2009 Pitching Appraisal: Carl Pavano

  

C. Pavano (33 Starts)
FIP | MLB Rank	4.00*	40th*
BABIP | +/- MLB Avg	.330	+10.0%
Runs Support | +/- MLB Avg	6.13	+27.1%
GAME SCORES	Decisions	No-Decisions
Game Score 50 or Greater:	11-3	3-1
Game Score 49 or Lower:	3-9	2-1
Average Game Score Per Start:	47
Season High/Low:	85 (6/5)	3 (4/9)
Game Scores over 90:	0
Game Scores 80-89:	1
Game Scores 70-79:	1
Game Scores 60-69:	7
Game Scores Below 40:	9
Record of Opposing Batters:	.294/.329/.466 (795 OPS)
Offensive Equivalent:	Miguel Tejada

*NOTE: FIP not xFIP

 

Back when the Twins first acquired Carl Pavano, I detailed why this move was actually much better than it looked on the surface.  Pavano was a victim of a bad defense and a high portion of balls falling in uncovered areas of the field.  At the same time, he demonstrated the ability to throw consistently in the zone and miss bats.  Still, his arrival was met with skepticism due to a hefty home run allowed (1.36 HR/9 comparative to the average of 1.05) and bloated ERA (5.37).    

 

After relocating to the 612, Pavano finished the year 5-4 with a 4.44 ERA and an improved 7.21 K/9 in 12 starts.  In spite of converting fewer batted balls into outs in Minnesota (a .668 DER versus .673 in Cleveland), Pavano managed to pitch better (3.50 FIP versus 4.28 FIP in Cleveland).

 

Pavano made strides to improve his efforts against right-handed hitters – an inexplicable split mystery.  After beginning the year in upper Ohio being splattered by same-sided opponents, allowing 13 of his 19 home runs along with an eye-popping .547 slugging percentage against to righties, Pavano avoided major damage with the Twins.  One of his biggest overall differences upon the migration was his increased use of his slider to righties: 

 

Vs RHB	Slider Pct	Slider WHIFF Avg	Overall K%	Overall Slugging Pct
Cleveland	17	.320	12.1	.547
Minnesota	30	.315	15.3	.432

 

Whether this was a self-imposed correction or something Rick Anderson picked up, Pavano’s final months against righties were drastically better than his first few.

 

At 33 years old, Pavano’s stuff was not exactly electric – he was bringing the fastball at a pedestrian 90.4 miles per hour – but he worked ahead of hitters (his 67.7 percent first pitch strike led all of baseball) which provided the luxury of turning to his nasty breaking stuff in his slider, curve and splitter (those three had a combined WHIFF average of .304).  In addition to the pitches with hard break action, Pavano also had an above-average change – one that he threw for a strike 75 percent of the time and had opposing hitters chase nearly half of those offerings out of the zone. 

 

He has pitched well enough to earn a well-deserved raise, the question for the Twins, is it one that will price him out of the running for the rotation in 2010?  With his history of injury, age and the crooked-looking ERA, Pavano may not get anything more than two-years in the range of $5-to-$9 million per depending on how the free agent market unfolds.

2009 Pitching Appraisal: Kevin Slowey

 

K. SLOWEY (16 Starts)
xFIP | MLB Rank	4.46	DNQ
BABIP | +/- MLB Avg	.349	+16.3%
Runs Support | +/- MLB Avg	5.69	+18.1%
GAME SCORES	Decisions	No-Decisions
Game Score Greater Than 50:	8-0	0-1
Game Score Less Than 50:	2-3	0-2
Average Game Score Per Start:	48
Season High/Low:	69 (4/25)	23 (4/13)
Game Scores over 90:	0
Game Scores 80-89:	0
Game Scores 70-79:	0
Game Scores 60-69:	5
Game Scores Below 40:	7
Record of Opposing Batters:	.309/.340/.503 (843 OPS)
Offensive Equivalent:	Matt Kemp

 

Even while pitching with bone spurs in his throwing wrist since the previous September, Slowey still managed to demonstrate why he will be a front-of-the-rotation starter with college-level velocity (88.9-mph fastball in ’09): his outright ownership of the strike zone. 

 

Prior to landing on the DL in July, Slowey was leading the league in first pitch strikes and overall zone presence.  This dominance of the space that resides from knees to letters and 17 inches across allowed the Twins righty to keep pace with some of the league’s already elite pitchers.  Among those that worked a minimum of 80 innings, Slowey’s 5.00 K/BB ratio was fourth behind Roy Halladay, Dan Haren and Javier Vazquez.  The man trailing him is the presumed AL Cy Young in Zack Greinke.  Slowey’s rise to the top of that list includes a solid 7.44 K/9 but is magnified by his ultra-stingy issuance of base on balls.  Only Joel Pineiro (1.14 BB/9) and Halladay (1.32 BB/9) relinquished fewer free passes than Slowey. 

