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Thursday, September 25, 2008

Hallelujah And Amen: Cardinals 12, Diamondbacks 3

Somehow, a slightly B-team Cards team managed to absolutely whup the Snakes, and the Dodgers by consequence take the division. St. Patrick — why, you've done a man's work, sir.

Update: BTF snark observes that the Yankees and their 87 AL wins won't make the postseason, but the Dodgers and their 83 NL wins will.

Update 2: Mark Reynolds struck out a major league record 200th time in this game. Woo hoo.

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Comments:
a short summery of went wrong/right for the Snakes is at the AZ Republic if any one interested.

http://www.azcentral.com/sports/diamondbacks/articles/2008/09/25/20080925spt-p2main.html

the big one, not as prominent in the article but in most fans eyes including mine was letting Valverde go. and why did they do that??? that was the biggest bonehead move!

letting Quentin go wasn't even mentioned in the article but there was some justification for that.
 
I actually agree about Quentin, but it was also understood that he had a very high ceiling. Valverde's trade sort of makes sense from the standard-issue sabermetric perspective, but one of the reasons the Snakes outperformed their pythag last year was that they had a kick-ass bullpen in the good parts, and a lousy one in the bad parts. Unloading Valverde was a key reason they weren't able to compete as well. Not that Valverde helped the 'Stros that much ...
 
Valverde does have 42 saves this year, and as of today, the Astros are still alive, while the Snakes are not. He has the 4th best VORP on the Astros among all pitchers and a 2.9 WXRL (1tth best in NL), so I think Valverde has helped the Astors and is one key difference in the NL West this year; all else being equal he would have imo kept the NL West flag in AZ.
 
The amazing thing to me is that Valverde's ERA went up almost a whole run from 2007 and yet he's got a virtually unchanged VORP:

Year VORP ERA IP
2008 17.8 3.44 70
2007 21.8 2.66 64.3
 

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