Bradley Raises a Difficult Question About McDowell

M

MadduxFanII

Swallowed by Mark Bowman
Mark Bradley has a piece today pointing out something a few posters here have talked about a little. Using Teheran's struggles as a jumping off point, Bradley discusses the organization's struggles developing promising pitchers:

He’s also better with seasoned pitchers than with young ones. Jair Jurrjens and Tommy Hanson rose to All-Star status (or nearly All-Star status) under McDowell; within two years, they were gone from the organization. Neither has thrown a big-league pitch for any team this season. At 28, Hanson is out of baseball.

Now something similar seems to be happening with Teheran. He was an All-Star last season at 23. Today he’s pitching himself out of a rotation he was supposed to anchor. The under-new-management Braves have bet everything on the care and feeding of young pitching. Under McDowell, who has been in place since 2006, this organization has yet to take a promising young pitcher and render him a year-upon-year ace.
Click to expand...

Bradley mentions Hanson and Jurrjens, but you can also include Minor, Medlen and Beachy in that litany.

Obviously it's not fair to pin all of that on McDowell. Pitchers are just weird, and things go wrong for even the best young pitchers. But it is hard to escape the fact that over the course of a few years we either brought in or brought up Hanson, Jurrjens, Minor, Medlen and Beachy, and somehow every single one of them suffered catastrophic injuries. Add Teheran's struggles to the mix, and a pretty unfortunate portrait is beginning to develop.
 
The health concerns are valid. No question about that. The organization needs to take a long hard look at itself to determine what the cause of those problems are. Something needs to change and I'm open to the idea that that person could be Roger.

However, I'm not as surprised about the regression from these pitchers. Essentially all the pitchers mentioned above were either pitching above their peripherals with the exception of Beachy and Medlen (and neither of them had the prospect pedigree that your traditional ace would have). It's hard to make an ace out of pitchers that aren't truly pitching like front line aces in the first place.
 
Everything is on the table. The results are what they are. I love McDowell but will trust the front office if they feel a move needs to be made.
 
I advocated the end of last season scrapping the lot of them and found people aghast when questioning McDowell.
Perhaps the most overrated coach since Leo
 
Certainly in his first year Hanson's ERA was not consistent with his peripherals. But, years 2 and 3, his FIP was 3.31 and 3.67; close to his ERA. He then completely fell off the map to never be heard from again. Years 2 and 3 would be fine moving forward for him.

I have no idea what is going on with Teheran. Last year he was certainly lucky, but no one could have predicted them type of falloff.
 
chop2chip said:
The health concerns are valid. No question about that. The organization needs to take a long hard look at itself to determine what the cause of those problems are. Something needs to change and I'm open to the idea that that person could be Roger..
Click to expand...

I think there's an easy fix to this to be honest. Promote McDowell to manager. Have him bring in someone as pitching coach. As manager he'll have the say in when a pitcher gets yanked, not just be consulted. Part of what made Bobby so great was his ability to maximize his pitchers. He did it with Leo and with Roger. Fredi and Roger don't seem to have that bond, so why not give ROger a look at manager. Hands down the most importnat in-game management of a manager is how they manage pitchers, and Fredi is quite horrific at that.
 
gilesfan said:
Certainly in his first year Hanson's ERA was not consistent with his peripherals. But, years 2 and 3, his FIP was 3.31 and 3.67; close to his ERA. He then completely fell off the map to never be heard from again. Years 2 and 3 would be fine moving forward for him.

I have no idea what is going on with Teheran. Last year he was certainly lucky, but no one could have predicted them type of falloff.
Click to expand...

Well Tommy went a bit unpredictably. He went from nothing to shoulder. Usually you get TJ first then your shoulder goes. He skipped a step.

Teheran is hurt. I would DL him, let him rest 2 weeks then start getting healthy. I don't think the knee thing has fully healed and we don't want it to be an issue. With Teheran long term management is important as we just signed him to a big deal.
 
