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(2021 thread) Red Sox Sign Michael Wacha to a One Year Deal
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Post by Addam603 on Nov 28, 2021 11:38:18 GMT -5
The Rays upgraded from Wacha to Kluber for 8 million and incentives. For an extra million I'd rather have signed Kluber. At least when he pitches he consistently gets batters out. The key words here being “when he pitches.” I don’t think there’s any question that Kluber has more upside than Wacha. But Wacha at least at this point in their careers is probably more likely to pitch a full season. The Red Sox rotation has a decent amount of questions. Can Chris Sale pitch a full season coming back from Tommy John at Chris Sale quality? Can either of Tanner Houck and Garrett Whitlock stick in the rotation for a full year? Can Nick Pivetta be consistent? If you add in the question about Kluber’s health, that’s a lot that could go wrong. The Rays, with their seemingly endless pitching development, can afford to take that risk.
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Post by redsox04071318champs on Nov 28, 2021 12:50:51 GMT -5
The Rays upgraded from Wacha to Kluber for 8 million and incentives. For an extra million I'd rather have signed Kluber. At least when he pitches he consistently gets batters out. The key words here being “when he pitches.” I don’t think there’s any question that Kluber has more upside than Wacha. But Wacha at least at this point in their careers is probably more likely to pitch a full season. The Red Sox rotation has a decent amount of questions. Can Chris Sale pitch a full season coming back from Tommy John at Chris Sale quality? Can either of Tanner Houck and Garrett Whitlock stick in the rotation for a full year? Can Nick Pivetta be consistent? If you add in the question about Kluber’s health, that’s a lot that could go wrong. The Rays, with their seemingly endless pitching development, can afford to take that risk. I'd rather have 50 good innings from Kluber and turn the ball over to Whitlock/Houck, etc, than have 100 not so good innings from Wacha, ala Garrett Richards. Hopefully Wacha is his 2013-2015 self and I change my tune.
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Post by incandenza on Nov 28, 2021 13:19:57 GMT -5
The key words here being “when he pitches.” I don’t think there’s any question that Kluber has more upside than Wacha. But Wacha at least at this point in their careers is probably more likely to pitch a full season. The Red Sox rotation has a decent amount of questions. Can Chris Sale pitch a full season coming back from Tommy John at Chris Sale quality? Can either of Tanner Houck and Garrett Whitlock stick in the rotation for a full year? Can Nick Pivetta be consistent? If you add in the question about Kluber’s health, that’s a lot that could go wrong. The Rays, with their seemingly endless pitching development, can afford to take that risk. I'd rather have 50 good innings from Kluber and turn the ball over to Whitlock/Houck, etc, than have 100 not so good innings from Wacha, ala Garrett Richards. Hopefully Wacha is his 2013-2015 self and I change my tune. It's not a slam dunk that you get *good* innings from Kluber though. In 80 IP last season he had a 4.38 xFIP. Steamer projects a 4.43 ERA next season (Wacha's projection is 4.70). The last time he was actually really good was when he was 32; he'll be 36 next season.
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Post by redsox04071318champs on Nov 28, 2021 15:06:49 GMT -5
I'd rather have 50 good innings from Kluber and turn the ball over to Whitlock/Houck, etc, than have 100 not so good innings from Wacha, ala Garrett Richards. Hopefully Wacha is his 2013-2015 self and I change my tune. It's not a slam dunk that you get *good* innings from Kluber though. In 80 IP last season he had a 4.38 xFIP. Steamer projects a 4.43 ERA next season (Wacha's projection is 4.70). The last time he was actually really good was when he was 32; he'll be 36 next season. No, it's not a slam dunk Kluber pitches well, but I think it's more likely, and for the money, I'd rather chance Kluber than Wacha. The injury history is less important than ineffectiveness. Ultimately I figured the rotation would be Eovaldi/Sale/E-Rod caliber replacement, and 2 of Pivetta/Whitlock/Houck. I figure with Kluber that his presence early on would give them effective innings before injury and then at some point he might be healthy enough to be a postseason starting option. I have trouble seeing Wacha as that kind of viable option. I think Kluber is a bit better than the projection system you're quoting.
