drewdat
Well-known member
Hm. Not a very useful hint.
GDT 7/7/21: Braves @ Pirates - No Smylys for this lineup
- Thread starter Slippyjms
- Start date
Hm. Not a very useful hint.
I’ll try and get them made more often. This 2 under 2 life is very stressful.
yesterday was a bad game against a bad offensive team but his previous 4 starts were really good. The only thing that sticks out among those though is that they were against Miami twice, the Reds, and Cards. Miami and the Cards are 23rd and 26th in team WRC+. The Reds are a good hitting team obviously but most of that good work was against bad teams and then of course the not so good outing against a bad team. Suffice to say, I don't see his success continuing.
50PoundHead
Hessmania Forever
I'm way too lazy to check this out, but I've noticed that in a couple of Smyly's more successful starts, his strike-to-ball ratio was actually worse than it was when he gets rocked. Probably an aberration or maybe he's pitching backwards. One thing to remember of course is that every time a player puts a ball in play, it counts as a strike so those missiles that were being launched against him early in the season were strikes in the strike/ball ratio calculation. He's thankfully doing better and I don't know where we'd be without his contribution at this point. I didn't like the signing and still don't at a level, but he's been okay and I guess that's what $11 million per buys a team these days.
UNCBlue012
Well-known member
Smyly definitely isn't a high-quality pitcher but he's doing his job as a No. 4/No. 5 over the last two months. His WHIP continues to be higher than it needs to be but he's pitching his ass off and giving Atlanta great chances.
3.34 ERA over his last 11 starts. 4 of the starts have been against offenses in the top half of the league. He's been a bit lucky over this time frame, but not overtly so. The HR rate is what doomed him earlier in the season. Now that it has normalized, I would expect solid pitching for the remainder of the year. Maybe he won't maintain a 3.34 ERA over the rest of the year, but I envision him maintaining a sub sub 4 ERA over his remaining starts, assuming health.
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In a normal year I would agree with you. Smyly has been worth 0.5 bWAR so he's on pace to be a 1 WAR guy this season. Typical $$/WAR in previous seasons has been hovering around 9. So not far off especially if you consider the extra AA may have had to spend by getting him to sign so early. But $$/WAR ended up being something like 4.8 million this past offseson.
In fact looking at the graph here:
Only 5 players with a project fWAR between 1 and 1.5 (Smyly had a zips projects of 1 fwar) signed for 10 million or more. With quite a few players below that. Simply put AA overpaid the market rate for Smyly by quite a bit. Maybe they put a lot more into what he did last year and their internal projections were higher?
By itself it's not that big of a deal that he got paid a few extra million more than expected. But it's a small thing in a long list of small things that are keeping this team down.
4.13 FIP with an xFIP of 4.72. I suspect both stay over 4 from here on but we'll see how it plays out.
Ideally, teams don't pay $11M to fill the 5th slot in their rotation. That slot should be going to unproven rookies and/or scrap heap guys signed for $1M. I'm certain the Braves did not project Smyly as a 1 win guy holding don the 5th spot in the rotation, and they thought they were being brilliant by jumping the market to sign him early.
The Braves have a known tendency to rely on small sample measurables as indication of future breakouts, so it's not surprising they were overly swayed by Smyly's 2020 sprint results. I'm not sure why they thought an old pitcher with a sudden uptick in stuff was going to sustain that uptick, but they undoubtedly did...and he didn't sustain it.
I wasn't a fan of the signing from the moment it happened, but I'm glad he is producing like a competent MLB SP.
The Braves have a known tendency to rely on small sample measurables as indication of future breakouts, so it's not surprising they were overly swayed by Smyly's 2020 sprint results. I'm not sure why they thought an old pitcher with a sudden uptick in stuff was going to sustain that uptick, but they undoubtedly did...and he didn't sustain it.
I wasn't a fan of the signing from the moment it happened, but I'm glad he is producing like a competent MLB SP.
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50PoundHead
Hessmania Forever
Thanks for pointing that out. I think Anthopoulos went over on Smyly due to last year's uptick in velocity, which I don't think is the best way to go about doing business given the absolute oddness of last season. I'm not a big Alex Wood fan (and I would have probably rolled my eyes if the Braves had signed him last off-season), but it will be interesting to see where Wood and Smyly end up performance wise (Wood started out great, but has been getting rocked a bit of late) and how that compares to their salaries (Smyly-$11 MM/Wood-$3 MM). The reason I balked at Smyly's price is that I felt the excess bucks (even if it were just a couple of million) could have gone elsewhere to bolster the team. In the end, like you say, it's probably not that big a deal by itself.