True story: I usually don't mind Peter Gammons. I'll roll my eyes at things he says on TV sometimes, but he's a very good reporter and generally actually interested in stats beyond RBI! and RUNS SCORED! and PITCHER WINS!. I'm not particularly happy he's going to be on MLB Network, though I guess they need a Red Sox homer to go along with their Yankee/Mets homer (Al Leiter), Mariners homer (Harold Reynolds), Tigers homer (Sean Casey), and Phillies homer (Mitch Williams), plus maybe he can hit Harold Reynolds so that he stops whining whenever the network tries to talk about even the most slightly advanced stats (we are talking, like, OPS here, people). For a Red Sox fan, he sure loooves Mariano Rivera (though, I was disgusted when Mariano showed up to talk to the Baseball Tonight guys on the field the night the Yankees won the World Series, and the first thing Gammons said to him was basically, "Congrats on winning the World Series. Remember the time you blew the World Series?" WOW.). Like I said, he's pretty fair and impartial. Except when it comes to the Red Sox. Then, he becomes a little ten-year-old boy in the stands at Fenway cheering for Dustin Pedroia.
Here's an article he wrote about the "young guns" in the AL East. I won't be critiquing the whole thing because it's too long and I admit to being under-aware of the Rays' system other than that they have a lot of young guys, but parts of it are just absolutely friggin' ridiculous with how much Gammo writes off the Yankees' young guys, while doing all but writing love notes to Clay Buchholz. Man, that is the hardest name to pronounce and spell...
Yanks manager Joe Girardi essentially said the same up the road in Tampa, where one of the Yankees' most significant storylines will be Phil Hughes and Joba Chamberlain: Who starts and who relieves? All winter, general manager Brian Cashman has asked for patience, hoping that between them, they have a power starter and a power setup man for Mariano Rivera.
In Port Charlotte, an hour and a half to the south of The Trop, the Rays hope that David Price and Wade Davis are ready to make the leap that Jeff Niemann made last year and that Matt Garza made in 2008, when they won the AL pennant.
And here in The Fort, at the Spring Training home of the Red Sox, Clay Buchholz reported to camp with a chiseled addition of a dozen pounds and, after pounding out nine quality starts in his last 10 appearances, is preparing to take his extraordinary stuff out for 30 starts. What that means on a staff that already has Daisuke Matsuzaka and All-Star Tim Wakefield as fourth and fifth starters, no one knows.
So, Gammons concludes:
- The Yankees are hoping they get a decent starter and a decent reliever out of their young guys. Maybe they will, maybe they won't.
- The Rays are hoping their young guys are okay. Maybe they are, maybe they're not.
- CLAY BUCHHOLZ IS THE BESTEST AND OMG HE WORKED OUT A LOT HE IS SOOOO FINE. LEGENDARY DEPTH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Also, uh, here are Clay's last ten starts.
Aug. 19 vs. TOR: 6 IP, 1 ER (quality)
Aug. 24 vs. CHW: 4.2 IP, 7 ER (NOT QUALITY)
Aug. 29 vs. TOR: 8.1 IP, 1 ER (quality)
Sept. 3 vs. TBR: 6 IP, 3 ER (quality)
Sept. 8 vs. BAL: 7 IP, 0 ER (quality)
Sept. 13 vs. TBR: 7 IP, 1 ER (quality)
Sept. 18 vs. BAL: 6 IP, 1 ER (quality)
Sept. 24 vs. KCR: 6.2 IP, 0 ER (quality)
Sept. 29 vs. TOR: 5 IP, 7 ER (NOT QUALITY)
Oct. 4 vs. CLE: 3 IP, 6 ER (NOT QUALITY)
Try seven out of ten, Peter. I mean, that's quite good. I'd be cheering if Joba and Phil could give us stretches like that August 29-September 24 stretch (though I'd be fairly sure, without looking, that Joba had a stretch like that for at least a month). He's a young guy, he's gonna be inconsistent, but this shows a lot of promise. But let's not give blatantly wrong facts by saying nine out of ten of his starts were quality, because seven out of ten were. That's still pretty darn good, especially for a young guy, but can you not, like, lie?
I'll give him the slight benefit of the doubt that maybe he meant the Red Sox won nine out of ten of those games, because they did, including that start against the White Sox and the one against Cleveland. But Gammons is never really one to let facts get in the way of talking about how Red Sox prospects are teh awsum.
Also, don't go on about his "extraordinary stuff" and whatnot, when you're not doing that for the other teams. I can hear your heavy breathing from here, Gammo.
