2013-04-09 Brewers (Peralta) at Cubs (Wood), 7:05 PM CDT [Brewers lose, 6-3. Yes, bullpen.]

[brewmann04]

You would Hope Good Managers and head Coach will learn from their Past Mistakes. Lets Hope RR will finally learn from his.

[brewmann04]

You would Hope Good Managers and head Coach will learn from their Past Mistakes. Lets Hope RR will finally learn from his.

[rluzinski]

I was not happy to see Axford get trotted out there for the 8th. I am not a huge fan of set roles anyway, so let Axford have a couple of easy innings already.

 

That said, it's never as simple as "learning from your mistakes" in baseball because a mistake is defined by the fans as anything that had a poor outcome. Axford is getting absolutely destroyed right now but there is nothing so obviously wrong with his stuff right that suggests we should expect him to have a 24 ERA. Anyone proclaim (without evidence) that his fastball is straight as an arrow but the pitchFX data suggests it has the same movement (and velocity) as it did when he was dominating. Am I suggesting that I KNOW there is nothing wrong? Of course not. I am only saying is that there is no obvious evidence. I have no idea why his first 3-1/3 innings this year has had disasterous results and I am pretty certain no one else does either.

 

So we are stuck with the same problem with that we have with any reliever. They face so few batters each season that it's hard to sort through the data and figure out what the signal is and what is the noise. As a recent Fangraphs article on Axford stated, he was probably not as good as 2010 and 2011 seasons suggested and he's probably not as bad as his 2012 season suggests. There are no obvious lessons to learn here.

[vegasbrewcrew1993]

I was not happy to see Axford get trotted out there for the 8th. I am not a huge fan of set roles anyway, so let Axford have a couple of easy innings already.

 

That said, it's never as simple as "learning from your mistakes" in baseball because a mistake is defined by the fans as anything that had a poor outcome. Axford is getting absolutely destroyed right now but there is nothing so obviously wrong with his stuff right that suggests we should expect him to have a 24 ERA. Anyone proclaim (without evidence) that his fastball is straight as an arrow but the pitchFX data suggests it has the same movement (and velocity) as it did when he was dominating. Am I suggesting that I KNOW there is nothing wrong? Of course not. I am only saying is that there is no obvious evidence. I have no idea why his first 3-1/3 innings this year has had disasterous results and I am pretty certain no one else does either.

 

So we are stuck with the same problem with that we have with any reliever. They face so few batters each season that it's hard to sort through the data and figure out what the signal is and what is the noise. As a recent Fangraphs article on Axford stated, he was probably not as good as 2010 and 2011 seasons suggested and he's probably not as bad as his 2012 season suggests. There are no obvious lessons to learn here.

 

I agree with you. I don't think that his stuff is the problem. I think his problem is that he uses the fastball too much. If you keep showing your fastball, eventually hitters are going to hit it. I think that Axford should rely on the curveball instead of the fastball. Attack with the curveball and another breaking ball, and then surprise hitters with the fastball. He's got nothing to lose so maybe he should consider a change in gameplan. Whatever Axford is doing now isn't working.