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Discussion of 2014 and 2015 pitching rotations
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Post by wcsoxfan on Oct 10, 2014 21:56:02 GMT -5
If you think Wright might be a 1 or a 2, I have some ocean front property in Colorado you may be interested in I'm not interested at all in any property in the USA, but if you think Joe Kelly's outperformance of his FIP is a real skill, then I have some ocean front property in Switzerland you may be interested in. So - it's starting to look like a buyer's market!
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Post by thelavarnwayguy on Oct 10, 2014 22:12:26 GMT -5
It seems to me that Kelly at least knows how to pitch for a guy his age. And his stuff is good enough that he may well improve to be a solid #3 or 2 even sometimes with a little luck. Give him a solid defensive infield and he is a sub 4.00 ERA guy with a chance at close to a 3.00 sometimes. He's already been sub 3.00 once. He seems to pitch well with guys on base. I think he is underated.
Which pitcher is worth the most on this staff right now? I think it may be Kelly.
I like a guy who can give you a quality start on a regular basis. I think Kelly might be a real steady performer. Get shelled once in a while but give us quite a few quality starts.
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TearsIn04
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Everybody knows Nelson de la Rosa, but who is Karim Garcia?
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Post by TearsIn04 on Oct 10, 2014 23:10:23 GMT -5
I'm not interested at all in any property in the USA, but if you think Joe Kelly's outperformance of his FIP is a real skill, then I have some ocean front property in Switzerland you may be interested in. Let's take a look into it this way, one guy has performed over a prolonged stretch in the majors. Even if his ERA was a 4.01, that is still a very valuable commodity to have in your rotation. As a 26 year old who throws hard t here is a chance that he can hit a higher ceiling than what his current floor is at.Steven Wright is 30 years old and had his first real look at major league life. In 21 IP, he looked fantastic. In AAA he had an ERA of 3.42 which is about on par with what he did last year in AAA. His K/BB is pretty good and his K rate is decent but if I had to bet which player would have a better career moving forward or be more productive, I'm going to have to say that player is Joe Kelly. I would love to be wrong and have Wright be an ace or even a two, but I highly doubt either happens. In players and in houses, the ceiling is always higher than the floor, isn't it? I'm highly doubtful that either of these guys has ace potential. Kelly's ML performance to date just doesn't indicate the potential to throw 190 innings or more at a 115 to 120 ERA-plus year after year. His K/9 and K/BB aren't great and that's why he has the 4.11 career FIP. As far as Wright goes, how many knuckleballers in the modern era have been the best P on their staff year after year? Definitely Wilbur Wood with the White Sox (WAR numbers from 1971 to 1974: 11.7, 10.7, 7.5 and 5.6 with IP of 334, 376, 359 and 320!!) and P. Niekro with the Braves for a long stretch. Wright's upside is to be another Wake: an innings eater who pitches to a little better than a league average year after year. Nothing wrong with that.
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TearsIn04
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Everybody knows Nelson de la Rosa, but who is Karim Garcia?
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Post by TearsIn04 on Oct 10, 2014 23:12:37 GMT -5
It seems to me that Kelly at least knows how to pitch for a guy his age. And his stuff is good enough that he may well improve to be a solid #3 or 2 even sometimes with a little luck. Give him a solid defensive infield and he is a sub 4.00 ERA guy with a chance at close to a 3.00 sometimes. He's already been sub 3.00 once. He seems to pitch well with guys on base. I think he is underated. Which pitcher is worth the most on this staff right now? I think it may be Kelly.I like a guy who can give you a quality start on a regular basis. I think Kelly might be a real steady performer. Get shelled once in a while but give us quite a few quality starts. This is probably true, but it's also not saying much. The only veteran SP we have at the moment is CB and we know the kind of year he just had.
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Post by philsbosoxfan on Oct 10, 2014 23:21:04 GMT -5
There's also Samardzija on the last year of his contract and I'm more inclined to think Beane deals him for a couple of near major league ready prospect pitchers.
