Currently viewing the tag: "Rubby De La Rosa"

Which D-backs Pitches Work Well Together?

On March 20, 2017 By

There are those times, in my journey to learn about baseball, that I’ve legitimately had my mind blown. Most of them occurred early on, when I learned that saves were made up by some guy in the late 60’s, RBI’s were mostly a function of guys getting on base in front of a hitter, and pitchers don’t have all that …

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2017 Spring Preview: A Wide Open Bullpen

On March 6, 2017 By

My goodness, there are a ton of relief arms in camp this spring. I know, I know. This isn’t exactly unheard of as relievers, especially those not slated for late inning duty, are probably the most fungible assets in the game. They’re also the most volatile. With performances fluctuating wildly and sample sizes small, evaluating relievers is difficult in the …

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The Wheel Turns: O’Brien Traded, De La Rosa to the Bullpen, Hopefully

On January 9, 2017 By

“Where were you when you heard the news?” you probably won’t ask a friend or baseball-talking colleague some indeterminate chunk of time from now. “You know, the news that Big Pete got traded and Rubby’s coming back as a reliever?” The odds of one remembering that time and place are slim to none. That’s because most of us lead lives …

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The D-backs Rotation, Playoff Rotations, and Depth

On October 5, 2016 By

The playoffs started yesterday, and that’s both good and bad. Playoff baseball is fun (good), but with every passing final box score, we’re reminded that the long, cold, dead, baseball-less winter is fast approaching (bad). The Jays beat the Orioles in a game that’ll remain notorious for Buck Showalter neglecting to use Zach Britton, the best reliever in baseball, …

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D-backs Pitching Through the DRA Lens: Our Cleanest Look at Talent

On August 3, 2016 By

One of my favorite debates within the baseball analytics community is how to evaluate pitching. We’ve collectively moved on from ERA since it has some obvious problems. The first is the most glaring: ERA tells most of the story of what happened, not how talented a pitcher is. We don’t really care what happened, we care mostly about how good …

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An Attempt at Making Sense of Rubby De La Rosa

On May 2, 2016 By

On Thursday night, Rubby De La Rosa threw a gem — the type of gem that makes you kind of wonder why you ever doubted him. Maybe you never doubted him, but I sure as hell did. It’s been a frustrating ride for De La Rosa with enough troubling outings to put his future into jeopardy and, somehow, enough …

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Smoothing Out the Seams: Fastball Woes Weighing Down the Rotation

On April 25, 2016 By

In case the secret isn’t out yet, Diamondbacks starters have had a bit of a rough go of things to start the season, with home runs allowed serving as the main bugaboo – 17 allowed by the starting rotation in their first 19 games. As Ryan wrote about after the team acquired Shelby Miller, the mix of his fastballs has …

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Rubby De La Rosa: Reliever For a Day

On April 13, 2016 By

In the eighth inning of a 4-2 loss to the Cubs on Saturday, something special happened. Rubby De La Rosa pitched as a reliever. Now, we’ve had some zany ideas around here in the past, like experimenting with a team full of Gerardo Parra‘s, utilizing a starter by committee approach or using Archie Bradley as a bullpen ace. …

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Opening Day and Bold Predictions

On April 3, 2016 By

It’s that time, sports fans: Opening Day for the Diamondbacks and 19 other teams. If you follow the D-backs, you’ve survived a slow death to the season in 2013, a 2014 that was derailed before it got going, and a 2015 season that included some long-lasting experiments that were at least as frustrating to watch as they were smart to …

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Double Plus: D-backs Calibrating Their Reliance on Sinkers

On March 25, 2016 By

Not long ago, we worked through some research that betrayed a general principle: the more horizontal the movement on a pitch, the more susceptible to large platoon splits it was likely to be. The converse — that when the movement of a pitch was more or mostly horizontal, the bigger the platoon splits — clashed with the D-backs’ sinker …

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Why Doesn’t Rubby’s Changeup Work?

On March 1, 2016 By

I’ve been room-temperature about Rubby De La Rosa since he arrived in Arizona. Watching him in Los Angeles and Boston a time or two, he was the kind of pitcher that had the raw stuff but didn’t maximize it. At 23 or 24, that was understandable. Now, just a few days before De La Rosa turns 27, it remains a …

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D-backs Starting Pitcher Arsenal Scores

On February 9, 2016 By

Analytics allow you do some really fun things. You can slice and dice numbers to create new ways of evaluating players that, frankly, weren’t possible just five years ago. One such metric, and one that I’m a big fan of, is the arsenal score. Eno Sarris has been rolling these out over at RotoGraphs for a few seasons now (his …

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The Race for Fifth Starter May Already be Decided

On February 3, 2016 By

When the D-backs reported for spring training a year ago (yes, it really is February!), the roster had been partially blown up. For the rotation, there were at least twelve candidates — and only Josh Collmenter and Jeremy Hellickson had slots essentially locked up. They don’t have rotation slots locked up this year.

What a difference a year makes, right? …

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Fastballs and Changeups and Diamondbacks

On January 26, 2016 By

Strikeouts were a problem for the Diamondbacks’ pitching staff in 2015. As a collective group of pitchers, they were 19th in the majors in strikeout rate. The starters were 18th and the relief corps ranked 24th. It was a bottom-third result when you put it all together in terms of strikeouts. We like strikeouts, but as you’ve hopefully noticed here, …

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D-backs Nearly Run the Table in Arbitration

On January 20, 2016 By

I’m frequently surprised by how aggressive some people are in negotiation — and how frequently it works. I tend to stake out ground and defend it, rather than go all over the place. The benefit of that kind of general reasonableness is that you get to take an unreasonable position from time to time and garb it in that same …

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Pre-Filing Arbitration Strategies for D-backs, Players

On January 4, 2016 By

The baseball arbitration dance is set to its own rhythm. Things become a little more clear once players and teams have filed figures, but a lot is happening behind the scenes right now, and more will happen before figures are exchanged on January 15th. At that point, the game has fewer dimensions — and maybe no negotiation dimensions, if the …

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