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Post by manfred on Nov 28, 2021 16:49:31 GMT -5
I hate to be this guy, but the Wacha signing cannot be assessed without the full off-season. If he is the main ERod replacement, it is almost crrtainly a step back. But if he is the Richards replacement, it is probably a push in talent with a little bit of money saved.
I hated a bunch of last off-season’s pitching signings, but I hardly hate this. Wacha could be a fine arm, as long as he is slotted appropriately. And I’d prefer him to Kluber. I just don’t believe Kluber will stay healthy.
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Post by wcsoxfan on Nov 29, 2021 12:06:29 GMT -5
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Post by bosoxnation on Nov 29, 2021 12:33:03 GMT -5
I hate to be this guy, but the Wacha signing cannot be assessed without the full off-season. If he is the main ERod replacement, it is almost crrtainly a step back. But if he is the Richards replacement, it is probably a push in talent with a little bit of money saved. I hated a bunch of last off-season’s pitching signings, but I hardly hate this. Wacha could be a fine arm, as long as he is slotted appropriately. And I’d prefer him to Kluber. I just don’t believe Kluber will stay healthy. Agreed. My feeling are if we sign another starter that means Houck and Whitlock are in the pen again and that makes our bullpen that much better. 7 million means he’s getting the 5th spot imo. Is Bloom willing to go into ST with Sale Eovaldi Pivetta Houck/Whitlock/Seabold Wacha That’s a pretty good group of guys. If we do run with this i’m expecting a Devers extension and Schwarber or Baez to be signed with that extra money we’re saving.
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jimoh
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Post by jimoh on Nov 29, 2021 14:32:27 GMT -5
Thanks; I like being reminded of what Gausman and Robbie Ray did in the years before they blossomed.
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Post by manfred on Nov 29, 2021 15:39:14 GMT -5
And then there were two: Stroman and Rodon are the last guys who might be pushes in ERod’s slot.
But it seems like the Sox are assuming they make up the gap internally. That is a huge risk.
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Post by redsox04071318champs on Nov 29, 2021 15:48:14 GMT -5
And then there were two: Stroman and Rodon are the last guys who might be pushes in ERod’s slot. But it seems like the Sox are assuming they make up the gap internally. That is a huge risk. That's what I think, too. There's always the trade route although the thought of having to give up young talent is not appealing.
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mobaz
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Post by mobaz on Nov 29, 2021 20:09:02 GMT -5
And then there were two: Stroman and Rodon are the last guys who might be pushes in ERod’s slot. But it seems like the Sox are assuming they make up the gap internally. That is a huge risk. That's what I think, too. There's always the trade route although the thought of having to give up young talent is not appealing. I feel like a trade is more likely than not at this point, honestly. Hoping for Duran and Dalbec and someone we'd feel bad about giving up but neither of Yorke/Mayer, and probably not Bello. I'm kind of almost okay trading Casas in the right deal.
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Post by ematz1423 on Nov 29, 2021 20:20:25 GMT -5
That's what I think, too. There's always the trade route although the thought of having to give up young talent is not appealing. I feel like a trade is more likely than not at this point, honestly. Hoping for Duran and Dalbec and someone we'd feel bad about giving up but neither of Yorke/Mayer, and probably not Bello. I'm kind of almost okay trading Casas in the right deal. Short of a bona-fide ace I'm not trading Casas for a starter and those aren't likely to be available. Some combination of Duran/Dalbec/Downs and someone in the 10-20 range hopefully would get them someone along the lines of a Manaea or bassit.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on May 4, 2022 12:42:57 GMT -5
Of the 121 SP with 17+ IP, Wacha ranks 7th in wOBA, but 43rd in xwOBA. I can find no evidence that the difference is other than luck. When you look at his 29 fly balls and liners, he's actually given up 3 more pulled and 2 fewer straightaway than the average starter with his number of total balls in the air. That's the opposite distribution from a guy with a wOBA / xwOBA skill.
