I was just parusing the stats for the Ironpigs. We recently passed the 1st quarter of the season mark and I was curious to see where they stood amongst the rest of the International League, stat-wise.
Hitting:
Batting average – 10th with a team .246 average
Doubles – 12th with 59
Triples – 12th with 5
HR – 6th with 37
RBI – 5th with 171
In fact the Ironpig’s have only one player breaking the top 5 in any positive stat for batters. That would be Rich Thompson, who leads the league with 16 Stolen Bases. The next closest would be Jeff Larish’s 8 HR for 7th in the standings.
Pitching:
ERA – 5th with a 3.66
Strike outs – 4th with 316
The other stats are pretty much the same, innings pitched, wins/losses, etc. Everyone plays the same number of innings and games, not relevant.
Looking at individual stats, keeping in mind minimum participation:
Mike Zagurski riding a solid 6th with 6 saves.
Michael Schwimer leading the league with a whopping 5 holds.
Holds and saves are situational, so it’s not really a great measure of performance and in regards to Schwimer and Zagurski it doesn’t reflect how well they have been pitching.
So barely 2 league leaders and the team stats riding towards the middle-bottom of the league for both hitting and pitching yet still holding the league’s 2nd best record…
How do we explain this?
Teamwork, good leadership, aggressive play and a whole lot of luck… but mostly teamwork.
Really appreciating the effort this team puts out each and every day! Thank you!
noisenation.mlblogs.com 
The Phillies organization picked up some good players, hired the right Manager, and there are no negative leftovers from the past. Yes, Thompson still here, but he is light years from the Casey Smith’s, Mike Rouse’s, and Valentino Paschucci’s of those days…
Only 10th in batting but fifth in RBI. That means timely hitting…
I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anyone play with less energy than Casey Smith at 2nd base.
Slow start has a lot to do with it as well.
Barfield in April: .195. Barfield in May: .339
Belliard: .267/.293
Moss: .239/.306
Young: .165/.276
Sullivan: .203/.243
Thompson: .246/.300
Larish and Kratz went the other direction.
Kevin Frandsen’s .321 average is still listed as 8th best in the IL.
The starting pitching seemed to go the other way except for Ryan Feierabend who was 0-2 9.72 in April but is 2-0 1.65 in May.
With 24 team wins there are already 13 different pitchers with at least 1 win.
Not surprising that Erik Kratz, Dane Sardinha and Joel Naughton are the only players not to have attempted to steal a base.
I haven’t had a chance to watch them yet, but from the limited information I get via iPad app, I notice these guys do a good job of capitalizing on their opportunities: They rarely manage to outhit their opponents, but their number of runs is usually greater than or equal to their number of hits. That tells me they’ve got a pretty good running game.
This team seems taylor-made for Thompson’s running out of the leadoff spot, as well. He’s always played hard for us, but this manager and group of players really support him. What’s our record with/without Thompson in the lineup? Seems every time I look up he’s on base or scoring runs. If he can stay in the lineup most every day, he’ll start to rise to the top of some other categories, like runs, OBP, etc.
Don’t know their record with/without Thompson but one thing I noticed is that he seems to be taking more pitches this year and it’s translating into more walks. 97 at bats and 17 walks so far this year. Last year he had 348 ABs with the Ironpigs and walked just 24 times. His .268 batting average plus the 17 walks has his onbase % at .403. Last year he hit .279 but his OBP was just .332. His OBP vs. LHP is .405 and it’s .403 vs. RHP. Too bad we don’t get to see many road games because he’s hitting .318 away from CCP.
I looked over the IL team stats, and several things stuck out at me:
— Lehigh Valley batters are drawing a well-above-average number of walks, which helps mitigate that below-average hitting.
— Lehigh Valley pitchers, in turn, aren’t giving up many walks at all. This helps lessen the chance of opponents getting big innings.
— Lehigh Valley’s bullpen is excellent.
— Lehigh Valley is stealing a few more bases than normal, but the caught-stealing rate is only OK.
I wish the I.L. kept track of fielding stats. It seems the team isn’t allowing a bigger-than-normal number of unearned runs. But it’s hard to get a feel for the team’s defense without hard data. Any longtime observers seeing any big difference this year with the fielding?
See if this link is any help with the fielding stats you’re looking for:
http://www.baseball-reference.com/minors/team.cgi?id=08dcc2f3
Thanks. I see the Pigs are third in fielding average, which means they’re not giving teams a lot of extra chances.