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nomar
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Post by nomar on Oct 10, 2014 23:56:20 GMT -5
There's also Samardzija on the last year of his contract and I'm more inclined to think Beane deals him for a couple of near major league ready prospect pitchers. Addison Russell turned into a couple near major league ready specs who will inevitably be substantially worse than him in all likelihood. You hate to see that.
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Post by larrycook on Oct 11, 2014 0:29:51 GMT -5
Is it wrong of me to be scared of Shields as FA if say he pitches twice this series and goes on to the World Series to pitch twice more? Has there been a lot of research put forth about starters pitching big innings during the year and going deep into the post season? I expected kc to be eliminated by now. The fact that shields is still throwing this late in the year is indeed making me nervous about signing him. (Whatever the years and dollars) I think cherrington goes hard after hamels in the offseason securing us a number 1 starter. Then we will need a number 2 and I had penciled in shields, but now I am thinking we have to go outside the box since Lester probably signs with the cubs and sherzer with the Yankees
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Post by philsbosoxfan on Oct 11, 2014 0:48:47 GMT -5
There's also Samardzija on the last year of his contract and I'm more inclined to think Beane deals him for a couple of near major league ready prospect pitchers. Addison Russell turned into a couple near major league ready specs who will inevitably be substantially worse than him in all likelihood. You hate to see that. He took a shot and made the playoffs, that shot was worth the trades. Relative to the playoffs, Miller, Peavy and Lackey are cases that worked out better from the other team's point of view but are no more valid than this trade or the Lester trade. We lost Hanley but have a ring.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Oct 11, 2014 3:27:24 GMT -5
This strikes me as far too cautious of a strategy. Sure, there's a chance that Webster is as good as Latos, but it's a teeny tiny chance, and not one that a big-market team that seriously wants to contend should rely on. This is especially true of starting pitchers, where the high injury attrition rate means that you'll need your sixth and seventh starters regardless. Is there more than a teeny tiny chance that none of the young pitchers are better than Latos? Steven Wright has 34 career IP with a 90 ERA-, 80 FIP-, 89 xFIP-, and 3.31 SIERA. Yeah, that's a small sample size, but you have to work some to find any 34 consecutive Mat Latos innings with metrics that good across the board. I started off looking for 34 or more innings with a SIERA that low, and found a stretch of six starts in June and July of 2013 -- but he had a 135 ERA- (5.09 ERA. The trick is that he was striking out guys at an immense rate but yielding a titanic BABIP-- and those two absolutely will correlate if you keep throwing the ball hard down the middle of the plate). He had 44 innings just after that with a terrific ERA- and FIP- (32 and 61), but it was 6 starts without allowing a homer, and had a 93 xFIP- and 3.49 SIERA. I'll grant that some of the low HR rate was skill not reflected in the latter two metrics -- so, congrats, we've gone back to the middle of Latos's last healthy season and found a stretch that is better than Wright's career so far. And his first six starts that year actually do best Wright across the board. The point is that Wright's SSS career has been so much better than Latos's that you have to go cherry-picking to find stretches of Latos's that match it. That makes the odds that Wright is close enough to Latos to make Latos not worth acquiring (except for depth) fairly high. Again, assuming they wake* to the reality of how good Wright is, then the reason you acquire Latos, Leake, or Kazmir in addition to Lester or Hamels, etc., is not to strengthen the rotation per se, but to protect yourself against an injury that forces a possibly unready Webster or Barnes into the rotation. Personally, I don't think the risk that someone gets hurt and none of the kids is an OK replacement is worth acquiring Latos etc. unless the acquisition cost is surprisingly low. But I can see the argument for prioritizing it higher. Now, if we're talking about trading for Cueto or Samardzija instead of re-signing Lester or trading for Hamels, that's very interesting. That way, you commit no money long term, you've gotten your borderline ace to anchor your rotation so you can contend if all goes well, and you've bought yourself an entire year of evaluation on half a dozen top pitching prospects in order to determine whether you need to invest huge bucks in an older top of the rotation guy, a move that has historically rarely worked out well. (And Cueto will hit free agency a year younger than Lester or Samardzija.) *Pun not originally intended! Edit: Samardzija and especially Cueto, however, have feasted on dominating weak hitters, whch makes them significantly less interesting to me. Some career splits, OPS allowed to 3 and 4 hitters minus OPS allowed to 7 through 9, non-pitchers only: 51 Zack Greinke 54 Doug Fister 71 Jon Lester 82 Scott Kazmir 88 Max Scherzer 92 James Shields 98 Jordan Zimmermann 100 Mat Latos 102 David Price 103 Mark Buehrle 104 Hisashi Iwakuma 104 Mike Leake 112 Rick Porcello 119 MLB average, 2014121 Clayton Kershaw 128 Cole Hamels 140 Jeff Samardzija 141 Chris Sale 157 Felix Hernandez 178 Ian Kennedy 184 Tim Hudson 190 Bud Norris 197 Johnny Cueto 208 Yovani Gallardo A smaller number means you lose less value when you move from a weaker to a stronger division, and perform better in the post-season relative to expectations, when facing strong opponent lineups.
