Recap 4/18/2007 Twins 5, Mariners 3

Just this week new MNSG writer Ray Felix did a fantastic write up of Carlos Silva's early season success and gave his rationale. Tonight Carlos Silva took the mound looking for his third win of the season just like Ramon Ortiz did last night. Once again he was near brilliant for much of the game going 6 1/3 innings while allowing 3 runs on 8 hits. The damage was done in the sixth when the Mariners had two bloop singles and a Richie Sexson homerun on what was a very good pitch down at the knees and in. Silva couldn't have made a much better pitch. He also walked one and struck out four. So far Twins fans, skeptical or otherwise must be completely thrilled with Silva's early success. Coming into this season you'd have had a hard time finding anyone who would've said they had faith in Carlos Silva, except perhaps Terry Ryan and Gardy. While I'm not saying that he'll continue to be so successful throughout this year, on the contrary, Mr. Felix pointed out the one very good reason he wont, even if he limits the total number of hits as he has and continues to keep the ball in the yard, it's simply not possible to continue scattering the hits he does allow as well as he has. He will give up runs, he will have bad games, its the nature of sinker-ball pitchers. But if he can continue to intersperse the good with the bad the Twins will be thrilled to have a .500 season from him, as would I.

In the 7th inning the Twins brought out Silva to try to get one last inning out of him as he was only at about 75 pitches and after a bloop to left that was into and out of Kubel's glove on a sliding play and a sharp single by Lopez, then Twins brought in Reyes who failed to get Ichiro. With the bases loaded and needing an answer the Twins turned to Matt Guerrier, usually a long reliever forced into short duty due to the injury to Jesse Crain got Adrian Beltre swinging on a curve and got some defense when Justin Morneau made a great play on a smashed liner off the bat of Jose Vidro to end the inning.

The other huge piece of news from this game was the Mariners loss of star pitcher and phenom Felix Hernandez. Hernandez who had been utterly dominant in his first two starts came into tonight expecting to continue his torrid pitching against a Twins team that would seem to play right into the hands of a strikeout pitcher. However he got off to a real tough start and ended up leaving with an injury after 24 pitches in the first inning while surrendering three earned runs. This was definitely welcome news as no one wanted to face Hernandez the way he had been pitching this season.

On offense the Twins scored all their runs in the first two innings, taking advantage of Felix Hernandez's bad outing to jump out to a 5-0 lead on an assortment of singles, stolen bases, and walks. However after Hernandez left the Twins bats fells silent against long reliever Jake Woods who didn't surrender a run after the 2nd inning. Even though the Twins did manage to put up five runs the offense wasn't particularly impressive managing just 6 hits on the night with four walks.

The Twins will have the chance to break out the brooms on the road tomorrow when El Presidente squares off against Jarrod Washburn.

Positives

- A good game from Luis Castillo who finally got his bat back going 2-4.

- Carlos Silva. Another quality start.

- Matt Guerrier who came in a clutch situation and got two huge outs when he had no room for error and the game was on the line.

- Jason Tyner kept his hitting going with a 1-3 night at the plate and played a serviceable if occasionally frightening center field.

- Stand Up and Shout got his fourth save but made it interesting in the ninth but got some defensive help in the form of Michael Cuddyer getting his 5th (?) outfield assist as the Mariners inexplicably sent Beltre home where he made the final out by about 15 feet.

Negatives

- Jason Kubel, what a terrible night. He went 0-4 with a strikeout and his only good looking at-bat was his first when he lined a pitch to left center that Ichiro used his virtually limitless range to catch. He also dropped a ball on a sliding play in the seventh that very nearly cost the team the game.

One Good Week: Carlos Silva

Hmmm....

This is different, I kind of like it here.

Oh, hi there, I didn't see you come in. I'm Ray, and Corey has recently enlisted me to write some articles here at MNSG-Twins. This is the first of (hopefully) many of those articles, looking at Carlos Silva's first two starts. If you're interested in my other writing, check out my own blog, Daneeka's Ghost. Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoy it.

