Last night Chac was horrific. David Cortes was bad for the second outing in a row, but other than that, the Rockies were pretty decent. All but one of the first seven in the lineup got safely on base at least twice, and the outlier was only because Clint Hurdle insists on batting Aaron Miles near the top of the lineup. Okay, truth be told, Miles' home OBP of .368 isn't so bad. However when you have Eddy Garabito batting seventh in the lineup with a Coors OBP of .451 you wonder about the people who make these decisions. So here it is: the Aaron Miles Coors OBP standard, if you are above that as a batter, great, you get a free pass to the top of the lineup, below, you better be hitting a lot of jacks out and cleaning the company hot tub to make up for it.
Conversely, pitchers who fail to get outs at below that .368 rate or better at Coors probably shouldn't be too comfortable with their jobs here unless they are young enough that we can see them improving. The math behind this is fairly simple, if a pitcher allows less than one in three batters to reach base (an OBP of .333) then they are unlikely to allow more than one on in any given inning before they get three outs, and guess what, when nobody's on, they aren't going to score. However, if a pitcher gets up near a .400 OBP it means that there's a likelihood of at least two batters getting on before the third out (two out of five, .400) is recorded and that's where we get into trouble as just one more hit results in a pretty wicked snowballing effect.
So without further ado, the lists:
Pitchers with safe Coors OBP allowed:
Micelli .182
Fuentes .295
Acevedo .297
Witasick .305
Carvajal .308
Chacon .344
Francis .344
Kim .346
Danger Zone:
Cortes .386
Jennings .389
Perhaps we should rethink handing them the ball while in Denver:
Wright .420
Kennedy .422
Seay .481
Matt Anderson before he was designated by the way had a .556 OBP allowed at Coors. Yeesh. So joe Kennedy gets the start today, we're all excited for it, right?
Update [2005-7-7 16:0:45 by Rox Girl]:
The Rockies made the Mike DeJean signing official today, optioning David Cortes to Colorado Springs. Cortes had been pretty good up until those last two outings, even meriting some rookie of the month consideration in June, hopefully DeJean slides back in seamlessly.
Batters above the AMCOS:
Garabito .451
Atkins .451
Sullivan .443
Helton .431
Ardoin .385
Relaford .379
Aaron Miles .368
Batters below the AMCOS:
Wilson .352
Hawpe .349
Gonzalez .279
Mohr .273
Closser .273
Piedra .267