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Post by jmei on Oct 11, 2014 7:54:36 GMT -5
Steven Wright has 34 career IP with a 90 ERA-, 80 FIP-, 89 xFIP-, and 3.31 SIERA. Yeah, that's a small sample size, but you have to work some to find any 34 consecutive Mat Latos innings with metrics that good across the board. I started off looking for 34 or more innings with a SIERA that low, and found a stretch of six starts in June and July of 2013 -- but he had a 135 ERA- (5.09 ERA. The trick is that he was striking out guys at an immense rate but yielding a titanic BABIP-- and those two absolutely will correlate if you keep throwing the ball hard down the middle of the plate). He had 44 innings just after that with a terrific ERA- and FIP- (32 and 61), but it was 6 starts without allowing a homer, and had a 93 xFIP- and 3.49 SIERA. I'll grant that some of the low HR rate was skill not reflected in the latter two metrics -- so, congrats, we've gone back to the middle of Latos's last healthy season and found a stretch that is better than Wright's career so far. And his first six starts that year actually do best Wright across the board. The point is that Wright's SSS career has been so much better than Latos's that you have to go cherry-picking to find stretches of Latos's that match it. That makes the odds that Wright is close enough to Latos to make Latos not worth acquiring (except for depth) fairly high. You're omitting the fact that the vast majority of Wright's career innings came in relief (28.1 of 34 IP were as a reliever). Not just that, but almost all of those innings were incredibly low-leverage relief innings-- of his career IP, 24.1 IP came in low leverage, 7.2 IP in medium leverage, and just 2.1 IP in high leverage. His career average leverage index when entering the game is an absurdly low 0.41, which would literally make him the lowest-leverage reliever in the league amongst qualified relievers this year by a decent margin. You can thus see why his current career-to-date major league stats are almost certainly a little inflated. He has almost always been limited to blowout duty, and opposing hitters in blowout duty won't have much of an interest in doing stuff like working the count and really trying to hone in on the hangers (potential weaknesses of his). If we bump his ERA up a run (the generic adjustment for a reliever-to-starter transition), Latos and co. look far, far more appetizing, and there's an argument to be made that you need to bump Wright's ERA more than that. I like Wright more than most, but I'm still far, far less confident in Wright's ability to be an above-average starter than you. It's certainly possible, but it's not something I'd want to bet on.
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Post by Guidas on Oct 11, 2014 10:05:35 GMT -5
I think Porcello is also a free agent after next year, and only 28. The Tigers have a ton of cash and will be losing Scherzer so who knows what they'll do but I expect them to be big bidders for Lester and Shields. I haven't gone too deep into Porcello's numbers but if they don't lock him up this winter they may look to move him for more controllable assets.
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TearsIn04
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Post by TearsIn04 on Oct 11, 2014 10:22:47 GMT -5
MFY reporter Sweeney Murti was on WFAN a few minutes ago and was asked whether the MFY will go for one of the top FA pitchers. He said he "wouldn't rule them out" due to the uncertainty surrounding Sabathia, Tanaka and Nova. But he doesn't think the MFY will make "an astronomical offer" to one of the top guys.
