Tyler Krieger began the season as a slick fielding, light hitting shortstop. Twenty games into the season Krieger was hitting .212 with 6 RBI in 66 at bats.Twenty four games later Krieger sits at .286, which equates to a .341 average over those 24 games.

Krieger has come up with clutch hits, the game winning hit in the second game of Friday’s double header being example A and his game winning RBI in a 1-0 win over Wake Forest on April 13th being exhibit B.

But Krieger’s bat is more important than just those two game winning hits as evidenced by the fact that Krieger has come to the plate with 139 runners on base this season – more than Garrett Boulware – and the third most on the team.

It’s no coincidence that Clemson is 18-6 over those 24 games when Krieger has batted anywhere from 6th to 9th. It seems that no matter his place in the lineup, runners are on when Krieger steps to the plate and the difference between .212 and .286 can mean winning and losing a game.

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I try to learn something new everyday, so if anyone can tell me what a “team unearned run” is I’m all ears. I’ve never heard of such a thing, but there it was in the box score from Saturday’s game. Four of them in Georgia Tech’s 10 run 5th inning: “EVANS homered to left field, 2 RBI, team unearned;”.

Apparently, under this concept the pitcher is charged with an earned run, but the team is charged with an unearned run – at least that’s the only way I could get the official stats on clemsontigers.com to make sense. How the same run can be charged as earned against the pitcher, but unearned for the team is beyond my pay grade. But, if you look at the “ER” column on the stats page you see that the total is listed as 136. Add up the numbers and you get 140.

If one of my readers has any insight or a link it would certainly be appreciated. Until I can decode the official scoring of unearned team runs the pitching stats totals here (mainly ERA) will differ slightly from the official ones issued by Clemson. For instance, I show the teams ERA at 3.15 (and the individual numbers are correct and total to this number), however Clemson shows the number at 3.06 due to these 4 “unearned team runs”.

Patrick Andrews had another good outing on Friday, giving up 1 run on 2 hits and a walk in 3 and two thirds innings in a 4-3 come from behind victory over Georgia Tech.

Andrews WHIP is down to 0.91, but what’s interesting is the right handed Andrews’ dominance of left handed batters. Lefties are batting .107 against Andrews (3 for 28) and Andrews has not walked any of the 28 lefties faced while striking out 6. Conversely, Andrews is walking 9.5% of the right handers he’s faced, while only striking out 5 of 63.

Baseball logic says pitchers typically fare better against batters from the same side as they throw – right handed pitchers tend to fare better against right handed batters – but not in Andrews’ case.
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Clate Schmidt continues to struggle as the third starter. Schmidt’s numbers are getting ugly and one has to wonder if Jack Leggett will try another option in that spot on Sunday. Andrews got a start early in the season and failed miserably, but I wonder if he, or perhaps Jonathan Meyer, will get an opportunity in place of Schmidt sooner rather than later.

With no midweek game this week the bullpen should be rested and ready come game 3 and Maryland might be the team for another starter to get his feet wet, especially playing at Clemson.