Every single guy mentioned in this thread got hurt...because that's what pitchers do. Roger hasn't developed a year-upon-year ace? What does that even mean? How many "aces" are truly elite for more than a few years...and then get hurt? I think Braves fans have a hard time understanding just how rare Maddux, Glavine and Smoltz really were.

Pitchers get hurt all the time. That's why I think the best strategy is to stockpile and grow your own arms, ride them until they break, and then move on to the next guy in line.
 
chop2chip said:
The health concerns are valid. No question about that. The organization needs to take a long hard look at itself to determine what the cause of those problems are. Something needs to change and I'm open to the idea that that person could be Roger.

However, I'm not as surprised about the regression from these pitchers. Essentially all the pitchers mentioned above were either pitching above their peripherals with the exception of Beachy and Medlen (and neither of them had the prospect pedigree that your traditional ace would have). It's hard to make an ace out of pitchers that aren't truly pitching like front line aces in the first place.
Click to expand...

I agree with most of this.

It's fair to question what we're doing because of injury and take a look to see if we might need to make some changes. But pitchers do get hurt throughout baseball. It's a little worrisome that it happens to basically all of our guys and to an extent that they never really pitch again, but some of that could be attributed to bad luck.

But not developing a year-over-year ace? Who among that list should have developed into that? Beachy and Medlen were complete and utter non-factors until they hit AAA. The fact that they became what they did, even for a short period of time, is a huge feather in McDowell's cap, not a blemish.

Hanson was a really good prospect, but he might have had the most clearly bad mechanics I've ever seen. Everyone knew an injury was coming and that he couldn't pitch for long with that motion. Jurrjens was a good prospect who was projected as a 3-4 when we traded for him. McDowell got even more than that out of him; he was never going to be an ace. Same with Minor.

So the pretty clear track record is, develop a guy into better results than anyone thought possible, then the guy breaks down. If McDowell gets blame for the injury aspect, then he also gets credit for turning these guys into more than they should have been before the injury.

I don't really know what the answer is. I understand the concerns, and we should see if we're doing anything specific to lead to this, but McDowell also does a great job of maximizing a pitcher's talent.
 
The "year-upon-year ace" thing is definitely silly columnist hyperbole. But I think it can distract from the bigger point, which is less about "aces" and more about just getting nothing out of these guys. We got one good, full season out of Hanson and two good partial seasons. We got one good, full season out of Minor. We got two good, full seasons out of Medlen (and that's counting 2012 as a "full" season). We got two good, full seasons out of Jurrjens and an All Star year cut short by injury in 2011. Beachy basically had 2011.

I don't need those guys to be year-upon-year aces, but it would be nice if at least one or two of them was still contributing to the organization in some way.
 
MadduxFanII said:
The "year-upon-year ace" thing is definitely silly columnist hyperbole.
Click to expand...

Yup, but they may have lucked themselves into it with Shelby Miller. Apparently, Bradley considers it as a potential drawback since he wasn't drafted/developed by the Braves hierarchy.
 
Such a small sample though. Statistically speaking you have to throw it out. Now with that in mind the Braves should constantly be reevaluating every facet of their organization, including the pitching. The overall tommy john injury situation in the organization over the last several years is a much better sample size and more worth discussing.
 
This goes back to drafting philosophy and player development. The Braves haven't developed an ACE type pitcher because they haven't drafted and developed one. Teheran is essentially the best of the group and he was signed as an International FA, not drafted.

The Braves have generally drafted guys who are low risk/low reward relatively. Look at Wood. His ceiling was a 3 and will always be a 3. Look at some of the other pitchers taken: Minor, Hursh, Gilmartin, Sims, etc. etc. None of those guys have a big arsenal with at least one wipe out pitch.

Maddux had one of the best changes in baseball, the best control in possibly the history of baseball and possibly the highest baseball pitching IQ of all time.
Glavine had one of the best LH changes of all time, a bulldog mentality, never got hurt, superior control and a high baseball IQ.
Smoltz had a dominant FB, a dominant slider.

If you want a true ACE then you need a pitcher with at least one top end attribute and pitch. The Braves haven't been drafting that and when they did they made them a reliever.
 