(And Tim Wakefield went to the All-Star Game last year for the first time in his long career - and I'm pretty sure he wasn't voted in by the fans, but Maddon brought him along, which was okay because as I said, the guy's had a long-ass career and he seems like a really really good guy - because he led the AL in WINS! with 11 at the break despite a 4.31 ERA. Greinke had 10 wins and a 2.12 ERA. Felix, 9 wins and a 2.53 ERA. Halladay, 10 wins and a 2.85 ERA. Was there really a point to that? No, but I'll never pass up the opportunity to point out how stupid pitcher wins are as a stat. Tim was an impressive 9-3 at one point... with a not-so-impressive 4.47 ERA. After the ASB, Tim never won a game again and only made four more starts, in which - SSS, to be sure - he had a 6.00 ERA and he walked more guys than he struck out.)
Girardi has been careful to remain open on the Chamberlain-Hughes issue, especially now that Vazquez is in the rotation in place of the departed Chien-Ming Wang. The numbers clearly show that either can be a sound lead-in to Rivera. Hughes is 8-9 with a 5.22 ERA as a starter in his career, and in his seven starts in 2009 -- after being called into the rotation to replace the injured Wang -- he gave up six homers, which actually may be understandable in the Bronx launching pad. But in 44 games as a reliever, he had a 1.40 ERA, allowed just 31 hits in 51 1/3 innings and carried a 13:65 walk-to-strikeout ratio.
I'm ignoring his totally predictable dig at Yankee Stadium but I'll point out that, if you look at those last two starts against Toronto and Cleveland, Buchholz gave up six home runs in two games. And Buchholz' numbers as a starter: 12-14, 4.91 ERA.
He did pretty damn well when Boston called him up in 2007, including pitching a freaking no-hitter, but since 2007, he's 9-13 with a 5.36 ERA, 1.554 WHIP, and 1.82 K/BB ratio. Now, Sox fans that aren't Gammons who will probably find some way to interpret those numbers as being AWESOME, I'm not trying to say he's crap. I'm just trying to say he's a young guy and will be inconsistent, and you have to be patient. Why does Buchholz get all the chances to start in the world, but Joba and Hughes OMG HAVE TO GO TO THE BULLPEN?
Also, "injured Wang," heh heh heh.
The much-publicized "Joba Rules" -- applied to prepare him for a long-term career -- might have restricted Chamberlain's development last season. Joba is 12-7 with a 4.18 ERA as a starter and has shown flashes of command of all his pitches, but that fire-breathing charge out of the bullpen
"Fire-breathing." "Bull in a china shop." Joba is always described like this.
resulted in far more velocity and a career ERA as a reliever of 1.50, with 39 hits and a 20:79 walk-to-strikeout ratio in 60 innings.
So besides trying to decide if one of the two is Rivera's successor, ...
And here's where Peter misses the point entirely. The Yankees didn't draft Hughes and Chamberlain, especially Hughes, a first-round pick, just to be relief pitchers. Other than Chien-Ming Wang, the Yankees haven't had a homegrown starting pitcher with any real sort of success since Andy Pettitte. I totally love him to death and I may actually cry when he finally retires, but his rookie year was 1995 and he's nearing 38 years old. With the way teams are locking up their homegrown pitchers - look at what happened with King Felix and Verlander in this offseason, and even Lincecum to a much lesser extent - there is such a premium on young pitching. Almost nothing in baseball is more valuable than a very young, even-slightly-above-league-average, homegrown starter.
Because of really crazy excellent pitchers like Lincecum coming up and having immediate success, plus New York's very annoying media that demands results NOOOOOWWWWW, Joba and Hughes not being able to dominate in the starting rotation Lincecum-style immediately means they are failures as starters and need to be moved to the bullpen ASAP. Heck, sometimes even the most dominant pitchers in baseball go through growing pains. Roy Halladay, through his age 24 year in 2001, had pitched 336+ major league IP, starting 49 games, and was sporting a 4.95 ERA, a 1.537 WHIP, and a 1.59 K/BB ratio. To be fair, these stats were skewed by a horrible 2000, but you have to give these guys time to grow. I'm not saying Hughes, Joba, or Buchholz will be Roy Halladay, just that you can't give up on young guys so early.
These arguments aren't helped by the fact that the Yankees have had the best reliever in baseball history on their team working out of their bullpen as either a set-up guy/long reliever or closer since 1996, and Joba and Hughes were so good in the bullpen, especially Joba, who first came up there and set up JOBAMANIA!!! in, IIRC, the summer of 2007. You want to know why Mariano Rivera went to the bullpen in the first place? It was because his ERA as a starter (in a 50-inning sample size, to be fair) was 5.94. That's way more of a "failure" than Joba, Hughes, or Buchholz have been in any way. Do I think Mariano would have gotten at least slightly better if he'd had more time? Sure. But he was 25 when he first came up to the big leagues and almost 27 by the time the 1996 World Series ended. That's older than the age at which you want your starting pitchers to start developing their secondary pitches.