If he's right about them not making an astronomical offer (let's say 7 years, $175 million) to Lester, then I think the RS chances of getting him back increase significantly. I don't see anyone else going that high, which means the highest offer would probably come in at about $150 million. With Lester's Boston Herald comment that he would leave $20 million on the table to be somewhere he knows he'll be happy, that would leave the RS able to swoop in and get him at 6 years/$22 million or $23 million per year (for a total of $132 million of $138 million).
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nomar
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Post by nomar on Oct 11, 2014 10:41:48 GMT -5
Wonder if Seattle would give up iwakuma for ML ready pieces
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Post by moonstone2 on Oct 11, 2014 11:27:27 GMT -5
MFY reporter Sweeney Murti was on WFAN a few minutes ago and was asked whether the MFY will go for one of the top FA pitchers. He said he "wouldn't rule them out" due to the uncertainty surrounding Sabathia, Tanaka and Nova. But he doesn't think the MFY will make "an astronomical offer" to one of the top guys. If he's right about them not making an astronomical offer (let's say 7 years, $175 million) to Lester, then I think the RS chances of getting him back increase significantly. I don't see anyone else going that high, which means the highest offer would probably come in at about $150 million. With Lester's Boston Herald comment that he would leave $20 million on the table to be somewhere he knows he'll be happy, that would leave the RS able to swoop in and get him at 6 years/$22 million or $23 million per year (for a total of $132 million of $138 million). The other team with a lot of money, a need for a pitcher and a front office that knows Lester well is of course the Cubs.
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Post by mgoetze on Oct 11, 2014 13:07:42 GMT -5
This is probably true, but it's also not saying much. It says a lot actually ... and it's pretty sad. Kelly probably does have the highest floor of every pitcher on the 40 right now. I feel like Webster, RDLR, Buchholz and Wright all have a higher ceiling than he does but perhaps that's just because I don't really see anything worthwhile in Kelly...
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Post by Chris Hatfield on Oct 11, 2014 14:31:57 GMT -5
MFY reporter Sweeney Murti was on WFAN a few minutes ago and was asked whether the MFY will go for one of the top FA pitchers. He said he "wouldn't rule them out" due to the uncertainty surrounding Sabathia, Tanaka and Nova. But he doesn't think the MFY will make "an astronomical offer" to one of the top guys. If he's right about them not making an astronomical offer (let's say 7 years, $175 million) to Lester, then I think the RS chances of getting him back increase significantly. I don't see anyone else going that high, which means the highest offer would probably come in at about $150 million. With Lester's Boston Herald comment that he would leave $20 million on the table to be somewhere he knows he'll be happy, that would leave the RS able to swoop in and get him at 6 years/$22 million or $23 million per year (for a total of $132 million of $138 million). The other team with a lot of money, a need for a pitcher and a front office that knows Lester well is of course the Cubs. I'll be surprised if Lester doesn't wind up on the Cubs. Fit makes too much sense.
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Post by ray88h66 on Oct 11, 2014 14:51:15 GMT -5
I'm coming around more towards going the trade route for pitching.Not interested in Shields for the price or years he will get. Lester and Max S will get 6 or 7 year deals at 25 mil per IMO. Looks like the sox will have to give up a few of the top prospects for top of the line pitching. One or more of Xander, Mookie, and a pitcher or one of the catchers would have to go. I'm hating not signing Lester before the season started more every day.
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Post by johnsilver52 on Oct 11, 2014 18:43:47 GMT -5
Wonder if Seattle would give up iwakuma for ML ready pieces He's my preferred trade target of the off season. Same age as Shields and a FA after the season. Top of the rotation guy? I'd think next year he gets 75-80m over 4y as a 34yo pretty easy, though think Seattle is looking for offense and kids along with that to possibly move him. Start with Cespedes and go on from there, a LOT more from there.
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Post by redsox04071318champs on Oct 11, 2014 18:56:11 GMT -5
The other team with a lot of money, a need for a pitcher and a front office that knows Lester well is of course the Cubs. I'll be surprised if Lester doesn't wind up on the Cubs. Fit makes too much sense. I, too, would be stunned if Lester doesn't wind up with the Cubs. The Cubs have a great young offense coming along. They need an innings guy and Lester doesn't cost them a draft pick or young talent, just a lot of money, and with all those young kids coming along there's plenty of room in the payroll for Theo to splurge. Where the Sox are hesitant, Theo won't be. Lester will wind up getting a huge contract with the Cubs.