CARLOS SILVA, Apr.6 - Apr.13
(2GS, 0-1, 0.77 ERA, 11.2IP, 12H, 3BB, 5K)

Coming into the season, there was much hue and cry about Carlos Silva's presence on the roster. The Twins exercised Silva's option this offseason for $4.35 million, and then he had a terrible spring training, posting an 8.44 ERA in five starts and one relief appearance. He pitched 21.1 innings and allowed 31 hits to go with 4 walks and 2 hit batsmen. That's 1.73 baserunners per inning. Nonetheless, he was given a spot in the rotation over Matt Garza and was slated for his 2007 debut in Chicago to open the second series of the season.

That game was cancelled due to inclement weather, but Silva was sent out the next day and pitched 5 solid innings, only allowing 1 run on 5 hits (all singles), a walk, and a hit batsman. Jermaine Dye was the recipient of the hit by pitch, so I'm counting that as a point in Carlos' favor. Unfortunately, the Twins offense couldn't solve Javy Vasquez and Silva left trailing 0-1, eventually taking the loss as the Twins fell 3-0 to the South Siders.

It's fair to say Twins fans were skeptical after the first start. Everyone agreed that Silva deserved a win for his effort, but few were convinced that this would become a regular occurrence. Then Silva took the ball on Thursday and shut out the Tampa Bay Devil Rays for 6 2/3 innings, leaving the game with a 2-0 lead. Silva gave up 7 hits and walked two while striking out 4. Juan Rincon allowed the Rays to tie the game, leaving Silva with a no decision in the eventual 3-2 Twins victory, but that made two excellent starts for Silva which I felt merited a closer look.

Silva is an interesting case to look at, because he has always given up a lot of baserunners; remember the 11-hit shutout of the Angels? His WHIPs for the last three years were 1.43, 1.17, and 1.54, so the real difference betwixt a good start and a bad start for Carlos is whether those baserunners are allowed in the same inning or scattered throughout the game. This trend is continuing so far this year. Silva has only one 1-2-3 inning so far this year, and has allowed a hit in 10 of the 12 innings he has pitched. However, he has been able to keep posting zeros because only twice has he allowed more than one hit in an inning. So, when you see a 1.29 WHIP thus far this season, that's because Silva really is allowing almost exactly one hit every inning.

The key has always been keeping the ball down and using his sinker to induce large quantities of ground balls, as well as limiting the number of walks, since there are already enough runners on without giving up free passes. So to assess how Silva was controlling the count and working ahead of hitters I looked at what count the ball was put in play and what the results were.

COUNT	0-0	0-1	0-2	1-0	1-1	1-2	2-0	2-1	2-2	3-0	3-1	3-2
Chicago	1-2	---	---	1-2	0-3	0-3 K	---	0-1	1-2	---	1-2	1-3 BB
Tampa Bay	0-2	1-1 2B	1-3 K	0-2	3-6 2B	1-6 2K	1-1	0-4	0-1 K	BB	BB	0-1
# of pitches	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12+
Chicago	1-2	1-2	0-3	0-3	1-3	1-3 BB	---	0-1	---	---	1-1	---
Tampa Bay	0-2	1-3	5-10	1-10 BB	BB	0-2	---	---	---	---	---	---

Silva hasn't been involved in very many marathon at bats. Again, this tells us that hitters don't foul off pitches when Silva is pitching, if they're hit, they're going to be in play.* Also Tampa apparently loves to swing the bat, with only 3 at bats getting past the fourth pitch, while almost half the White Sox extended their at bats past 4 pitches. The other thing I noticed with this data was that those at bats that ended quickly were less likely to end with ground balls than other at bats. A closer look yielded the following:

Overall - 43% GB
1st or 2nd pitch - 11% (9 balls in play)
3rd through 5th pitch - 64% (25 balls in play)
6+ pitches - 0% (6 balls in play)

It's a small sample size, but this whole exercise is based on two starts, so bear with me. It seems that Silva tries to get ahead with his fastball early, and if that is put in play it's almost always in the air. Later in the at bat, the sinker plays a larger role and an impressive 64% of balls in play are on the ground. I also looked at some of the splits to see if the GB% increased with runners on base, but there was very little difference (47% with runners on base, 42% with the bases empty). Especially in the Tampa game, Silva seemed to bear down with runners on (see chart below) but not necessarily through the ground ball, I guess.

