They likely also belong in this post. Here are Qualls’ splits for the year, coming into today’s game:
Bases empty: .176/.263/.250
Men on base: .242/.310/.355
Runners in scoring position: .333/.404/.487
The last figure will now look even worse, as Boston went 3-for-5 tonight there against Qualls – a quick bit of button-pushing reveals opponents are now batting .364 against him with RISP.

there does seem to be something about Qualls’ movement that simply drives Snyder batty. The pitches that he misses usually don’t appear to be particularly difficult, but he still seems to whiff in an inordinate numbers of Qualls’ appearances (yes, I did just go out of my way to avoid typing Qualls’ balls).

If I could find a source that features game logged fielding data, I would look further into the number Qualls-Snyder WP and PB, but for now that seems especially daunting.

the truly amusing part of Quall’s situational numbers this year is that if they hold to form, then the best role for him would be Lyon’s closer job. If he only came into games with a lead and the bases cleared, he would be putting up “all star” numbers this season.

Have I mentioned lately how overrated closers are?

He did at the beginning of the season, getting 5 quickly through April 24th.

But since then only one.

There is ebb and flow to a season, to player performance, etc. I don’t see why the team can’t at least temporarily have Qualls and Cruz switch roles.

Into whether preventing inherited runners from scoring is a genuine talent? By that, I mean those who are good at it one year, also tend to be good at it the next: it looks as if Qualls had no problems in this area last season. In some ways, this is “clutch pitching”, and we already know that the evidence for “clutch hitting” seems to be ephemeral and fleeting. Some way would have to be found to take the different degree of difficulty into account: coming in with a runner on third and no outs, is a much harder situation than with a runner on first and two outs.

that Chad Qualls started the inning and then gave up the lead:

May 4th
May 7th
May 10th

It was on May 24th where he came in the 9th and gave up a home run to lose the game.

Now some of the situations he was aided by poor defense, but that was a fair stretch where he was pretty awful, and might have been because of the month of April that he had.

From BaseballProspectus.com:

Overall reliever performance is measured by Adjusted Runs Prevented (ARP), a park-adjusted extension…which measures how run expectation changes between the time the reliever enters the game and the time he exits. For example…an average team with one out and runners at second and third would expect to score 1.37 runs in the remainder of the inning; with two outs and a runner on second, a team would expect to score 0.35 runs. If a reliever entered a game with one out and runners on second and third, and was pulled after getting a strikeout and surrendering a double that scored both runners, his Value Added for that appearance would be 1.37 – 0.35 – 2 = -0.98 runs. A player’s Value Added for the season is the sum of the Value Added results for each appearance in the season.

Here are the figures for the Diamondbacks bullpen this year:

Juan Cruz 7.5
Brandon Lyon 7.2
Max Scherzer 6.0
Tony Pena 4.8
Leonel Rosales -0.3
Billy Buckner -0.5
Brandon Medders -0.5
Jailen Peguero -0.5
Doug Slaten -1.1
Yusmeiro Petit -1.6
Chad Qualls -3.5
Edgar G Gonzalez -4.6

Based on these figures, our Four Horsemen this year have been Cruz, Lyon, Scherzer and Peña. Qualls has been very, very poor.

but it’s great to know that Melvin and Price still stand by Chad Qualls.

I quote:

“We still are confident in him,” Melvin said. “He has some struggles, but earlier in the year, he was as good as anybody we’ve had.”

In an astonishing historical parallel, a Polish man named Bobov Melvinski was quoted saying this in September 1939:

“We are still confident in our cavalry’s ability to defeat German tanks,” Melvinski said. “We’ve had some struggles, but earlier in the history of Poland, in the 17th century, our cavalry was as good as anyone else’s.”