However, the 43rd best starter in MLB is a guy who has sneaked into the #2 starters from the borderline with #3. He leads the Sox in xwOBA, as Eovaldi and Hill are at .328. So far he looks like a legit #3. To say that he's been way better than expected even if you remove the crazy results on balls in play is still an understatement.
If he keeps this up, they'll have plenty pf SP depth once Sale comes back. Houck or Pivetta likely ends up in the pen.
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Post by FenwayFanatic on May 4, 2022 14:06:59 GMT -5
Or they’ll have a great guy to sell high on.
Houck is under team control long-term and Wacha obviously is not. Would make little sense to me to prioritize Wacha over Houck. Especially since it looks like Wacha has benefitted from luck and Pivetta has had bad luck (and also is controlled longer).
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cdj
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Post by cdj on May 4, 2022 14:25:08 GMT -5
Or they’ll have a great guy to sell high on. Houck is under team control long-term and Wacha obviously is not. Would make little sense to me to prioritize Wacha over Houck. Especially since it looks like Wacha has benefitted from luck and Pivetta has had bad luck (and also is controlled longer). What if they’re trying to win? For the record I don’t necessarily disagree with what you’re saying, I just think there’s more to it than what the future holds. I do think they care about the present. They may not expect to necessarily win it all without some breaks but I do still think they want to compete and I think ultimately they will
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Jun 28, 2022 11:04:51 GMT -5
Wacha has allowed a .265 wOBA ... and a .344 xwOBA. That's kind of insane. Of the 174 pitchers who have allowed 100 or more balls in play, he ranks 24th and 120th respectively. He's a #4 starter by expectations and a #2 by results.
It is true that all of MLB is doing this, to a lesser degree. BABIP is as low as it's been in years. Teams have figured out stuff about positioning defenders in just the last few seasons. The league is .310 / .329 (-.019), which means that Statcast is going to have to recalibrate all their data, because by definition xwOBA should be based on the average defense.
So the proper way of looking a this is to look at wOBA and xwOBA on balls in play only. The league is .359 / .387 (-.028), and Wacha is .287 / .394.
Is there any evidence that this is for real?
There are two ways a pitcher can have a BABIP talent. As I've mentioned often, pulled fly balls have a big differential, favoring the hitter of course, while fly balls hit straightaway favor the pitcher to a large degree. Each combo of batted ball type has its own differential.
This is clearly more important for hitters than pitchers. There are "pull hitters" but no "pull pitchers" (which would be bad). If you look at Refsnyder's wOBA / xwOBA in the majors -- and he's been much worse in the majors than you'd expect from his AAA numbers -- you immediately say, wow, super unlucky, that explains MLB failure. But when you adjust for his batted ball distribution, which has been terrible overall, he's actually been a little lucky! (The Twins seemed to have fixed him last year. More on that later.)
Has Wacha shown this skill? No. In fact, when you adjust for his batted ball distribution, his apparent luck increases by .004!
The second way to have a BABIP skill is to simply get hitters to hit the ball to a predictable location, and put your fielders there. The analytics department looks at a hitter, looks at each type of pitch, plots where they hit the ball as a function of location in the zone (and maybe velo and break as well), and finds the spot in the zone for each pitch that will lead to the most predictable results. This is what teams have been doing, I believe.
You'll note that team offenses would differ in how pitchable they are. And they do. While the MLB average on BIP is -.028, the Cardinals are at .001 and the Tigers are at -.049. The Yankees are at -.048, second worst. The Sox are 13th best.
It tuns out that Wacha's opponents have been a bit on the predictable side. How much so? Yup, .004.So the two confounds cancel each other out.
Is there any evidence that Wacha is particularly good at executing this?
Yes, there is. To pull this off, you have to hit your spots in the zone. What's the other, more generic, old fashioned reason you want to hit a spot in the zone? Painting the corners to get a called strike.
