Top Play (WPA): The Target Field faithful had many opportunities to try out their “Plooouuuuffe” cheer Friday night: Trevor Plouffe collected four RBI on two doubles on the evening. However, the night’s top play resulted in an unearned runs when Plouffe smacked a perfect double play ball to Starlin Castro. Castro booted the ball, allowing Brian Dozier to score, and then proceeded look away in disgust at his error, a lapse lasting just long enough for Eddie Rosario to also score on the play (.087).
I write about Castro a lot in these (digital) pages, and he is a point of vociferous contention among many Cubs fans, particularly with regards to his defense. This season, he sports a middling 2.9 FRAA (Fielding Runs Above Average) and a very poor -13.4 UZR/150. FanGraphs’ Inside Edge fielding grades (to be taken with a large grain of salt due to inherent biases) rate Castro very poorly as well: among qualified shortstops, he has converted the league’s lowest percentage of “certain” plays at 92.56 percent. That’s well below his career mark of 95.8 percent, a mysterious and disconcerting drop.
Castro will most likely be a divisive player the rest of his career; advanced fielding metrics generally can’t agree on his defensive ability, and the “eye test” yields similar results.
Bottom Play (WPA): Kyle Hendricks never recovered from a poor first inning, but he did benefit from a stroke of luck to limit the damage to two runs in the Twins’ first frame. With one out and runners on first and second, Hendricks delivered a belt-high changeup on the inner half of the plate that Kurt Suzuki drilled back through the box, fortunately finding Hendricks’ glove. Plouffe had wandered too far towards third base and Hendricks easily threw to Addison Russell to complete the double play and end the inning (-.062).
Key Moment: The Cubs’ patient approach did not work against notorious strike-thrower Phil Hughes. Hughes, who set the single-season record for K/BB ratio last season, and who quite handily leads pitchers in first-strike percentage (73.3 percent) and percentage of pitches in the strike zone (55.9 percent), got ahead of Cubs hitters and cruised through eight innings of two-hit, no walk baseball. Other than Anthony Rizzo’s first of two home runs (.084), Hughes faced basically no trouble.
The only other occurrence of note in this game was Edwin Jackson’s spotless three innings in relief of Hendricks, which makes me wonder…
Trend to Watch: … Is it time to give Edwin Jackson a start?
A pattern does arise when looking at his 2014 pitch locations versus this year’s:
Jackson is making fewer mistakes in the heart of the zone and hammering the lower portions. In April and June of this season, Jackson has thrown a higher percentage of pitches out of the zone than at any other time in his career.
This seems to be one way in which he is combating the incredibly high slugging he allowed on pitches in the strike zone last year, which increased nearly every month.
Breaking Jackson’s pitches down by batted-ball outcomes yields less useful results, due to many fewer pitches thrown this season, but are generally encouraging. It’s difficult to ascertain the source of Jackson’s effectiveness in long relief this season, at least to my eyes.
One unequivocal positive for Jackson is the amount of home runs he has served up this season—zero. His 3.40 DRA is solid and his 103 cFIP is fine for a swing man. For comparison, Tsuyoshi Wada is at 4.76 and 115, respectively. Until Jacob Turner is ready, or until the front office acquires another solid starting pitcher, I wouldn’t be opposed to seeing Jackson make a start or two to gauge his effectiveness and possibly convince another fringe contender with pitching troubles to take a flier.
Coming Next: Jon Lester (3.99 ERA/5.42 DRA) looks to stop the Cubs’ brief two-game skid. His last start marked an improvement over a couple of atrocious June outings. His DRA is 12th-highest among the 108 pitchers with 65 innings. He faces righty Trevor May (4.26/3.81) in a 1:10 CST start. Kyle Schwarber has only two more big-league games before his scheduled demotion to Iowa. His first two at-bats Friday produced a looking strikeout on three pitches and a pop out, before a fine third at-bat ending in a hard grounder right back to Hughes.
How is this Minnesota club winning so much? Tell us, Cliff Floyd:
#MLBNetwork #twins Cliff explains why they winnin and sh*t @CespedesBBQ @MoEgger1530 pic.twitter.com/4a55WbJiIz
— Dane Galloway (@redsyear) June 20, 2015
Lead photo courtesy of Jesse Johnson-USA TODAY Sports