And please don't say something like "well look like how good Mo's been, if we put Joba and Hughes in the bullpen they'll be like that too!!!" Mariano Rivera is a freak who will probably be pitching and dominating with 41MPH cutters when he's 58 years old. He'll still convert 90%+ of his saves, and post an ERA around or under 2, a WHIP just slightly over or just slightly under 1, striking out a ridiculous amount of guys and walking very few. We will likely never see anyone like him ever again. But again, if he was able to, at all, be a league-average starter, or even maybe if he was younger and they had a little more time to be patient with him, they wouldn't have put him in the bullpen to begin with.
Joba and Hughes were put in the bullpen to begin because, pitching out of the bullpen - which is much easier, you don't need as many pitches or, generally, to go through the lineup more than once at most - they are easily MLB-ready talent. In both earlyish 2009 and especially 2007, the Yankees desperately needed bullpen help, and Hughes and Joba were able to be very effective there. And it's certainly not a bad idea to put young guys in the pen when they first come up, in order to give them some confidence that they can get guys out. This scenario is what the Twins and Royals did with, respectively, Johan Santana and David Cone, and that was just off the top of my head so I'm sure there were others too.* But - and I'm sort of rambling, and here is the most important part, so I'm even gonna bold it - even a league-average starting pitcher that gives you 150+ innings is more valuable, at least over a 162-game season, than a stud reliever, unless that reliever is giving you 100+ innings. Peter Gammons isn't dumb, he knows this. And that's probably why he's trying to convince people that the Yankees should basically give up on their young starters and put them in the bullpen.
Neither Hughes nor Joba is Rivera's successor, or at least neither should be. There are plenty of guys in the Yankees' minor leagues who are excellent relievers or meh starters. They'll make good relief pitchers and closers. These are Rivera's successors. Maybe the Yankees will sign Soria or even, vomit, Papelbon, when he hits free agency or something, I don't know. It kills me to write this sentence, but when Mo retires, they will replace him. His replacement will likely not be as out-and-out amazing as he is, and he probably won't mean as much to me personally, but they'll find someone that can close games at a very good rate.
I don't know if either of Joba or Hughes will ever be what Andy has been, nevertheless any sort of ace or Cy Young-caliber pitcher, but we can't just give up on them. And yes, shoving them in the bullpen to not even be a closer but a one-inning-set-up-guy for good is, at this point, giving up on them. I understand there's no room in the rotation for both of them this year, so putting the other one in the pen is pretty much the best idea; it, at least, makes the pen much stronger. But when whichever one in the pen excells, please please please don't say this means they should be in the pen permanently. Please.
I rambled a lot as I am wont to do, so TL;DR: Peter Gammons doesn't know what he's talking about when it comes to the young Yankee pitchers and the ultimate goal of the Yankees for both Joba and Hughes should not be to make them the heir to Mariano Rivera, it should be to make them decent starting pitchers. And I believe this is what the Yankees intend to do.
* of course, the Royals pretty much gave up on him early on and traded him to the Mets for Ed Hearn, Rick Anderson, and Mauro Gozzo. Dumb. Cone was generally one of the great voices of sanity in the Joba/Hughes thing last year, because he went through it, and he constantly talked about how you have to give young pitchers time and patience. And you absolutely do. Not everyone can be Tim Lincecum or even Andy Pettitte, who is really one very tough son-of-a-bitch (I like how his 1997 is basically one big "F you, Verducci Effect!").
I'm going to skip the Rays part because I'm honestly not informed enough about them to talk about it, but Gammons talks about the Red Sox at the end, because, you know, save the best for last and all that:
With Buchholz, the arm has always been there from his second big league start, when he no-hit the Orioles. Hall of Famer Jim Palmer has offered the opinion that Buchholz has the best stuff of any starter in the league.
FAP FAP FAP FAP FAP FAP FAP FAP FAP
Buchholz since he no-hit the Orioles: 5.19 ERA. The arm is ~always there~
After the Jays turned down Boston's five-for-one offer for Roy Halladay on July 29, Buchholz actually won as many games (six) as Halladay.
Buchholz stats since July 29: 76.2 IP, 4.34 ERA, 1.33 WHIP, 1.97 K/BB ratio
Halladay stats since July 29: 91 IP, 2.97 ERA, 1.21 WHIP, 5.26 K/BB ratio
Oh, and remember Halladay's supposed "bad" period right after the trade deadline. But don't you see, THEY'RE EXACTLY THE SAME!!!!! The W-L record has nothing to do with the fact that Buchholz pitched for a much better team than Halladay did!!!!!
