Weekend for Lefties
By Eric

Heading into the Cubs-Phillies game Friday night Pat Burrell had one homerun in 97 at bats this season and was catching slack from his manager and the Philly media machine. He was even booed by the Philly crowd during introductions (surprise, surprise... ). Three at bats, two homeruns and five RBI later he was receiving a standing ovation, and the Phillies went on to grab a win. The story on Friday was supposed to be about the Hamels-Hill pitching matchup; it turned into the Pat Burrell show.

I went down to Philly for the game and was beyond psyched about the chance to see Rich Hill go up against the “Cole-Train” (a totally lame nickname that I must have heard about 17,000 times Friday night). Despite the Burrell fireworks and crooked number on the box score, the match-up was still worth the price of admission.

Hamels and Hill are interesting to watch because both are big lefties that rely predominately on off-speed pitches to work batters. Hill’s bread and butter is a killer curve, pretty rare for a lefty, and Hamels lives and dies by his change-up. It was not uncommon on Friday for Hamels to come after a batter with three or four change-ups in a row.

Hill has been a top prospect in the Cub’s farm system for a while now and it’s great to see him finally come into his own in the bigs. He’s been pulled up several times the last couple of years, but has been unable to put everything together until this season. He pitched 23.2 innings in 10 games in 2005 with an ERA of 9.13 and a WHIP of 1.77, and showed his potential last year pitching 99 innings with an ERA of 4.11 and a WHIP of 1.23. But this season he’s finally starting to live up to the Cub’s expectations. Even after Friday’s shaky outing he still has the third best WHIP in the NL (o.96) and 10th best ERA (2.51).

Much has been written about Hamels this season (by Joe), and for good reason (he's on Joe's fantasy team). At 23 years old, he’s definitely one of the most exciting young pitchers in Major League Baseball. He currently has a WHIP of 1.32 and an ERA of 3.46.

While Hamels definitely got the best of Friday’s match-up, his and Hill’s performances were not drastically different. Both pitchers struck out seven (Hill in five innings, Hamels in seven) and gave up two homers. Hill gave up four hits and three walks, Hamels seven hits and two walks. The differentiating factor was that Hill’s homers were of the two and three run variety while Hamels were both solo shots.

Now there are several ways to look at this. To some extent it comes down to random luck, but at the same time the ability to pitch out of jams with runners on base is a make or break skill for pitchers. Friday’s game had bits of both. One thing I noticed about Hill on Friday is that he looks significantly less comfortable pitching out of the stretch with runners on base.

Hill either goes to a slide step which seems to take quite a bit off his stuff or stays in his normal long wind-up leaving himself susceptible to the steal. Aaron Rowand, not exactly a steal machine, stole a base with relative ease against the lefty. That shouldn’t happen. On the plus side, this is a fairly minor mechanical problem that can probably be fixed with a little coaching. Once it is, Hill will be even more dangerous.

There are a couple of things about Hamels that I found on Wikipedia and thought were interesting. Despite being only 23 years old (exactly 11 months younger than me) Hamels is married. Not extremely interesting in and of itself, but the fact that he’s married to Heidi Strobel of Survivor and Playboy fame is. Also, he broke his pitching hand in a bar fight in 2005. Sounds like this guy likes to live the wild life, hopefully it doesn’t get in the way of his baseball career.

A couple other notes:

Citizen Bank Park is a great baseball stadium. I’d been there once before for a Jimmy Buffett concert, but never for a baseball game. I definitely walked away impressed. All of the seats have great sight lines and the place had a distinctly intimate feel with all of the tiers arranged vertically so noone is far from the field. I’m moving down to Philly in July and definitely looking forward to catching some more games there.

How about them Brewers? Sure they just dropped two to the Mets, but they still sit atop the NL with a 25-12 record. I tried to convince Joe in March that the Brewers could be the team to beat in the NL Central this year, and he pretty much laughed at me. Granted, this series against the Mets was their first against a team with a winning record since the first or second week of the season and they are sure to regress to the mean, but talk about a great story. It’ll be interesting to see how their young lineup does as the season drags on and whether their pitching can hold up and stay healthy.