts with On Base Percentage, essentially how often a player gets on base when he comes to bat — hit, walk, hit by pitch. And then you add to it the Slugging Average, which is the number of bases per at bat. One way to help understand slugging is that if you look up on the scoreboard and see a batting average that’s the same as the slugging average, it means he’s only hit singles so far this year.

There’s another stat I like better, called Weighted On Base Average, and I plot them both. But as far as trends go, I’m not seeing much difference.

This plots the OPS for each of the last 15 games. Included is the International League average over the last 3 years. The slight upward trend is a good thing. The Bulls’ overall OPS on the season is .690, which ranks them 6th out of 14 teams in the league.

click for larger chart

Split; Bad News, Good News

 Wrap, Box, Virginian-Pilot

Season: 4-7; Trip: 1-1
Wrap, Box, Virginian-Pilot

The Bulls split their series with the Norfolk Tides. The Bulls spoiled the Tides home opener on Saturday, but yesterday’s game was a bit of good news and bad news.

Bad news first: This is a very error-prone team. In fact, the Durham Bulls are the worst in the International League with 19 errors in 11 games. Of the 50 runs scored against the Bulls, 13 have been unearned.

Consider yesterday’s 5th inning. At that point the Bulls were ahead 2-0. However, a walk put a runner on 1B, an error by Taylor Motter (his fourth) put runners on 1st and 2nd. Before the inning was out those two runners scored as did one more. That was enough to win the game for the Tides.

Which leads us to the good news, even if it is a bit odd. Young Dylan Floro pitched a complete game loss. He had a terrific game allowed just four hits and one earned run over 8 innings.

Dylan Floro came to the Bulls with an impressive résumé spending 2012, 2013, and 2014 coming up through the Rays system. His manager at Charlotte was the young Jared Sandberg. Last year he had some very nice numbers in 28 starts (a WHIP of 1.307) and he’s doing even better this year (WHIP 0.895). So keep an eye on the schedule if you want to see some interesting pitching.

Both pitchers were exceptionally efficient. Game time was just 2:11.

Outside the game —

• Kirby Yates is back on the Bulls’ roster and he pitched an inning in Saturday’s win. Mr. Yates was an exceptional reliever for the Bulls last year and we did not expect to see him back ever again. Here’s hoping that his time with the Bulls is both productive and brief. Not clear why he’s here, but the Rays are nothing if not confusing regarding their pitching turmoil this year.
• Brandon Gomes, who was doing OK in four appearances as a Bull, 5⅓ innings, WHIP of 1.312, is back on the Rays 40-man roster and back with the Rays. The Rays Designated for Assignment former Bull (15 games in 2008) Grant Balfour. I can’t imagine a circumstance where he would end up with the Bulls.
• Mayo Acosta returned from Hudson Valley.