Here's an interesting article with a more significant sample of data. link

TJbyTeam.png


The Braves were tied with the highest total of major league Tommy John surgeries in this time period. But their delta between MLB pitchers and Minor Leaguers is pretty similar to the other teams. This to me indicates that the problem lies more with either an organizational pitching development philosophy or a drafting philosophy. Which to me goes back to the guys running the team rather than just one coach. It could have also just been bad luck.
 
weso1 said:
The Braves were tied with the highest total of major league Tommy John surgeries in this time period. But their delta between MLB pitchers and Minor Leaguers is pretty similar to the other teams. This to me indicates that the problem lies more with either an organizational pitching development philosophy or a drafting philosophy. Which to me goes back to the guys running the team rather than just one coach. It could have also just been bad luck.
Click to expand...

It's the simple fact that the Braves, as well as some other clubs, openly admitted that they were accommodating of young pitchers requiring TJ surgery or even wanting the pitcher to have it. The surge of young pitchers with UCL tears is a baseball-wide phenomenon and not unique to the Braves.

Think you'll find that it's more related to them not properly building arm strength. Otherwise, why did it used to take pitchers several years into the majors? They used to consistently throw more than 100 pitches/game or 6 innings, actually complete starts and 200 innings/year was no big deal.
 
Horsehide Harry said:
The Braves have generally drafted guys who are low risk/low reward relatively. Look at Wood. His ceiling was a 3 and will always be a 3. Look at some of the other pitchers taken: Minor, Hursh, Gilmartin, Sims, etc. etc. None of those guys have a big arsenal with at least one wipe out pitch.
Click to expand...

Well, they hadn't been used to a high draft position in a long time either. So, it's no wonder. Looking at the names of former staff aces doesn't indicate a trend from the '80's/'90's either. Obviously, Smoltz and Maddux weren't drafted by the Braves. Glavine was not an early rounder. None of them rose through the minors, and were touted as future aces, let alone HOF caliber.
 
For comparison's sake, let's look at the Giants. They have a reputation for great pitching, and they also are at the bottom of the Tommy John numbers, so they should be a good contrast to us.

Matt Cain and Tim Lincecum were supposed to anchor that rotation for years. You could look at them similarly to Jurrjens and Hanson for us, though the Giants' pair obviously had a higher ceiling.

Cain gave them a lot of good years; he gave them two decent ones early, then 4 very good to great ones in a row. But then in 2013, he regressed quite a bit, was even worse the first half of last year, and has battled injury and tried to get back for about a year now without pitching in the majors. This all happened before he hit 30.

Lincecum gave the Giants 4 very good to great years, then at a similar age to Cain (28), he blew up and became awful overnight. He's been a little better this year, but it's been 4 years now since he was very good, and he's just now 31. He's also had significantly reduced velocity and whispers of some arm trouble, though he's continued pitching.

Both of these guys could have probably had TJ at some point, and if they were on the Braves, you could certainly argue they would have had it. But either way, while they gave the Giants more good years than we got out of our guys, they also had more natural talent yet similarly fell off a cliff at some point and have given the Giants little since. So to some degree, the TJ numbers are an organizational philosophy as much as a sign of pitcher injuries. We are far more likely to go ahead and give someone TJ than the Giants, but we both have dealt with significant injuries and loss of productivity from our top pitchers.

Ryan Vogelsong, though much older, similarly fell off a cliff for them after two good years and is now garbage. If Bumgarner has similar issues, then all the sudden they're right where we are, even though the TJ numbers suggest we have far more of a problem.

So it's a combination of a bit of a worrisome trend, but also simply a fact that many pitchers break down nearing 30 combined with an organizational philosophy not to postpone or hold off on TJ if we think it will help.

Instead of the Hanson/Jurrjens/Teheran/Medlen rotation we thought we might have, we have Teheran/Wood/Miller, and Teheran seems to be crashing. And instead of the Lincecum/Cain/Bumgarner/Vogelson rotation they thought they'd have, they have Bumgarner/Heston/Hudson/Lincecum/Vogelson, where Lincecum and Vogelson have long since crashed.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top