(Buchholz actually had a slightly better OPSA, go figure, though Buch gave up more home runs in fewer innings.)
He started utilizing his two-seamer to give him a pitch for strikes to go with his curveball, change and four-seamer. And after a winter of training, he arrived at Spring Training seemingly more mature and certainly stronger.
FAP FAP FAP FAP FAP FAP FAP FAP
If this was an article by a totally unbiased person and not just a Buchholz and Sox-in-general love fest, Gammons would talk about the pitches Joba and Hughes were working on, too. But it's not, and it is, so he doesn't.
With Jon Lester, Josh Beckett and Lackey, the Red Sox know their front three. If, as believed, Matsuzaka's back strain isn't serious, he's going to start.
Gammons is seriously the friggin' Minister of Propaganda for ~Red Sox Nation.~ Dice-K's medical issues are never ever ever a problem. He is a reliable warrior and the best Japanese import ever. Unless he's bad-mouthing the Red Sox staff to the Japanese press. Then he's a traitor who is constantly hurt and never throws strikes. I guess I should just be proud that, when asked who he thought was going to win AL Comeback Player of the Year for 2010 on MLB Network, Gammons didn't answer Dice-K.
"I have to prove myself as a starter," Buchholz said. "I tried to get stronger so I can hold up, but I don't have any starter's stress right now. Wake has earned all the respect that the rest of us should show him. I'll do whatever they want. If I pitch well, I'll get lots of opportunities."
That's nice. Where are the quotes from Hughes, Joba, Price, and Davis, and even the young guys on the Orioles that everyone's been talking about? Oh, right, they're not Red Sox. Also, he has to prove himself as a starter? He hasn't yet!! Clearly the Red Sox need a set-up guy to their set-up guy!!!! Buchholz to the seventh!!!! The game will be over after six innings!!! This would be funnier if it wasn't exactly what a lot of Yankee fans wanted Joba and Hughes to do for the rest of their careers rather than start.
In this division, with the two highest payrolls and three of what the PECOTA and other analytical experts feel are the best teams in the sport, the self-developed young pitchers may end up being a major factor in who wins 90, who wins 95 and who wins 100 games in 2010, all with touted two-way Red Sox prospect Casey Kelly standing in the shadows.
1. PECOTA is sooooo screwy this year. I've stopped trusting it. They've messed up their projections so many times that they're on their fourth revision, with indications that they're going to change again. Currently, their projections include no teams in the AL Central having a winning record and no teams outside of the AL East having 90 wins, and in the AL East, three teams have 90 wins. I know the AL East is really crazy good, but the chances of that happening are just so miniscule. I also think that they badly overestimate young players (remember their projections for Weiters last year?) and tend to predict that anyone over 33 or so will totally fall off a cliff the next year.
They're also only projecting a 23-game difference between the best record in baseball and the worst. Since baseball introduced the unbalanced schedule in 2001, the average difference between the best record in baseball and the worst is over 44 games. The lowest it's ever been is 30, and that was pretty much an outlier (if you care, since 2001, the number of games separating the best and worst records: 54, 48, 58, 54, 44, 36, 30, 41, 44). That's not to say a 23-game difference between the best and worst record won't happen. It's just that it seems extremely unlikely to happen. Other crazy sabermetrically-inclined people have pointed out that the AVG/OBP/SLG/OPS they're projecting for each team doesn't match up at all with the total runs they're projecting for the teams.
Basically, PECOTA has been bizarre this entire offseason.
2. Pretty much non-important, but I am pretty sure that, unless something changed, the two top payrolls in the league are the Yankees and the Mets, not the Yankees and the Red Sox. NO, THIS DOESN'T MEAN THE RED SOX ARE SOME SCRAPPY SMALL-MARKET TEAM (I contemplated putting that in bold), but you'd think Pete would put any fact in there if it could build up the Red Sox and put down the Yankees in any way. It's also one of those fact-checking things that, in a generally bad article, is gonna annoy me juuuust a little bit more than it should.
3. I saved the most important point for last. WHAT THE FUCK does Casey Kelly have ANYTHING at all to do with this other than that he's the latest Red Sox prospect Gammons, ESPN, and sports media in general will be desperately overhyping, Daniel Bard-style? (He throws 100 MPH OMGZ!!!!) Also, "standing in the shadows," huh?
I don't want to put the "idiot" label on this post because Gammons is not an idiot, he's just a ridiculous Red Sox homer. I know I could never write for ESPN because I'd just write about how the Yankees are awesome and how overrated Josh Beckett is and whatever. But I am tempted to stick that label on this post. Instead, I'll go look at some more pictures from Spring Training of Andy being super hot to make me feel muuuuch better, or something.