Is there a correlation, start by start, between Wacha's wOBA differential and his percentage of all pitches that are taken for strikes? Which is to say, a start-by-start correlation between his hypothesized ability to hit the "at-em ball zone" and hit the paint?
Yes there is. It's not huge -- r = .39, p = .21, but it's as expected.That's actually impressive, I think, for 12 data points, given all the noise in the data.
(I will admit to looking at the correlations to various strike percentages first and then spotting the biggest one, so the "expectation" is after the fact and technically bogus. But the quickest way to do this is to see what correlates, and then see what kind of sense it makes. In this case, it makes perfect sense. It can be tested by looking at other pitchers, teams, etc. I may do that at some point.)
That the MFY's have a terrible differential is promising. You probably have already connected that to the Astros' success against their lineup. They do have the second highest xwOBA on balls in play, but they're just 6th in wOBA. Since 5/9 when we turned it around, we have a .006 edge on them in overall xwOBA but .018 in wOBA.
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ericmvan
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Post by ericmvan on Aug 24, 2022 3:24:34 GMT -5
I found the evidence that Wacha's insane "luck" (wOBA - xwOBA) on balls in play is for real. And it's spectacular! (The evidence, that is.) If this were for real, you'd expect him to have this this karma on each of his pitches, right? These numbers are for balls in play only, of course ...
Pitch PA wOBA xwOBA Diff Sinker 52 .119 .236 -.117 Changeup 63 .241 .348 -.107 4-Seamer 85 .339 .414 -.075 Cutter 36 .390 .451 .061 Wow. Not only is this the case, the better the pitch is by xwOBA, the better the karma.
In fact, the relationship between xwOBA and wOBA is perfectly linear. Plot the two numbers against each other, and the line between them is so straight it's almost surrreal. The correlation between the two stats in a linear regression is .997. The odds of that being random are 343 to 1 (p = .003). With four data points! How about batted ball type? Type PA wOBA xwOBA Diff LD 69 .503 .688 -.185 FB 41 .379 .448 -.069 GB 101 .173 .206 -.033
Here the correlation in the regression is "just" .990. The odds of that being random are technically not significant, but no one gets p = .08 with three data points.
How about by pitch location? Location wOBA xwOBA Diff Heart .306 .403 -.084 Shadow-Str .284 .364 -.061 Shadow-Ball .208 .258 -.027 Chase .195 .312 -.046 The "Chase line is just 11 balls in play (out of 241). It's already an outlier in that he's given up harder contact than on pitches that just miss the zone.
The other three locations again form a perfect line when you plot wOBA vs. xwOBA. In fact, (and it's about to get silly) the regression correlation is .9988. If you use xwOBA to predict wOBA, the former explains 99.8% of the results (r^2 .998). The rest is noise!
It's worth breaking down how Wacha does versus the league by pitch location. I'll give all the league days first, and then what Wacha has done in the form of + statics. For instance, Wacha has 52% more strikes on the corners (as a fraction of all his pitches put into play) and is 100-83 = 17% more effective with them. Location Lg% wOBA xwOBA Wa-% wOBA xwOBA Heart .650 .366 .368 77 84 110 Shadow- Str .207 .341 .345 152 83 106 Shadow - Ball .106 .302 .296 129 69 87 Chase .037 .267 .253 124 73 123
The first thing you notice is that much fewer of Wacha's balls in play come from pitches in the heart of the zone. It's essentially just half (.502). The average pitcher's strikes hit into play are 76% from the heart of the zone; for Wacha, it's 61%.
The next thing you notice is that, relative to the league, what he's doing with strikes in the heart of the zone is clearly the same as what's he's doing with strikes on the edges. It's one approach. In both cases he seems to be trading harder contact for more effective defense.
Anyone who saw a lot of Yaz knows that if you threw him just the right pitch, he would hit it right at the second baseman. From a physics POV, it makes perfect sense that, given a hitter's swing, there will be certain pitches he will hit in a predictable fashion.
