Week 8 MSSSMRMoW

A Hitting vs. Pitching Crossroads matchup is week 8's
Mike Shaw Subaru Super Mo Replay Matchup of the Week

Its an age old fantasy baseball question. Which would you rather have, great hitting and suspect pitching, suspect hitting and great pitching, or average hitting and average pitching. With most draft leagues, you cannot reasonably expect to have both. With auction leagues, you can try to allocate certain percentages of your budget to each and attempt to hold firm to those budgets, but you are still not likely to be able to acquire both great hitting and great pitching. Whatever happens, no one wants to be terrible at both pitching and hitting. While a single week of the season is not a great sample, this week's Mike Shaw Subaru Super Mo Replay Matchup of the Week gives us a glimpse into what happens when a great hitting/suspect pitching team like Dustys Nustys meets a solid pitching team with suspect hitting like Tom's Lester the Molester.

	R	RBI	SB	AVG	OBP	SLG	W	K	ERA	WHIP	QS	SV+H	Score
Dusty's Team	30	30	2	0.337	0.417	0.583	3	33	4.91	1.55	2	3	6
Lester The Molesters	16	20	8	0.259	0.346	0.463	2	48	3.68	1.29	3	3	5

Fun with stats: The top 3 players for the matchup in each of the hitting stats:

R- Chris Davis (DN) 7, Ian Kinsler (DN) 6, Mike Trout/AJ Pierzynski (DN) 4
RBI - Chris Davis (DN) 10,Mike Trout (DN) 6, Adrian Gonzalez (LM) 6
SB- Ian Desmond, EY JR, Coco Crisp (LM) 2 each
AVG- Chris Davis, Mike Trout (DN) .421, AJ Pierzynski (DN) .409
OBP- Chris Davis (DN) .542, Mike Trout (DN) .455, Miguel Cabrera (DN) .444
SLG- Chris Davis(DN) 1.158, Mike Trout (DN) .789, AJ Pierzynski (DN) .636

Basically, Dusty had six of the top 8 hitters in the matchup with the only ones left out being all everything Troy Tulowitzki having a merely All Star caliber week (250/375/450) instead of a hall of fame one and reigning AL Rookie of the Year Wil Myers (105/261/105) continuing his sophomore season to forget. When AJ Piezynski and Ian Kinsler are having better weeks than Jose Bautista and Troy Tulowitzki, the Nusty offense is going to be extremely difficult to top.

Unfortunately for Dusty, and fortunately for the rest of us, Dusty's pitching staff features Francisco Liriano (9.00 ERA 2.10 WHIP this week), Fatolo Colon (rained out this week), Tim Lincecum (pot smoked away his sure fire Hall of Fame career), and Chris Tillman (54.00 ERA 9.00 WHIP this week). That pitching staff gives everyone a fighting chance every week. This week, Tom's team took advantage behind Zack Greinke, David Price and Dallas Keuchel (2 W, 2 QS, 14K, 1.02 ERA 0.57 WHIP, many confused hitters because they had never heard of Dallas Keuchel). I am in an uncomfortable place in my life because of Dallas Keuchel. First, someone named Dallas pitching in Houston makes me a little confused inside. That confusion grows exponentially when I try to convince myself that there is a fantasy ace pitching for the Houston Astros. I am struggling to reconcile the facts that Dallas Keuchel, middling prospect and pretty terrible major league starting pitcher for the last 2 seasons (1.54 WHIP with opponents hitting nearly .290 against him) has suddenly morphed into Steve Carlton. But Keuchel is inducing groundballs at a nearly 60% rate (amongst the league leaders) and he is strking out 5 batters for every one he walks. It is tough to give up runs in bunches when you arent walking batters and no one can hit a flyball off of you. Rarely do teams string together 3 ground ball base hits in an inning. There is a much higher likelihood of those ground balls producing double plays than runs.

Back to our initial question. Great hitting like Dusty's produced 5 hitting wins and 1 hitting loss but his poor pitching produced only 1 win with 4 losses and a tie. Average might have produced almost exactly the same result. I dont have time today to run what the average scores for each category each week across the league come out to be, though that would be a great project for a rainy day.