 

In addition to his command, Slowey refined the use of his changeup in 2009.  The results showed more aptitude to getting empty swings – a long-standing criticism of his pitching style:  

CHG	Pct Thrown	Vel	WHIFF Avg
2008	7.8	82.8	.190
2009	9.2	82.7	.270

It was this improvement that provided Slowey with a much needed “out pitch”.  On the other hand, Slowey had multiple problems with his slider.  The wrist injury may have contributed to the evaporation of his vertical break and the elongation of the horizontal break rendering the pitch much more hittable:  

SLD	hBreak	vBreak	WHIFF Avg
2008	1.8	6.1	.227
2009	3.0	4.3	.160

 

If there are supporters in the clubhouse for keeping a Gomez/Span outfield in 2010, Slowey should be one of the most vocal.  As a largely contact-oriented pitcher, nearly 50 percent of balls in play were of the fly ball variety.  The rangier outfield would help ensure several more balls find leather rather than turf. 

 

The most important thing to take away from Slowey’s 2009 season is to disregard the 10-wins in 16 starts - it boils down to a product of his ridiculous amount of runs support (5.69 runs per start).  Do not attempt to extrapolate that winning percentage over 33 starts in 2010.  That would be just wishful thinking.  Nevertheless, he is one of the top three starters in the rotation when healthy and could make a run at a 15-win season provided the right mix of defense.       

2009 Pitcher Appraisal: Glen Perkins

G. PERKINS (17 Starts)
xFIP | MLB Rank	5.07	DNQ
BABIP | +/- MLB Avg	.321	+7.0%
Runs Support | +/- MLB Avg	4.40	-4.7%
GAME SCORES	Decisions	No-Decisions
Game Score Greater Than 50:	5-1	1-0
Game Score Less Than 50:	1-6	1-2
Average Game Score Per Start:	43
Season High/Low:	73 (4/9)	5 (8/2)
Game Scores over 90:	0
Game Scores 80-89:	0
Game Scores 70-79:	2
Game Scores 60-69:	2
Game Scores Below 40:	7
Record of Opposing Batters:	.304/.341/.463 (803 OPS)
Offensive Equivalent:	Shane Victorino

Glen Perkins’s 2009 season peaked on April 19^th following his third start of the year.  Accounting for the fact that MLB’s schedule runs through October, this story does not have a happy ending.  Up until that point the lefty had tossed 24 innings, allowing only four runs on 16 hits and maintaining a tidy .188 batting average against.  Then everything he threw was sprayed all over the field.  Post-April 20^th Perkins worked 71.1 innings in 15 games, allowing 60 runs on 103 hits (13 of which were home runs), and went on to finish the season buried in Rochester on a rehab assignment.

His 6-7 record in 2009 should not surprise anyone when you note that Perkins was coming off a 12-win 2008 season that was inflated by an astronomical amount of runs scored on his behalf.  Perkins went 4-4 in starts where his Game Score was less than 50 but finished 1-6 in 2009 under the same circumstances. When the cavalry supplied less than league average support in 2009, it was apparent that his low Game Scores would not continue to provide him with victories.

Are there any takeaways that suggest Perkins can rebound from an ugly season in 2010?  Certainly.  Look at his batting average in play on groundballs.  It reads .327.  Meanwhile, the league average in this area was .240.  It stands to reason that approximately 10 of Perkins’s 55 hits on the ground bleed through or found unguarded seams.  These sorts of results do not last forever; eventually they find a fielder’s glove.  Because his balls-in-play tendencies shifted from an aerial pitcher to chiefly a groundball pitcher (from 38% in ’08 to 47% in ‘09), Perkins could be inline for a Plexiglas effect in 2010, if this trend continues.   That isn’t to say his overall woes won’t continue.  Outside of just three other starters with a minimum of 90 innings pitched, Perkins held the lowest K/9 (4.20) while not figuring out a way to subdue left-handed opponents (.878 OPS) and getting lit up while pitching from the stretch (.962 OPS men on vs. .687 OPS empty).  Without solving these three issues it is hard to believe shaving off 10 groundball hits a year will Cy Young-ify him.

Then there were the issues with management.

Including not revealing an injury which repositioned him in the manager’s doghouse and sparking some internal controversy when Perkins’ agent filed a grievance with the players’ association stating the Twins intentionally held him in the minor leagues to avoid increasing his service time, there is plenty of speculation circulating that Perkins’ name could be on the forefront of any potential trades this offseason.  Then again, Perkins’ stock is not high enough to wrangle in anything of substantial value without including at least one prospect.  

