I feel bad for Andrew McCutchen. Kind of like the way I felt for Jason Bay and Jason Kendall and Brian Giles before him. And Tony Pena and Johnny Ray before them. So long as they are in the Steel City, they might not play for a winner in spite of being pretty good ballplayers.
It has already been noted several times in various spots on the WWW that he should not be pitched to at this stage. The Pirates offense is looking historically awful as we hit the quarter post on the season. We have one regular with an OPS+ of better than 100 and just one bench player above 80 (Josh Harrison, thanks to a productive series in Detroit).
One of the boards I frequent wondered what percentage of the Pirates runs were attributed to McCutchen either through an RBI or a run scored. So, I took the old runs produced statistic (R+RBI-HR) and then divided it by the total number of runs scored by the team. Cutch leads the majors by having a hand in 32.2% of the runs the Pirates have scored. (As an aside, I’d reply right to the board as well, but they have yet to validate my registration…)
The rest of the Top 5 (includes games through Saturday – baseball-reference.com supplied the data):
2. Joey Votto – 30.0%
3. Chase Headley – 30.0%
4. Andre Ethier – 29.9%
5. David Wright – 27.7%
The 2011 leader was Matt Kemp at 31.4% followed by a large drop off to Ryan Braun in second at 25.9%. Miguel Cabrera (at 26.5%) formed a tight 1-2-3 race alongside Hunter Pence (26.0%) and Albert Pujols (26.0%) in 2010.