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Our Team is Weird
With the current injuries to Russell Branyan, Adrian Beltre, and Ichiro, we’ve been putting out some of the worst lineups I’ve ever seen. We’re incredibly lucky that the brunt of these injuries has come during a homestand featuring the A’s and the Royals. But, even though both of those teams (especially the Royals) are terrible, it still strikes me as somewhat of a minor miracle that we were able to win 5 of our 7 games against them. I mean, here’s the lineup, with wOBA’s, that we put out on Saturday in our 8-4 win over Kansas City.
CF Franklin Gutierrez – .337
2B Jose Lopez – .321
DH Mike Sweeney – .315
RF Bill Hall – .269
1B Jack Hannahan – .287
SS Jack Wilson – .288
LF Ryan Langerhans – .299
3B Josh Wilson – .267
C Rob Johnson – .285
That horrifying lineup scored 8 runs against a not-terrible pitcher. But, it was a not-terrible pitcher with a terrible defense behind him. Unfortunately, now we’ve run out of terrible teams to play, and we’ll be facing the Angels. The Angels are not by any means a terrible defensive team – they sit at just about average with an 0.1 UZR, but amazingly, despite their outstanding record, they are one of the worst pitching teams in all of baseball. Only the Indians, Reds, Nationals, Orioles, and Brewers rank worst in FIP (I’d cite tRA but Fangraphs doesn’t have it on the leaderboards yet).
The other good news, aside from the Angels having awful pitching, is that Ichiro will almost definitely return at some point in this series, possibly even tonight. Also, the word is that Adrian Beltre may also return – probably tomorrow.
So, we’re going to be sending a slightly improved lineup out against a team that’s actually easier to score runs off of than the Kansas City Royals. Unfortunately they have the 2nd best team wOBA in baseball, behind only the Yankees – hey, there’s gotta be some reason that they’re 25 games over .500. My point is, if the Greinke domination yesterday isn’t an indication that our bats have cooled off, and rather an indication that Zack Greinke is awesome, this bizarre run production from mediocre hitters has a chance to continue!
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