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TearsIn04
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Post by TearsIn04 on Oct 11, 2014 20:04:36 GMT -5
I'll be surprised if Lester doesn't wind up on the Cubs. Fit makes too much sense. I, too, would be stunned if Lester doesn't wind up with the Cubs. The Cubs have a great young offense coming along. They need an innings guy and Lester doesn't cost them a draft pick or young talent, just a lot of money, and with all those young kids coming along there's plenty of room in the payroll for Theo to splurge. Where the Sox are hesitant, Theo won't be. Lester will wind up getting a huge contract with the Cubs. I think it's hard to tell which way Theo will go simply because he has such an erratic past when it comes to giving massive contracts. In his early years as RS GM, he preached against it. I recall him saying "I don't worry about the players we don't sign. I worry about signing the wrong players." His point was that a bad mega-contract or two can badly compromise a team's ability to compete for years. He changed course later on, giving out big contracts to Lackey, Beckett, Crawford and Gonzalez. When it all went south, he skipped town. Then, in the book Tito wrote with Shaughnessy, Theo took the chicken-crap way out and said he gave out the mega contracts because he succumbed to pressure from ownership to Feed the Monster. Will he go above $150 million for Lester? I think he'll have to if Lester was telling the truth when he said he would leave $20 million on the table to be happy somewhere. If a big Lester contract blows up on Theo, we can look forward to reading about how it was all due to pressure to Water the Ivy or whatever.
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Post by larrycook on Oct 11, 2014 21:57:15 GMT -5
Ownership has to be putting the same pressure on cherrington.
I still think cherrington goes hard after 1 too free agent pitcher. Just not sure who that is.
The trade for a top pitcher is also going to be high in cherrington's list.
I can see ranaudo being part of a deal for Ian Kennedy.
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Post by redsox04071318champs on Oct 11, 2014 22:28:26 GMT -5
I, too, would be stunned if Lester doesn't wind up with the Cubs. The Cubs have a great young offense coming along. They need an innings guy and Lester doesn't cost them a draft pick or young talent, just a lot of money, and with all those young kids coming along there's plenty of room in the payroll for Theo to splurge. Where the Sox are hesitant, Theo won't be. Lester will wind up getting a huge contract with the Cubs. I think it's hard to tell which way Theo will go simply because he has such an erratic past when it comes to giving massive contracts. In his early years as RS GM, he preached against it. I recall him saying "I don't worry about the players we don't sign. I worry about signing the wrong players." His point was that a bad mega-contract or two can badly compromise a team's ability to compete for years. He changed course later on, giving out big contracts to Lackey, Beckett, Crawford and Gonzalez. When it all went south, he skipped town. Then, in the book Tito wrote with Shaughnessy, Theo took the chicken-crap way out and said he gave out the mega contracts because he succumbed to pressure from ownership to Feed the Monster. Will he go above $150 million for Lester? I think he'll have to if Lester was telling the truth when he said he would leave $20 million on the table to be happy somewhere. If a big Lester contract blows up on Theo, we can look forward to reading about how it was all due to pressure to Water the Ivy or whatever. Theo wouldn't have to put his spies out to judge Lester's character like he did with Crawford (and a lot of good that did!). Theo knows Lester very well. Theo also has a very low payroll in Chicago, unlike the bulging payroll the Sox had in 2011. He needs an effective top of the rotation workhorse, and not only does this guy not cost them players to acquire, he doesn't even cost them a draft pick. There is no way Theo doesn't go all in for Lester. Since we're reading between the lines in regards to what Lester meant by leaving money on the table, I think he's saying if he has a 7 year $170 million offer on the table for another team and the Sox come in at 6 years $150 million, he'd probably strongly consider the Sox' offer. The Sox had very little inclination to offer more 4 to 5 years at much more than $20 million/year, and I doubt that changes this offseason. They probably know they can get a Hamels or a Shields in that 5 year $100 - $110 million price range. Shields, of course, will cost a 2nd round pick, and Hamels, who in my opinion is better than Shields would make a little less money, but would cost a heckuva lot more in a deal. Beating a dead horse again, I'd much rather see the Sox spend money, save the prospects, save the draft pick and get the better pitcher in Lester (not saying he's better than Hamels necessarily, but he wouldn't cost them talent).
