Tag: pitching

Guest Blogger: Smile Politely’s Joel Gillespie takes on the Rolaids Relief Man Awards

Each day this week, The Baseball Zealot will be featuring special guest bloggers who will be giving their predictions on the 2009 MLB end-of year-awards and postseason matchups.  In our third installment of the series, Joel Gillespie breaks down the candidates for the MLB Rolaids Relief Man Award.

joel I first met Joel Gillespie earlier this year when he interviewed me for a article for Champaign-Urbana’s online magazine Smile Politely.  I must admit, it was an overly flattering article so I’m forever in his debt. 

Aside from covering the local cultural scene, Joel has been known to touch on baseball topics on Smile Politely. His major league loyalties lie northward with the Minnesota Twins.

The Rolaids Relief Man Award is a little different from the rest of the awards analyzed here, in that it’s based on an accumulation of points rather than votes. According to the award website, "The Rolaids Relief Man AwardÂŽ [don’t even think about using that phrase for personal profit] is based objectively on statistical performance, rather than subjective opinion." So, there will be no inquiring into the hearts of shoddy, bitter beat reporters in this article. Instead, we’ll take a look at which pitcher leads in the Most Favored Antacid standings and try to decide whether the algorithm will choose the right man or not.

Here’s the scoring system: award_photo
+4 for a "tough save" (when a reliever enters a game with the tying run  already on base and gets the save)
+3 for a save
+2 for a win
-2 for a blown save
-2 for a loss

And here are the leaders from each league:

American League

Rank Player Win Loss Saves Tough Saves Blown Saves Points ERA
1 Mariano Rivera 2 2 39 4 1 119 1.72
2 Brian Fuentes 1 4 41 1 6 106 4.10
3 Joe Nathan 2 2 38 1 5 105 2.20
4 Jonathan Papelbon 1 1 36 3 3 105 1.89
5 David Aardsma 3 5 34 1 4 91 2.12

Rivera is clearly head and shoulders above the rest of the American League closers this season, and you don’t need a convoluted formula to see that. He’s even getting some dark-horse consideration for the Cy Young award, mostly as a lifetime-achievement-award kind of thing. That would be a travesty, but he’s certainly having a season worthy of his fifth Rolaids Relief Man award, which will tie him with Dan Quisenberry for the most all time. Barring a collapse, or a bunch of narrow wins for the Angels, Twins, or Sox, he should capture it with ease.

Aardsma has really come into his own this season, posting his first season ERA under 4.00. His flyball tendencies are even more pronounced than usual, but the spacious confines of Safeco Field keep the consequences to a minimum. With his fifth club in five years, Aardsma has found a home, holding opponents to a .191 batting average and striking out 10.5 batters per nine innings.

National League

Rank Player Win Loss Saves Tough Saves Blown Saves Points ERA
1 Heath Bell 5 3 37 3 5 108 2.66
2 Jonathan Broxton 7 1 34 2 5 106 2.53
3 Ryan Franklin 2 3 37 4 4 105 1.96
4 Huston Street 3 1 33 0 1 101 2.96
5 Brian Wilson 5 5 34 6 6 96 2.69

This race is completely up in the air. Who will win the cherished silver fireman’s hat? Bell’s been one of the only bright spots for a putrid Pad squad, finally coming into his own after a career as a setup man. Broxton’s benefited from some good fortune to keep him in the race, picking up three vulture wins after blowing saves. Franklin is probably the most deserving candidate, but he’s limping to the finish line. He’s blown two consecutive saves, and he has a 16.20 ERA in four September appearances.

Street and Wilson have contributed to their teams’ surprising contender status by keeping things stable at the back end of their respective bullpens. 

Thank you to Joel for taking time from his busy schedule to write this up.  Check out the other end-of-year award analyses we’ve put up so far and check back later this week for more. 