OTHER STATS	BF	RHB	LHB	Empty	Runners	GB%	K%	1st strike	1st ball
Chicago	20	2-9	3-9 BB,K	3-9	2-9 K,BB	35%	5%	3-8 BB	2-10 K
Tampa Bay	29	3-13 K	4-14 2BB,3K	7-17 2K	0-10 2BB,2K	48%	14%	3-17 4K	4-10 2BB

Other interesting points on the first two starts; left-handers seem to get on base better against Carlos (OBP - .385 LHB, .261 RHB) but that's also due to the fact that all of his walks were issued to lefties (is that weird?). Predictably, Silva fared much better when starting out with a first pitch strike (OBP - .391 ball, .269 strike). Carlos is not known as a strikeout pitcher, of the 20 batters who reached 2-strike counts, he fanned 5 of them (25%). Overall, Silva was remarkably consistent in the number of pitches per inning (avg. - 15.9), with the one hiccup coming in the very first inning of the year (the only inning he allowed a run).

P/Inn.	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9
Chicago	32	12	20	7	16	--	--	--	--
Tampa Bay	16	15	12	18	12	16	10	--	--

It seems that the Tampa game was the better pitched of the two; observe the higher GB%, the higher K%, and the fantastic 0-10 with runners on base. In fact, it seems Silva was a little lucky to escape with only one run allowed against Chicago. It always seems like more runs should be allowed with all those baserunners, but, nonetheless, Silva has turned in two quality performances this week. I don't think that anyone would argue that it's realistic for this to continue all season, but if a few of these types of outings are interspersed with more average outings in the future, Twins fans should be pleasantly surprised.

Keep up the good work Carlos!

* After making this statement, I went and looked it up. In these two games, in 49 plate appearances, 40 balls were put in play and hitters hit 37 fouls (6 from one Darin Erstad at bat). Not as big of a difference as I thought, but technically I was correct.

WHAT!?!?!

Ok, I should preface this by telling anyone who doesn't already know that Im a pretty big Ron Gardenhire guy. I think he runs a bullpen better than any manager in the game and players really seem to like his approach. That said...

I read this quote today in an article I found on SI.com that was reported from the AP.

"We've been thinking about it over and over again, trying to decide what's best for this young man and our ballclub," manager Ron Gardenhire said. "He needs to be able to locate his pitches a little bit more.

"You have to be able to locate all of your pitches, besides your fastball. You can survive in spring training into six or seven innings with your fastball. You can't do that in the big leagues. He'll mature out there after a couple of weeks."

This makes me wonder a few things...

1) If Garza is locating so badly and ending up with a 1.50 ERA all with one pitch and getting sent down, how exactly does he justify Silva getting shelled to the tune of 11.02 with one barely functioning pitch which he locates almost solely belt high and down-the middle?

2) We all know Garza doesn't have a plus second pitch, but with a good fastball if he can learn to mix in enough breaking balls to keep guys honest and guessing, he can be effective (though not great) right now.

3) What the hell does he expect Garza to figure out "in a couple of weeks" that he hasn't figured out yet? Does he really think that somehow in a month or so he's going to develop Maddux-esqe control?

Now don't get me wrong I, unlike most Twins Nation believe Garza is a good but not GREAT prospect, and wont change that opinion till he works on his breaking stuff, but come on Gardy. I feel like he's insulting my intelligence when he says stuff like that. Everyone knows the reason Garza going and Silva is staying is related to arbitration, just say it. Instead they should say, "Listen right now the people who run the organization have decided that its in the best interest of this ballclub to delay arbitration on the players they feel give them the best opportunity to win in the future. If that means digging a hole for ourselves this season then so be it, we think we're making the best long-term decision there is to be made." Now of course there's no way they'll say that, but they should.