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Post by xanderbogaerts2 on Oct 12, 2014 2:31:37 GMT -5
I think the best possible outcome would be to Sign Lester, a lefty, who you know very well, who can dominate in the regular season and post season, and Johnny Cueto (pot. the cheapest "Ace" out there) who's contract is 10m next year and if Yoenis Cespedes happens to be the big piece in the deal (possibly along with prospect) his contract is 10.5m. Basically it's a trade off of a position of strength for a position of need as far as money goes. So it would be 35m~ for Lester and Cueto compared to 45m (Lester, Shields), 40 (Lester, 2nd tier), or 35 (Shields, 2nd tier). with 35~ that gives you 20 mill without making financial salary dumps per-say. Also can anyone tell me if this 55~ million we have to spend has us picking up Craig Breslow's option or not? If not he should be let go for one of Escobar/Britton/Verdugo/Layne. giving us another 4~ mill to work with.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Oct 12, 2014 3:10:57 GMT -5
Steven Wright has 34 career IP with a 90 ERA-, 80 FIP-, 89 xFIP-, and 3.31 SIERA. Yeah, that's a small sample size, but you have to work some to find any 34 consecutive Mat Latos innings with metrics that good across the board. I started off looking for 34 or more innings with a SIERA that low, and found a stretch of six starts in June and July of 2013 -- but he had a 135 ERA- (5.09 ERA. The trick is that he was striking out guys at an immense rate but yielding a titanic BABIP-- and those two absolutely will correlate if you keep throwing the ball hard down the middle of the plate). He had 44 innings just after that with a terrific ERA- and FIP- (32 and 61), but it was 6 starts without allowing a homer, and had a 93 xFIP- and 3.49 SIERA. I'll grant that some of the low HR rate was skill not reflected in the latter two metrics -- so, congrats, we've gone back to the middle of Latos's last healthy season and found a stretch that is better than Wright's career so far. And his first six starts that year actually do best Wright across the board. The point is that Wright's SSS career has been so much better than Latos's that you have to go cherry-picking to find stretches of Latos's that match it. That makes the odds that Wright is close enough to Latos to make Latos not worth acquiring (except for depth) fairly high. You're omitting the fact that the vast majority of Wright's career innings came in relief (28.1 of 34 IP were as a reliever). Not just that, but almost all of those innings were incredibly low-leverage relief innings-- of his career IP, 24.1 IP came in low leverage, 7.2 IP in medium leverage, and just 2.1 IP in high leverage. His career average leverage index when entering the game is an absurdly low 0.41, which would literally make him the lowest-leverage reliever in the league amongst qualified relievers this year by a decent margin. You can thus see why his current career-to-date major league stats are almost certainly a little inflated. He has almost always been limited to blowout duty, and opposing hitters in blowout duty won't have much of an interest in doing stuff like working the count and really trying to hone in on the hangers (potential weaknesses of his). If we bump his ERA up a run (the generic adjustment for a reliever-to-starter transition), Latos and co. look far, far more appetizing, and there's an argument to be made that you need to bump Wright's ERA more than that. I like Wright more than most, but I'm still far, far less confident in Wright's ability to be an above-average starter than you. It's certainly possible, but it's not something I'd want to bet on. Well, if we're going to drill down to this level of detail, the first thing we want to do is remove Wright's April 2013 roster-emergency MLB debut, because he didn't become the pitcher that has a few of us excited until the middle of that year. It's completely irrelevant to his projection. So he's a guy with a 66 ERA-, 78 FIP-, 82 xFIP-, and 2.97 SIERA in 30.2 IP. There are 272 MLB pitchers who have thrown 25 or more innings and at least 3 IP per G (Wright is 3.4), 2013-2014. Wright-minus-debut ranks tied for 8th, tied for 17th, tied for 16th, and (after adjusting for league) 12th in the four metrics. It has been a spectacularly good 30 innings for a guy who has more often that not faced guys a second time in a game. So, what about that? I happen to have just looked into the relief benefit in a lot of detail, because I wanted to adjust the Davenport