 
 

Guest Blogger: Shawn Lee analyzes the Cy Young candidates

Each day this week, The Baseball Zealot will be featuring special guest bloggers who will be giving their predictions on the 2009 MLB end-of year-awards and postseason matchups.  In the second installment of this series, Shawn Lee will look at the Cy Young candidates. 

shawn Shawn Lee is a local guy, living here in Champaign-Urbana.  Not only is he the webmaster for our local vintage base ball team, the Vermilion Voles, he’s been known to pick up a willow and swing at the onion too.  When he plays for the Voles, he’s known as General Lee, thank you. 

Lee doesn’t always live in the 19th century though.  He’s a big fan of current Major League Baseball, too favoring the New York Yankees. 

 

2009 Cy Young Predictions

 

This year’s chase for the Cy Young Award in both leagues is deserving of interest for two main reasons.  First, although there are plenty of deserving candidates, neither league has a clear cut front runner.  I wish the task of predicting the winners were made easy for me. Instead, I’ll need to stick out my neck just a bit and make my best guess.

The second reason this season is a bit different is that there are several teams who have multiple legitimate contenders.  For this reason in particular, my approach in making my prediction is going to be to pick the best pitcher from each team first.  Then from all 30 pitchers, I’ll make my AL and NL predictions.  Please note that my intention here is not to determine who should win the award based on my personal analysis.  My goal is to predict who the folks with the voting power are going to choose.

American League

 

Baltimore:  Brad Bergesen.  Not much to choose from here.  It would have easily been George Sherrill if he wasn’t traded to the Dodgers.

Boston:  Jon Lester edges Josh Beckett.

NY Yankees:  CC Sabathia with Mariano Rivera a close second.  Too bad Phil Hughes had some pretty rough outings as a starter to begin the year.  His numbers have been breathtaking since becoming a reliever in June.

Tampa Bay:  Matt Garza.  Rays pitchers have been very disappointing compared to last year.

Toronto:  Roy Halladay.  Hittable as of late, but still no contest here.

ChiSox:  Mark Buerhle edges Gavin Floyd.

Cleveland:  Cliff Lee.  Nothing else to choose from.  Forget Pavano.

Detroit:  Justin Verlander.

Kansas City:  Zack Greinke.  Easy choice.

Minnesota:  Scott Baker, only because Joe Nathan is having a down year, his ERA "soaring" to 2.28.

LA Angels:  Jered Weaver.

Oakland:  Andrew Bailey.  Great season.  Glad to see him make the All Star team.  Meet your AL ROY.

Seattle:  Felix Hernandez.  He is beginning to fulfill the lofty expectations set for him when he debuted for the Mariners as a 19-year old.

Texas:  Scott Feldman.

 

Now from this pool of pitchers, who is the best in the league?  Unfortunately, that’s not the question.  The question is who will win the Cy Young award.  The voters love looking at win totals, so that automatically puts Sabathia and Verlander at the top of the list especially since they are headed for the postseason.  But Verlander’s numbers are better than Sabathia plus his remaining opponents (Chicago, Minnesota) are not quite as tough as Sabathia’s (Angels, Red Sox).  The other true contenders are Halladay, Hernandez, and Greinke.  The voters also seem to have a fondness for stud pitchers who pitch for lousy teams.  Remember in May when the Royals were in first place and Greinke was 6-0 with an ERA of 0.40?  He has only won seven games since then.  That’s not going to be good enough for the W-loving voters despite the fact that he leads the AL in ERA and WHIP and second in strikeouts.  The only chance Greinke has is if he can win at least 15 games.  Otherwise, I think Verlander will get the nod.

National League

 

Atlanta:  Javier Vazquez.  Having as good a season as anyone else, but lack of run support is keeping his win total down.

Florida:  Josh Johnson.

NY Mets:  Johan Santana.  A poor year by Johan’s standards.

Philadelphia:  J.A. Happ throughout the season has been their best pitcher.  Midseason pickup Cliff Lee and a rejuvenated Cole Hamels are pitching better than Happ right now.

Washington:  John Lannan.

Chicago Cubs:  Ted Lilly.

Cincinnati:  Francisco Cordero.  33/35 in save opportunities, only 2 home runs given up all year.

