Steve Sommer

A Little on Wainwright

It’s no mystery that Waino has been struggling a bit in the second half.  A quick glance at his splits page from Fangraphs shows just how stark the difference has been.  Bernie outlined some possible causes in a column earlier in the week, highlighting among other things a more vulnerable sinker (go read the entire [...]

In case you haven’t noticed, Allen Craig’s ground ball rate has jumped rather drastically (55% so far this year, compared to 45% last year according to Fangraphs).  While we’re still operating in relative small sample size land, it’s still a rather alarming jump, so much so that I wanted to get some historical context.  With [...]

During the broadcast on Fox Sports Midwest the other night (I think it was Friday night, but I reserve the right to be wrong) the crew showed a graphic about the Cardinals great gains in Defensive Runs Saved (DRS) this year compared to last.  Currently the Cards have a healthy lead (>10 runs) on the [...]

Thursday Shorts

In honor of Bernie’s Bytes (which are a must read for those that don’t) I thought I’d start throwing out Steve’s Shorts. The idea is they’ll be reasonably quick takes on things with a sabermetric bent.  There won’t be a ton of research that goes into these, but will likely be a graph or two [...]

Looking at Approaches

Clearly the offense has been struggling over recent weeks (at least as I type this they have put up two runs in the first against the Pirates, so we have that going for us).  With that in mind I picked a couple of players, Allen Craig and Carlos Beltran, to look at in some detail [...]

Your Turn

Hi folks, unfortunately work has gotten in the way of content generation for me.  That said you may have seen some contests coming across the other blogs here at the Conclave, and I’ve got one for you too.   What: You have the chance to win a free copy of St. Louis Cardinals Baseball’s Greatest Games: 2011 [...]

Second Base Musings

Yesterday over at StlToday and in the PD Joe Strauss wrote about the upgrade Matt Carpenter provides compared to Cards second basemen of years past.  Being as how this is the Gas House Graphs section of the Conclave I figured what better way to depict that upgrade than with a graph.  I grabbed the production [...]

Happy 4th of July!  I hope everyone is enjoying it with friends and family.   In lieu of an actual post today I’m going to simply present a graph without much comment courtesy of BrooksBaseball.net The out of zone swing percentage is a little worrisome as it also coincides with a month in which the [...]

I’ve spent a decent amount of time over the past few weeks/months thinking of ways to better visualize pitch f/x data especially in the context of an at bat.  It just so happens that in my day job I spend an equal amount of time analyzing transportation networks where a common data visualization is via [...]

Over at Viva El Birdos Dan Moore talked about the Cardinal’s offense not relying on the home run nearly as much as it had in the past.  I found the subject interesting and thought I’d dig into it in my own way.  A chart style I’ve used in the past is to see how a [...]

Going the Other Way

One of the themes I hear fairly frequently is the Cardinals ability and desire to go up the middle and the other way. I thought it would be worthwhile to see how well reality matches perception. First the numbers for going to the opposite field (all data in the post is derived using Fangraphs.com splits [...]

WAR Birds

Reading through Derrick Goold’s chat on stltoday earlier this week the following answer jumped out at me I see all stats as part of a larger picture. I don’t think there is one stat that tells me everything. Wins for starting pitchers have value because they make a starting pitcher accessible and we know by reading [...]

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