Charts

(click on image for larger view)

With last night’s game we are 13 times through the rotation, so time to take a look at the charts.

The performance chart shows games since the first of May and the last bars are overall numbers for the season. What’s worrisome is the trend line for the pitching. Not only are the individual games recently worse than the season totals, but the trend line is down as well. The hitting trend is ticking upwards, nice to see.

The pitching chart is deceptive since only the current pitchers are shown (Thayer has been on the DL for a while, but he’s still in town). As might be noted by the low number of appearances, a lot of these guys are essentially new to the team (Cromer, Medlock, Julio, and DeSalvo. I’m not a big fan of ERA as a measure of pitching performance, but I am a big believer in the basic idea that if a guy doesn’t get on base, he can’t score. Among the current relief corps, things are not looking all that good. I’m not worried about Medlock yet and I guess Orvella had to go. Day is just coming back after a while off. And they are all putting in more innings than they should. So here’s hoping that the core starters can put in some solid innings over the next round — DeSalvo, Davis, Hernadez, and Cromer look OK. Then Talbot comes back, Houser goes, and all’s right with the world.

Note: We’ve had 21 different pitchers take the mound for the Durham Bulls this season! If Bradford pitches soon, it will be 22. One way to look at that is that there’s been a new pitcher at some point in every third game this season.