Houston:  Wandy Rodriguez.

Milwaukee:  Yovani Gallardo.  A future Cy Young winner once he gets his walks down.

Pittsburgh:  Ross Ohlendorf.  Not much to choose from on this team.

St. Louis:  Chris Carpenter, for now.  A really tough pick here, since Wainwright has been equally impressive and helped carry the team while Carpenter was on the shelf early in the season.  Wainwright will surely garner many Cy Young votes, especially if he can make it to 20 wins.  Carpenter has only allowed 2 stolen bases all year.  A lot of credit goes to Yadier Molina for that, but for a right-handed pitcher, that is really impressive.  But something I’m sure will not be noticed by the voters.

Arizona:  Dan Haren in a landslide.

Colorado:  Ubaldo Jimenez.  Jason Marquis has cooled off in the second half.

LA Dodgers:  Clayton Kershaw.  Unquestionably this is the deepest pitching staff in MLB.  The fact that team wins leader, Chad Billingsley, has twelve wins is testament to that.

San Diego:  Heath Bell.  The starters have been that bad.

San Francisco:  Tim Lincecum in another good team race.  Matt Cain is the staff ace on any other team in the league, but Lincecum’s K/BB ratio and quality starts percentage are just too impressive.

 

There are plenty of great pitchers in the NL.  It is hard to believe most of the contenders won’t even come close to 20 wins.  Wainwright has the best chance.  He needs to win 3 of his remaining 4-5 starts.  If he can do it, he immediately becomes the favorite.   If not, it comes down to Carpenter, Haren, and Lincecum.  Carpenter’s league leading ERA and stellar W/L ratio makes the Cy Young his to lose.  Like Greinke, both Haren and Lincecum currently have 13 wins.  They will need at least 15 to have any chance at all.

Thanks, Shawn for your excellent input.  Keep checking in for more great analysis throughout the week.  Here’s the link to our 2009 End-of-Year Predictions by our guest bloggers.

Slowpoke Papelbon

Jonathan Papelbon has been slapped with another fine related to MLB’s “pacing violation”.  This rule which MLB has asked to be more vigorously enforced, limits the time that a pitcher takes to throw the ball. 

I’m not a fan of the rule necessarily but I understand why it is in place.  Papelbon is certainly familiar with the rule.  This incident is the seventh time he’s been hit with this violation.  This time he got a $5000 fine to bring his total to $10,000 for fines accrued for this practice. 

Some baseball fans (who regard any infraction of the rules baseball as a personal affront) feel Papelbon is doing this because in the words of a commenter in one forum, “the rules are meant for someone else” or that it “shows the type of character he possesses”. 

Sheesh.

Papelbon is, in my opinion, simply pitching the best he can in the way that he can.  If getting fined a measly (in relative terms) $1,000-$5,000 a shot for a couple times a year in order for him to put up the numbers that he does, he’ll do it. 

Should he find a way to hurry his delivery?  Probably, unless he doesn’t mind that fine to continue to rise. 

At this time, Pap has 34 saves in 37 opportunities with a 1.84 ERA.  I’m sure Red Sox fans aren’t complaining about the extra time.

Know the 3000 K pitchers? Take the quiz

Courtesy of Sporcle.com, can you name all pitchers with 3000 career strikeouts?

Sporcle’s cool quiz interface gives you a time limit but does allow you to keep guessing till you get it right. 

(I’ll give you one hint:  one last name is a two-for-one)

Ironically, it was the current ones that I had the hardest time with.

Many saves, high ERA

In honor of Kevin Gregg, I played around with Baseball Reference’s Play Index and came up with a list of closers with the highest ERA.  More specifically, these are the pitchers with the most saves in a season among those with an adjusted ERA of 70 or less.  

