well, the game was fun today. cueto threw pretty well until his meltdown. bruce mania continues to run rampant in the greater tri-state area. mostly, though, nice to see cueto have maybe his best start since his debut. well, all except for that one inning. he was pretty pitch-inefficient early on but got it under control by the 3rd.

and it got me to thinking... doesn't it seem like cueto rolls along other than giving up lots of homers? it got me to thinking... more on that later.

first up - hatteberg was designated for assignment. rumor has it the mariners are interested (hatteberg lives in the pacific northwest, i think) and are thinking about releasing richie sexson.

now.... sexson is due a pretty ridiculous sum of money. but i wonder if maybe a trade could be worked out if the mariners will eat most of the contract. sexson is right handed. he has some pop (not much average, though). just a thought. and it's not that i am at all unhappy with having andy phillips on the team. he's a versitile dude. but he actually hits righties a lot better than lefties and has never demonstrated the kind of power in the bigs that he's shown in the minors...

anyway, about cueto. it seems to me he has a tendency to really miss badly in the strike zone occasionally (perhaps a side-effect of his normally good control).

he's given up 39 earned runs this year in 12 starts. he's given up 14 hr. unless other folks on the board moved up today, that ties him for 3rd in mlb. (harang, incidentally, is 13th. arroyo is 40th.)

it got me to thinking, how does that percentage stack up. i mean, it seems to be a pretty pure measure of mistake pitches... it doesn't even count the other guy the homer might have driven in (who may have dinked, dunked, or otherwise gotten on base despite a good job by the pitcher and might have managed to score some other way (combos of groundouts, sacrifiects, etc) that might not really be much of a "mistake")

so, i grabbed some stats. looked at guys who had given up 15 or more runs this year (volquez has given up 15, so i figure that's a good line to draw to throw out guys without enough stats.)

and what i found was interesting. cueto is giving up more runs off of the guy crossing the plate after hitting a homer than most pitchers, but he's by far not the worst. in fact, among pitchers who have given up 15 or more runs this year, he's 21st with 14 hr to 44 r (a ratio of 31.9%).

some interesting names in front of him:

johan santana (6th, 40%)

ben sheets (10th, 37.5%)

josh beckett (15th, 33.3%)

so i guess this really doesn't indicate that you're a bad pitcher. if i was less lazy, i'd look up how tom browning looked by this measurement (i mean, i recall him giving up LOTS of home runs. not sure if that's just perception though).

some of the lower percentages in the majors belong to sinkerball pitchers, as one might expect:

fausto carmona (2nd, 4.5%)

chien-ming wang (10th, 8.3%)

kyle loshe (really?) (17th, 9.4%)

brandon webb (38thth, 12.9%)

i'm not sure what, if anything, this means. but i found it interesting.

it amazes me that carmona has only given up 1 hr this year considering that he has only struck out 23 batters in 58 innings pitched. i mean, that's a lot of guys making contact. you'd think they would occasionaly get lucky and put one over the fence, right?

the only guy to hit a homer off of carmona this year? the feared slugger from the royals - david dejesus. he has 4 hr this year in 159 ab. talk about your mistakes.

too bad carmona hurt himself fielding his position. he's a fun pitcher to watch.

oh yeah, cueto. one other thing i noticed - even in the 7th he was hitting 96 on the radar gun. now, i think the gun at gabp may run a little hot... but it was still interesting to see him throwing so hard after 90+ pitches. i think he might have just been tired and started leaving them up in the zone a bit.

oh well, time for bed.