{"id":123,"date":"2011-05-02T21:04:02","date_gmt":"2011-05-03T04:04:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/?p=123"},"modified":"2011-05-03T10:34:55","modified_gmt":"2011-05-03T17:34:55","slug":"weaver-cruises-through-april","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/?p=123","title":{"rendered":"Weaver Cruises Through April"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Moonshiners pitcher Jered Weaver<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

My timing isn’t very good with this post as Jered Weaver picked up his first loss of the season tonight.\u00a0 However, this doesn’t change the fact that he had a truly remarkable April and is the primary reason why the Moonshiners find themselves in first place one month into the 2011 season.<\/p>\n

Weaver finished the month with a perfect 6-0 record, winning all six of his starts.\u00a0 He compiled a 0.99 ERA, 0.788 WHIP and 49 strike outs, all very impressive numbers.\u00a0 Shockingly, none of these marks were good enough to lead the league, except wins, but I’ll get to that in a bit.\u00a0 His six wins are two more than any other pitcher has accumulated though.<\/p>\n

The Moonshiners acquired Weaver from the Jackalope during the first round of the draft in exchange for their first round pick.\u00a0 As we all knew at the time, Weaver was exactly what the Moonshiners needed:\u00a0 a true ace.\u00a0 However, I don’t think anyone expected him to come out of the gates quite this strong.\u00a0 He has helped lead the Moonshiners to a top two ranking in every pitching category except saves (4th).\u00a0 Combined with the league’s best offense to date, the Moonshiners find themselves 13 points ahead of the pack with a very impressive 87 points.<\/p>\n

Trading Weaver hasn’t really killed the Jackalope as you much as you might think though.\u00a0 They still have arguably three of the top five pitchers in the league and are right behind the Moonshiners in total pitching points.\u00a0 If their offense, specifically Albert Pujols, picks it up a bit, the second place Jackalope will be right on the Moonshiners’ heals.\u00a0 Ryan Braun has carried their offense so far, with a league leading ten home runs and a .356 batting average.\u00a0 Braun would probably get my vote for Offensive Player of the Month.\u00a0 One other candidate for that title would be Darkhorses outfielder Andre Ethier.\u00a0 Just a couple minutes ago, he recorded a RBI single to extend his hitting streak to 28 games.\u00a0 Going into tonight, he led the league with a .378 average, just a few points ahead of his Dodger teammate Matt Kemp.<\/p>\n

Weaver wasn’t the only pitcher who compiled ridiculous statistics in April.\u00a0 Amazingly, Gators pitcher Josh Johnson has him beat in both ERA and WHIP.\u00a0 Johnson has a 0.88 ERA and 0.707 WHIP.\u00a0 Some bad luck has kept his win total at just three though.\u00a0 Johnson has carried the Gators to the third most pitching points in the league, however a putrid offense has kept them near the bottom of the league standings.\u00a0 The third pitcher who deserves special mention is Weaver’s Moonshiners and Angels teammate Dan Haren.\u00a0 Haren has a 1.23 ERA and a 0.750 WHIP with four wins.\u00a0 At one point, Weaver and Haren combined for eight wins in eight starts.<\/p>\n

There is one other big news item tonight.\u00a0 Mariano Rivera became the DTBL’s all-time saves leader with the save he picked up against the Tigers this evening.\u00a0 This is deserving of a separate blog post though, so I will go into more detail about Rivera later this week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My timing isn’t very good with this post as Jered Weaver picked up his first loss of the season tonight.\u00a0 However, this doesn’t change the fact that he had a truly remarkable April and is the primary reason why the Moonshiners find themselves in first place one month into the 2011 season. Weaver finished the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,5,6,10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-darkhorses","category-gators","category-jackalope","category-moonshiners"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=123"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":127,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123\/revisions\/127"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dreamteambaseball.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}