That Wacha gets below-average-quality contact on balls near the strike zone is interesting. Look at the big decline in both numbers compared to strikes within the edges. When a pitcher can get a hitter to put a pitches like that into play, it is on average a good thing. Wacha seems to have the command to hit predictable spots (not really cold spots in the usual sense), so it makes sense that he'd use that command to attack hitters in a conventional fashion with balls just off the plate, and that he'd furthermore be good at it.
This is a guy who has been given an analytics plan and has executed it consistently.
I don't think anyone is going to offer Wacha quite what he's worth, even if they've figured out what the Sox are doing with him. They can't know for ceerain that they can figure out the hitter-by-hitter approaches that the Sox have. Keep in mind that these ""predictable spots" may not be absolute but may well depend on pitch sequencing. And Wacha will have even less confidence that a new team can give him the data he needs.
So that's one rotation member for next year that seems very likely.
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Post by alexcorahomevideo on Aug 24, 2022 12:00:46 GMT -5
I hated the signing when it happened. Ironically this is about the only move that went right for them in the offseason.
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Post by redsox04071318champs on Aug 24, 2022 15:59:46 GMT -5
I hated the signing when it happened. Ironically this is about the only move that went right for them in the offseason. Me, too. I hated the move. I wanted them to re-sign E-Rod instead. So Chaim Bloom was right and I was wrong. It was easily his best move of the year. That said, Wacha strikes me as one of those guys somebody will spend a lot of money signing, only to find out he's nowhere near as good as he is in 2022. But for 2022, the results are the results and he's been damn good. I hope he comes back, or at least I hope he comes back and pitches like he did this year, but I can see him getting a bigger payday elsewhere and going.
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Post by manfred on Aug 24, 2022 17:15:29 GMT -5
I hated the signing when it happened. Ironically this is about the only move that went right for them in the offseason. Me, too. I hated the move. I wanted them to re-sign E-Rod instead. So Chaim Bloom was right and I was wrong. It was easily his best move of the year. That said, Wacha strikes me as one of those guys somebody will spend a lot of money signing, only to find out he's nowhere near as good as he is in 2022. But for 2022, the results are the results and he's been damn good. I hope he comes back, or at least I hope he comes back and pitches like he did this year, but I can see him getting a bigger payday elsewhere and going. I don’t know. He could be Charlie Morton. His stuff looks impressive.
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cdj
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Post by cdj on Aug 24, 2022 17:40:02 GMT -5
If he keeps pitching well I’d be inclined to give him a QO. Get a pick or bring him back for another year (so no huge risk), seems like a win-win to me
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Post by scottysmalls on Aug 24, 2022 18:31:00 GMT -5
I like Wacha and think he can be good, and I buy that the Red Sox identified something he could execute on. But after 2022 can he keep executing on it? Will other teams be able to adjust and figure something out? Not totally sold it's a done deal he's a stud on the Red Sox forever.
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keninten
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Post by keninten on Aug 24, 2022 19:36:10 GMT -5
Couldn`t they get him for 2 years @ $10-12 per year?
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Post by ematz1423 on Aug 24, 2022 22:41:04 GMT -5
Couldn`t they get him for 2 years @ $10-12 per year? I think to resign wacha it'd take 2 years 30-36 million. I'd be okay if they got him back for that. Anything more and they should let him go.
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cdj
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Post by cdj on Aug 24, 2022 22:50:14 GMT -5
Couldn`t they get him for 2 years @ $10-12 per year? I think to resign wacha it'd take 2 years 30-36 million. I'd be okay if they got him back for that. Anything more and they should let him go. He’s probably gonna end up around 120 innings- that means he hasn’t cleared 150 innings in 5 years. Possibly not even 130 in 5 years. You couple that with his peripherals and there’s no way a team gives him $18 mill per for multiple years. I’m willing to do the QO and overpay a little for a year if he accepts it, I think giving him 2 years at $18 mill per would be crazy
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