    Player            SV ERA+   ERA  Year Age
+----+-----------------+--+----+------+----+---+
    1 Shawn Chacon      35   69   7.11 2004  26 
    2 Mike Williams     28   69   6.14 2003  33 
    3 Derrick Turnbow   24   66   6.87 2006  28 
    4 Jose Mesa         24   61   6.52 2003  37 
    5 Brad Lidge        23   60   7.21 2009  32 
    6 Matt Capps        21   64   6.41 2009  25 
    7 Rob Dibble        19   62   6.48 1993  29 
    8 Dave Smith        17   65   6.00 1991  36 
    9 Willie Hernandez  15   67   5.74 1989  34 
   10 Darold Knowles    15   66   5.81 1975  33

 

Full list here.

Only 2004 Shawn Chacon of (you guessed it) the Colorado Rockies, breaks the 30 save mark.  He had a 1-9 record to go with his 7.11 ERA. 

Five more over 20 and it pretty much dissolves after that. 

In 1998, Mark Wohlers of the Braves managed to get 8 saves in 27 games with an ERA in the double digits (10.18)

Trevor Bell and his day job

Reader DonS sent along this article on about Trevor Bell.  Bell who pitched for the Salt Lake Bees in the Pacific Coast League and has been called up to the majors recently (he’s scheduled to pitch Wednesday), has an interesting side story.  He had been moonlighting as an actor. 

Bell calls it a “hobby” now.  As a child, he did a fair amount of acting especially in commercials.  Nowadays, he spends the off-season in LA where he can get in Hollywood atmosphere.

Acting runs in Bell’s family.  His grandfather is Bob Bell who portrayed the original Bozo the Clown for WGN-TV in Chicago.  Living in Illinois as kid, I remember Bozo the clown and how popular he was. 

Now in the Angels’ organization, Trevor Bell is the real deal.  He was picked by Baseball America as the top 14-year old pitching prospect in the country.  That’s when Bell focused less on Hot Wheels commercials and more on baseball. 

In 2009 between stints with Arkansas and Salt Lake, Bell has gone 7-7 with a 2.70 ERA. 

Can Bell continue his “hobby” while pitching in majors?  Doubtful.  One thing is for sure, there’s no clowning around for him when he’s on the mound. 

Sorry, had to fit that pun in somewhere.

Carl Pavano shuts down Tigers and maybe shuts up critics

I admit I snickered a bit when I read the news release about Minnesota trading for starting pitcher Carl Pavano.  My first reaction was: Is the Twins’ pitching really that bad off? 

Since 2004 when Pavano won 18 games with Florida, there have been continual trips to the DL not to mention countless disappointments for Yankee fans save for those who were smart enough to not to get their hopes up.  Pavano won only nine games between 2005-2008 including missing 2006 altogether.  This year with Cleveland, he has won nine games already despite a 5.37 ERA.  A positive stat for Pavano:  only 23 walks in 125+ innings.

Well, Carl Pavano may have quieted his critics a little after his first start tonight.  Against rival Detroit, he pitched seven scoreless innings in the Twins’ 11-0 victory.  Pavano was efficient, facing only 27 batters and throwing only 90 pitches.  And yeah, his control remained intact, walking none. 

Minnesota is within striking distance of first place in the AL Central.  With today’s win, they are only 4.5 games back behind first place Detroit and 2.5 behind second place Chicago.  The Twins put out the usual line that Carl Pavano is what they need to win down the homestretch.  I wonder if Pavano’s performance tonight helps them convince themselves of their own PR-speak (it shouldn’t surprise them TOO much, Pavano owns the Tigers.  He came into the game with a 3-0 record and a 1.93 for the season against them). 

Carl Pavano won’t come out and pitch shutout ball every start.  But it’s POSSIBLE he could be a productive member of their staff.  But the big issue with Mr Pavano is his health.  Hopefully for the Twins’ sake, history does not repeat itself.

Key to Tampa’s success?

Interesting piece of trivia.  Every game so far in 2008 by the Tampa Bay Rays has been started by a pitcher who is 26 years old or younger.  Andy from Baseball Reference’s Stat of the Day did the math for the whole league.  

Pittsburgh is up there with 72.  On the other side of the coin, Seattle has just 16 such games.