I’ve decided to make a slight alteration to my monthly awards posts. Since those have become pretty much the only articles I ever write anymore, I’m going to make them a little more comprehensive, reviewing the league as a whole a little more and focusing less on the two players who won the monthly awards. The exact contents of the monthly articles won’t be consistent, other than listing the weekly and monthly award winners. Sometimes I’ll recap the month and take a temperature of the league title race. But other times I may have a specific topic of interest to write about. This month, it will be pretty basic: a brief rundown of all ten teams at the 1/3 mark of the season.
The story of the year so far in the DTBL has to be the Kings attempt to go from worst to first. They’ve held the top spot in the standings for a couple weeks now and even had a double digit lead at one point. Last year was a bit of an aberration from the usually strong Kings, but I’m not sure anyone saw this coming. The offense has been the best in the league, but the pitching staff has been the huge surprise. What looked like a debilitating weakness, their staff is actually above average so far. Jeff Samardzija and Aaron Nola have been especially key additions.
The Kings have plenty of company near the top of the league though. Unsurprisingly, the Mavericks have the best pitching staff in the league. They are dominating everyone in ERA, WHIP and strikeouts, to the point where their staff would really need to fall apart for them not to bank those 30 points. As you’ll see in a bit, May was an especially strong month for the Mavericks, led by their two biggest stars. The three other teams in the top half of the standings are a little more balanced between hitting and pitching compared to the Kings and Mavericks. The Choppers have had a really strong year on both sides of the ledger. The Demigods may have been the best team in the league in May (I should probably put numbers to this at some point), thanks in no small part to the return of Jose Fernandez to the ranks of the elite pitchers in baseball. Besides the Kings, the next most positively surprising team has to be the Gators who have been in striking distance of first place all season so far. All of these five teams should feel pretty good about their current standing.
On the other hand, the other five teams are surely disappointed with how things are going so far in 2016. The Jackalope were due for regression after their magical 2015, but 25 points out of the lead through two months was certainly unexpected. Some of it can be blamed on injuries to key players, but there are teams above them with even more injured guys. Obviously, this team has the talent to get back into the race in a hurry. The Darkhorses are having a great season with the bats, but their pitching staff has been woeful, currently sitting at just 10 points. That will need to improve soon. The Naturals, usually one of the best offensive teams in the league, have certainly not been that thus far. Nolan Arenado is doing his part, but he could use some help. The Moonshiners have had a rough go of it with the bats too, but their pitching staff has also taken some huge steps backwards, most notably Dallas Keuchel and Zack Greinke. Now add the misery of Felix Hernandez landing on the DL. Finally, not much has gone right for the Cougars in the first two months. They have been entrenched in last place for several weeks now.
Here are the weekly and monthly award winners for May 2016.
Batters of the Week:
Week 5 (5/2 – 5/8) - Robinson Cano, Kings
Week 6 (5/9 – 5/15) – Todd Frazier, Darkhorses
Week 7 (5/16 – 5/22) - Mike Trout, Mavericks
Week 8 (5/23 – 5/29) - Joe Mauer, Demigods
Pitchers of the Week:
Week 5 (5/2 – 5/8) - Jose Quintana, Gators
Week 6 (5/9 – 5/15) - Clayton Kershaw, Mavericks
Week 7 (5/16 – 5/22) - Madison Bumgarner, Cougars
Week 8 (5/23 – 5/29) - Clayton Kershaw, Mavericks
Week 6 exposed a flaw in my code for awarding the weekly honors. For both batters and pitchers, I had to manually change it to the players listed above because my code had awarded two players who were just activated for the upcoming week and were not actually on the active roster for the week they would have won: Jackie Bradley Jr. and Jose Fernandez. Interestingly, both would have been strong contenders for the monthly awards too had they actually spent the entire month on active rosters. But here are the two players who did win the awards for May 2016:
Batter of the Month:
Mike Trout, Mavericks
.340 AVG, 7 HR, 27 RBI, 26 R, 5 SB, 2.86 PAR
Pitcher of the Month:
Clayton Kershaw, Mavericks
0.91 ERA, 0.523 WHIP, 5 W, 0 SV, 65 K, 5.69 PAR
After a somewhat pedestrian first month, by his standards, Mike Trout was back to his usual form in May. He did not lead the league in any single category, but was near the top in all five. Perhaps most encouraging were the five stolen bases, which is the same number he stole in the final five months of 2015. There were a whole bunch of players within striking distance of this honor, with Ben Zobrist and Mookie Betts being the two closest. Meanwhile, Clayton Kershaw lapped the field on the pitching side. He is the first player (pitcher or batter) to surpass a 5.0 PAR in a month since I started tracking these monthly numbers last year. All of his May numbers are insane, but especially the 65/2 K/BB ratio. He had three more wins than walks in May! Jose Fernandez actually had the second highest PAR for the month, but as I mentioned above, he was not on the active roster for all of that time, so runner-up honors go to Madison Bumgarner who would have had a strong case for this award with his May numbers in almost any other month.