translations of piggyback starters and relievers who routinely pitch 2-3 innings, which doesn't happen much in MLB (the average relief appearance this year was 1.0 innings long). Tango et al in The Book came up with an 0.80 relief benefit (I'm not sure where you're getting 1.00). It turns out that 0.40 of that is the times-around-the-order effect. The other 0.40 has to derive from the fact that relievers can air it out more when they're not expecting to pitch more than an inning; guys in relief routinely throw harder than they do as starters. Well, there's no reason to expect a knuckleball pitcher to have either one of these things happening. They're throwing the same pitch mix from the get-go, and hitters seeing them a second or third time in the game can't get used to the break or spin of their primary pitch, since it's random. And obviously they're not exerting extra effort in shorter stints. The one factor that will create a starter / reliever split is whether they have a tendency to gain or lose their feel for the knuckler as the game progresses. If they do, it will be reflected in the times around the order split as well as pitching role splits. Tim Wakefield had a tendency to gradually lose consistent feel for the knuckler as a game went on, and was particularly terrific in his first inning of work. (In fact, I tried very hard to talk the Sox into making him the closer the year they were planing on converting Papelbon to the rotation, and the only reason it wasn't considered seriously was that they didn't feel he was up to it physically.) What about Wright? Do we have any idea about him? One thing we can do is control for identity of the hitter and just look at guys he's faced twice in a game. There are 39 of them. Here's what they did: First time: 8/36, 3 BB, 9 SO (.222 / .282 / .222) Second time: 5/37, HR, 2 BB, 14 SO (.135 / .179 / .216) In the sample at hand, he certainly wasn't losing any feel for the knuckler the second time through the lineup, since his K/BB went from 3.0 to 7.0. It's possible he would have started losing some feel the third time through (presumably from finger fatigue), but note that he would have had to do so, relative to the second time through, to not have his overall numbers improve from pitching longer . I think it's safe to say that we can regard those 30 innings as if they happened over 4 or 5 starts of that quality, or a small bit worse. There's no rationale for adding anywhere near the 0.80 usual penalty for a reliever. As for the leverage thing, that's a silly argument. MLB hitters are trying to do their best at all times, even in a blowout, aren't they? Heck, doing just that once won ARod an MVP that Ortiz completely deserved instead. You can make a better argument that hitters in a low leverage situation would be more relaxed about facing the dreaded knuckleball, which can make the best hitters look silly, and that therefore pitching in low leverage hurt him. I don't buy that either, but if you had a gun to your head and had to pick a barely credible argument about leverage, you'd pick that one and not yours.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Oct 12, 2014 3:54:01 GMT -5
Several people are salivating over Cueto, as well they might since he seems to be a front-runner for the CY runner-up.
We are, however, talking about a guy who held opposing hitters to a .169 / .235 / .249 line ... except for 3 and 4 hitters (which is to say, really good ones), which he "held" to .276 / .348 / .508. Versus the MLB average of .266 / .340 / .429.
And this was not a one-year fluke; he's had a similar pattern his whole career (though not this extreme, of course). His career splits are .277 / .356 / .480 versus 3 and 4 hitters (in 1168 PA) and .227 / .289 / .338 against everyone else.
Do you really want to unload some of the farm to get a guy who has been below MLB average against the two guys in the lineup you're most worried about?
And of course not every 3 and 4 caliber hitter hits there. This split is just a proxy for a more refined one by quality of opposition. He'll lose some value moving to a division that not only has the DH, but was (on average) 3 wins better. He'll lose even more value in the post-season, facing the best lineups in baseball (where I'd rather have Lester, whose 3 and 4 split is among the best in baseball rather than among the worst). But you will pay every penny for that missing value. And overpaying in prospects is sure to hurt you in the long run.
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