clvclv (12-06-2018)
He had a pretty modest improvement in launch angle (4.7 to 6.2). Guess that's progress, but still near the bottom of the stack. But you do see slight movement in FB, GB, LD, etc. Not enough to explain the surge in results.
Mainly he just hit the ball a lot harder. Exit velocity went from 88 to 91.5. Hard hit from 31% to 48%.
HR/FB spiked to 23.5%.
The Brewers has terrible SPs and gave the Dodgers all they could handle in the NLCS.
The Mets had arguably the best SPs in the game and didn’t sniff the playoffs.
The “we need a front line pitcher to lead us” cliche is beyond ignorant. All you need to do is consider the intelligence of the folks spouting that nonsense.
Did you read the article? The article was claiming that our 11-15 SPs are projected to produce not too far from league average, not the whole staff. Do I think we can survive when we have TWELVE starting pitchers who ZiPS projects to produce over 1 WAR, with 9 of those pitchers being top or former top prospects with less that 2 years of experience, yeah I think we'll be just fine. Let's say that just 1 of those 9 pitchers exceeds their projections, busts out, and produces just 3 fWAR for us this year. If all the other projections were the same that'd leave us with a starting 5 producing:
3 fWAR
2.9 fWAR
2.5 fWAR
2.0 fWAR
2.0 fWAR
With 5 pitchers behind them projecting for: 1.9, 1.6, 1.4, 1.4, and 1.3
I see no issue with rolling into 2019 with this rotation. It has a pretty large window of potential outcomes relative to the rest of the league, but we have the depth, youth, and upside to think that we'll end up with a top ~10 staff with no additions at all. If you took the top 7 pitchers and added up these WAR projections, we'd have ended up with the 4th best rotation in baseball last year by fWAR. All it would take to hit that number is for one of Touissaint/Soroka/Newcomb/Fried/Wilson/Wright/Gohara/Allard to become a 3 win pitcher. That, plus the rest of the rotation holding serve on their projections.
Also, remember when you said that Gausman is a bottom of the rotation pitcher with bad control? Yeah, he's projected for 2.9 wins with a 2.59 BB/9 next year.
I think the only pitchers with a chance to get a 3+ WAR are Folty and Gausman (assuming his NL stats are really who he is now). Say Folty comes close to repeating lats year and gets 3.5 WAR, which the chances of that happening are fairly equal with one of the other guys (looking at Newk) underperforming, so those numbers likely rise/fall proportionately. If you add up our ZIPs on the top 6 guys, that's 12.9 WAR, which is what the Cubs got last year at 19th best in the league. Even adding another .5, that only gets us to 17th.
Hell, even with your numbers that has us at 14.3, that puts as 16th. The lowest playoff team was Oakland at 17, with Atlanta second at 13.
Three of the final 4 teams were in the top 4 in pitching fWAR, with the "bullpenning" Brewers as the 4th...
So you don't think 7 top 100 pitching prospects all hitting MLB-readiness at the same time and all of whom gained mlb experience (some got playoff experience) even have a chance at reaching 3 fWAR next year? Mike Soroka was worth 0.6 WAR in 5 starts last year. Touki was worth 0.4 in 5 starts. Fried was worth 0.4 in 5 starts (9 relief appearances as well). In 2017 Luiz Gohara was worth 1 WAR in 5 starts. We have no fewer than 5 other guys behind them with the pedigree for success at the MLB level.
You don't think its even possible for one of those guys to make the necessary progression to hit 3 WAR next year? Some of these guys are going to be making 25-30+ starts for us next year. Even if they don't get better, their WAR numbers from last year get awfully close to 3 when you extrapolate them out over 30+ starts.
Not particularly worried about pairing Peralta or Pederson if you can get one of them with Duvall at this point, since you could use those days to play Camargo in LF if Duvall doesn't bounce back somewhat out of the gate - play Riley exclusively in LF for the first month of the season and he ought to be ready to come up in mid-May and you can DFA Duvall at that point.
Has there EVER been a statement and question a certain someone should absolutely never have made and asked publicly more than...
Kinda pathetic to see yourself as a message board knight in shining armor. How impotent does someone have to be in real life to resort to playing hero on a message board?
You need to work on your filtering. Among Starting Pitchers (the subject we're talking about), 14.3 fWAR would have put us tied with the Cardinals and Nationals for 10th in the MLB. And that is only if you take the "top 6"... The rankings would include anyone making a start for us. If you took our top 7 (or just assume that, in aggregate, our pitchers outside our top 5 would collectively produce 3.5 WAR) then that would put us at 15.9 WAR in my hypothetical. That would put us ranked 6th in the MLB last year.
Really, these are just silly hypotheticals though. I'm just using them to illustrate that it would take anything unusual for us to have a top 10 pitching staff next year with the current group of pitchers that we have. We have such tremendous youth and depth. You're making it sound farfetched that one of our young guys could exceed his projections and become a 3 win pitcher. I think its far more realistic than you think.
Wait, what exactly do you think ZiPs is trying to do when it comes to younger players and prospects? ZiPs is just taking trends from a player's past performance and using other variables like aging/development trends to spit out what the most likely outcome is for each individual player. That doesn't mean that deviations don't exist, ESPECIALLY with younger players/prospects. If 1-2 WAR over a full season is the 50th percentile outcome for nine of our pitcher's individually, the notion that any single one of them could hit their 80th or 90th percentile outcome isn't just realistic, an argument could be made that its likely.
cajunrevenge (12-06-2018)