 

2009 Pitcher Appraisal: Francisco Liriano

 

 

 

F. LIRIANO (24 Starts)
xFIP | MLB Rank	4.78	DNQ
BABIP | +/- MLB Avg	.323	+7.4%
Runs Support | +/- MLB Avg	3.82	-20.6%
GAME SCORES	Decisions	No-Decisions
Game Score Greater Than 50:	3-3	4-2
Game Score Less Than 50:	2-10	None
Average Game Score Per Start:	45
Season High/Low:	74 (8/12)	13 (8/17)
Game Scores over 90:	0
Game Scores 80-89:	0
Game Scores 70-79:	1
Game Scores 60-69:	5
Game Scores Below 40:	11
Record of Opposing Batters:	.279/.361/.469 (830 OPS)
Offensive Equivalent:	Carlos Lee

 

It is hard to harp on a thing like “run support” (which was 20 percent lower than the league average) when he served up more runs than most South of the Border eateries, but even so, Liriano was hosed out of four wins in 2009.  He could have been 9-13.  There.  That’s the end of the positivity for now.

 

In just under half of his 24 starts (11), Liriano made a huge-antic (a combination of huge and gigantic) mess out of the game, seemingly putting the Twins further in debt every time he chucked the ball towards home plate.  What gives?   Like the pitching version of Jason Lewis, righties simply loved him.  In his return to the mound in 2008, right-handed batters demonstrated little advantage over him (745 OPS).  One year later, the right-handed nation was launching moonshots off him, responsible for 20 of his 21 HR allowed and raising their OPS to 899.  

Back in June, I noted that he was pitching differently to hitters depending on which batter’s box they were in. The Twins' lefty slides down the rubber towards the third base line when facing right-handed batters in efforts to run the fastball inside, however, he releases it with less of a more vertical of an arm angle which results in a flatter pitch often finishing in the fat part of the zone, above the waist.  With the decrease in velocity from 2006 (from 94.6-mph down to 91-mph) Liriano's location combined with lack of movement (not to mention the regularity of being behind in the count) led to some hard hit balls off for right-handed bats. 

 

In general, his slider still had bite.  Over 40 percent of swings in '09 resulted in a miss (just down from 48 percent in '06) indicating that the is enough break to incite plenty of awkward swings - even after the Tommy John surgery.  However, like the fastball, it was thrown at a reduced velocity from his breakout year in '06.  Also like the fastball, Liriano demonstrated that he had trouble placing it within the strike zone this past season.  As opposed to '06 where he threw the slider in the zone almost half of the time, Liriano threw the slider in the zone less than 40 percent of the time, eroding the effectiveness of the break.  Hitters, particularly right-handed ones, eventually figured out he was unable to throw the slider for a strike and held back waiting for the fastball (NOW WITH 5% LESS HEAT!). 

 

The haphazard command led to better counts for opponents or a walk.  His control problems led to the AL's second highest walk rate (4.28 BB/9) trailing only the Yankees Joba Camberlain with pitchers who had thrown a minimum of 130 innings.  Even so, and this might be a hard pill to swallow in context to his 5-13 record, the heaping ton of walks and a 5.80 ERA but setting aside those facts, Liriano had a decent season when it comes to projecting talent:  

 

• Liriano's strikeout rate (8.03 K/9) was good enough for eighth in the AL - this is an unsurprising revelation given that his 20 percent swinging strike total was the highest in the league. 
• His .324 batting average on balls in play was the seventh highest in the AL and well above the league average of .300.  Where he suffered the most was on groundballs.  As the rest of the league's pitchers held Defensive Efficiency Ratio of .760 on grounders, Liriano was given a DER of .694 - meaning more bouncers slipped through the infield than the norm. 
• His 66.3 percent left-on-base rate was the well-below the average of 71.0 percent and sixth-highest in the AL.  As this equalizes next season, the ERA will drop with it.   

 

The injuries and slow-to-return control (always the last thing pitcher's regain after undergoing TJ) helped make an unfortunate season his worst, yet, there is plenty of evidence Liriano could be a boon to the rotation in 2010. 

