Click the link to read the story, but newly acquired Carlos Carrasco was the winning pitcher for Class AAA Columbus tonight against Lehigh Valley - the loser was Pedro Martinez.
This article is frustrating for me to read because the Plain Dealer reports that Carrasco’s numbers “weren’t outstanding.”
Of course, they’re looking at the wrong numbers - hits and earned runs.
In 5 and 1/3 innings, Carrasco struck out 6 and walked 1, which is excellent. He did give up a home run but that happens.
What’s frustrating about all of this - and it has to be extremely frustrating for the front office - is that print and TV media are the gateway to most fans’ understanding of the game. Therefore, when the newspapers make it sound like Carrasco pitched a poor game but got lucky and won, these fans think the same thing and immediately decide that Carrasco sucks and Shapiro made an awful trade.
In fact, when the deal was made I read that Carrasco has been struggling at Triple-A this season. However, when you look at the stats that matter he’s actually been better than his career average in BB/9 and SO/9 and just slightly worse in HR/9 (clicking on Carrasco’s name up top will take you to his page on Baseball-Reference).
This ends up really confusing the story in a way that isn’t helpful for the fans or the organization. I’ll be sad when newspapers die, if only because I hate to see people lose their jobs, but if one product of the information age is that the general population has access to more data and more points of view it’s a very good thing for the culture - especially when the conventional wisdom is misinformed.
