Brewers Finally Break Out Versus Lackey And Prevent 10 Game Skid

Pregame

Mike Fiers, the Brewers excellent starting pitcher, he of the dominant 2.86 xFIP and 2.63 SIERA, means the Brewers will probably win this particular match. I just don't see the Cards dealing them 10 losses in a row...

John Lackey, the lacking in that kind of excellence Cardinals starter: 3.46 xFIP which is actually pretty darn good, and 3.62 SIERA, which is also better than I thought. However, the Cardinals clearly have the disadvantage here.

The Cardinals and Brewers have similar positional fWAR totals, but the Cards have more there. This is because of a slightly better defense, as their team wRC+ are identical at 97. I would guess this means the season ain't over yet, peeps.

Game

John Lackey looked great at first, but he gave up plenty of runs, which made me sad. A gamethread moment for this game would be this:

Currently ungruntled

Very ungruntled.

TLR . . . wasn't so bad after all.

by huja on Sep 5, 2014 | 7:49 PM up reply unrec (1)

On the menu tonight is bourbon for me, not neat, but on ice. I am having a moderate amount of it, for a relatively low key Friday. Anyway, it was the third inning that spiked the WPA graph, with Scooter Gennett the likely culprit yet again. It was just a single, but he knocked in two Brewers. It was at this point that the Brewers win expectancy was just under 80% for some reason, even though they were only up by 2 runs.

The next nail in the proverbial coffin was Lucroy singling in the very pesky Scooter Gennett, who will be known as a villain to the Cardinals in a historical sense at this point, for 2014. By the time Khris Davis homered in the sixth, that was pretty much that. The Cards lost 6-2. There was some kind of weird drama at the end of the game, that I was unable to put my finger on, gladly. The Continental was also perplexed by it.

<iframe src="http://www.fangraphs.com/graphframe.aspx?config=0&static=0&type=livewins&num=0&h=450&w=450&date=2014-09-05&team=Brewers&dh=0" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" height="450" width = "450" style="border:1px solid black;"></iframe><br /><span style="font-size:9pt;">Source: <a href="http://www.fangraphs.com/livewins.aspx?date=2014-09-05&team=Brewers&dh=0&season=2014">FanGraphs</a></span>

Not a fun game, but we were riding high before this and this just felt like an inevitable loss being that both teams were streaking in opposite directions and the fates were likely to regulate that shit.

John Lackey gets the WPA dunce hat tonight for the loss, while Fiers expected-ly got the WPA crown, confirming all our fears about him. The bullpens were non-factors in this event. Scooter Gennett predictably offended my sensibilities tonight, and Matt Carpenter was the opposite expectancy, at a negative one zero five.

Post-game

• The Cards are 8-15 on Friday nights this season
• Jhonny Peralta is 1 dinger away from 20 home runs on the season with a solo home run tonight, leading the team; Holliday is next at 16; the two Missouri teams have the least home runs in MLB. The Orioles have more than twice as many home runs as the Cardinals
• Jon Jay lead the offense tonight and is something like 128 wRC+ and is presiding over the stat of BABIP. The Chief Justice has a higher wRC+ than Joey Votto and Mike Napoli, 2nd to Holliday on the Cards
• The next game is at 6:10 central 9/6/14 which happens to be tomorrow on a Saturday

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