2009 Pitcher Appraisal: Scott Baker

S. BAKER (33 Starts)
xFIP | MLB Rank	4.46	49th
BABIP | +/- MLB Avg	.277	-7.4%
Runs Support | +/- MLB Avg	5.62	+17.9%
GAME SCORES	Decisions	No-Decisions
Game Score Greater Than 50:	12-2	2-2
Game Score Less Than 50:	3-6	3-3
Average Game Score Per Start:	52
Season High/Low:	88 (8/14)	21 (4/22)
Game Scores over 90:	0
Game Scores 80-89:	1
Game Scores 70-79:	3
Game Scores 60-69:	7
Game Scores Below 40:	6
Record of Opposing Batters:	.247/.293/.416 (709 OPS)
Offensive Equivalent:	Garret Anderson

Back in May I wrote, “The season did not start out the way Baker and the Twins envisioned after signing him to a long-term contract this past offseason.  Shoulder problems delayed the beginning of his 2009 season and when he returned, he began by allowing home runs at an absurd pace - in his first three starts he surrendered a home run every 10 plate appearances - while his 16 earned runs in just 14 innings of work resulted in a 9.82 ERA and a myriad of questions regarding his health and effectiveness.”  A dissection in his pitches showed that Baker struggled at gaining movement with his pitches, frequently leaving very hittable balls middle-up in the zone.  Things turned around quickly for the Twins’ veteran right-hander as his fifth season in Minnesota wore on.  In April and May, Baker went 2-6 allowing 14 home runs in his nine games resulting in a 6.32 ERA but from June until the end of the season, he went 13-3 with a 3.67 ERA in 24 games helping propel the Twins towards the division-leading Tigers.

According to his game scores, Baker, perhaps more than any other pitcher on the staff, gave the Twins the best opportunity to win games.  His 52 average in addition to 11 starts in which he held game scores of 60 or higher, supplying more than enough pitching to yield victories - especially given his 5.62 average run support. There is little evidence that suggests Baker's 15 victories were anything but earned, however, he did manage to come away with three wins that would otherwise have been losses had the offense not scored a high runs total.  Still, there are plenty of Twins followers that would hesitate to call Baker an "ace".  This came up with the TwinsCentric group as well.  While writing the Offseason GM Handbook 2009-2010, I was tasked with creating report cards.  At the time, I wagged the grades at the beginning September and Seth Stohs, Nick Nelson, John Bonnes and I opened those up for discussion.  A debated sparked regarding what I submitted on Baker and Nick Blackburn.  In my evaluation, I had Baker graded better (albeit slightly) than Blackburn.  In my own assessment, I noted that Baker's peripherals were better all-around while Blackburn was allowing more hits than Google.  It was by the grace of the baseball gods that Blackburn managed to keep such a tidy ERA.  This was not a knock on Blackburn, it was just that Baker had a better year.  After an extensive dialogue on what exactly what the grading scale should reflect, we ultimately decided to ordain them the exact same grade, much to my chagrin.  

This is not to say that I felt Blackburn deserved a bad grade, per se.  After all, his performance, while not dominating, resulted in a very good 4.03 ERA.  Of course, to most baseball analysts, ERA and victories do little to inform on the actual performance of a pitcher.  In the areas like K/9, WHIP, batting average allowed, Baker was a far superior pitcher. Outward demeanor could also be influencing the decision.  Whereas Blackburn gets credit for appearing confident in big starts, Baker seems to project this opposite.  Baker's mound demeanor could be what is most unnerving and less than inspirational.  Following periods of unbridled bashing from opponents, Baker assumes the deer-in-headlights look and appears to have a rapport of that of a father chewing out his son whenever pitching coach Rick Anderson trots out to the infield bump. 

While the rancid numbers from April and May are influencing people's decisions on Baker's overall performance, we should consider a few other factors:

• His 1.19 WHIP and his 3.38 K/BB was good enough for seventh in the American League.  These have much better predicative values than citing his 4.36 ERA (which was still several points better than the AL average of 4.46) that inflated from sub-4.00 a year ago.   
• His fastball was one of the best in the league as well.  At 1.03 wFB/C, his heater was behind that of the Royals' Zack Greinke in runs above average in the AL.  
• 31 percent of his plate appearance were of the 0-2 variety.  Only Detroit's Justin Verlander held a higher percentage of 0-2 counts.  This fact is huge considering MLB players managed to hit just .461 OPS once falling into an 0-2 deficit.  

These statistics puts Baker in an elite category that is share by Cy Young contenders.  Had he been able to erase his first nine starts where he was re-acclimating himself to pitching again after his shoulder problems, Baker may have encroached on 20 wins rather than his 15.  Signed through 2012 (but with a club option in 2013), the 27-year-old Baker will be just entering his 30's so the organization has bought out his prime years for a very reasonable $14.5 million.  What the Twins will receive in return is a starter capable of consuming 200 innings and providing Cy Young-caliber outings so long as those long fly balls stay within the field of play.