Two Prospects have Dominated in Nationals' System

You know about Bryce Harper. You may not know about Tom Milone.

We'll start with Harper. After spending the first three months of the season dominating in Single A Hagerstown to the tune of .318/.423/.554, Harper was promoted to Double A Harrisburg, skipping High A Potomac. In his double A debut, he went two for three with a walk and a run scored. Remember, Harper doesn't turn 19 until October. For a reference part, an 18 year old hasn't appeared in a major league game was in 1994. His name was Alex Rodriguez.

At this point, unless he completely flunks AA ball, I'd be shocked if Harper doesn't debut in September. He's likely to begin next season in the minors, though if he dominates in AA and hits either in his call up or next year in spring training, that could change.

You probably know all of that already, though. Who's this Milone guy?

Tom Milone (statistics)was just named the International League pitcher of the week. In his two starts, he pitched 14.1 innings, allowing 1 run, 8 hits, striking out 12 and walking nobody, extending a pattern of dominance that could fly under the radar because of some bad luck. Through 15 starts this season, Milone has what may seem like a pedestrian 6-5 record and 3.38 ERA. It doesn't take much digging though to find some truly mind boggling numbers:

Team	IP	H	ER	HR	BB	SO	ERA	WHIP	H/9	HR/9	BB/9	SO/9	FIP
Syracuse	96	90	36	6	5	101	3.38	0.99	8.4	0.6	0.5	9.5	2.10

Check that again. 101 strikeouts. FIVE walks. His strikout to walk ratio is 20.2. For a point of reference, the career record for K/BB ratio was in the strike shortened 1994 (is this a theme today?) when Bret Saberhagen had 143 strikeouts to 13 walks. Since he surpassed the full-season 162 IP standard, I'm willing to accept this as the record even though the strike shortened the year. If you're not, last season Cliff Lee had 185 strikeouts and 18 walks. The active career leader (min 1000 IP) is Mariano Rivera, at a tick under 4 strikeouts for every guy he walks.

Milone's stuff is considered middling, which is why we don't see him on prospect lists. His fastball is in the mid 80's, reaching 89 on rare occasion. His changeup seems to be regarded as his best pitch, and he also throws a cutter and curveball. He doesn't generate a ton of ground balls, so, considering the rest of his arsenal, I would guess it is likely that his home run rate in the major leagues would approach 1 per every 9 innings.

Still, while the walk number is impressive, it is the International League leading strikeout number that stands out to me. Walking too many hitters is bad, but simply avoiding walks isn't, on it's own, good. The active leader for lowest career walk rate is Carlos Silva, who has an ERA+ of 93, because he doesn't strike anybody out and gives up too many home runs. Combining such a low walk rate with such a high strikeout total though? It's almost impossible not to succeed while doing that. Zack Greinke has been hit hard this year doing it, but he's also a former Cy Young winner. There are 12 active pitchers with 1000 career innings and a K/BB ratio of over 3 to 1 (courtesy of baseball-reference):

Player (age)	K/BB	ERA+
Mariano Rivera (41)	3.9669	205
Dan Haren (30)	3.9444	120
James Shields (29)	3.7611	105
Cole Hamels (27)	3.7435	126
Roy Halladay (34)	3.6753	137
Roy Oswalt (33)	3.5216	134
Zack Greinke (27)	3.4694	112
Javier Vazquez (34)	3.261	104
Cliff Lee (32)	3.2175	113
Jered Weaver (28)	3.1667	128
Jake Peavy (30)	3.0888	116
Josh Beckett (31)	3.0618	115

Nobody on the list lower than a 104 ERA+, ten of the twelve over 112.

So why is Milone's performance so outpacing his stuff? One theory is that minor league hitters do not deal with pitchers, particularly left handed ones, who can locate and mix their pitches well, but major league hitters do. While there is some evidence to this, I'm having trouble finding an example of someone with such an extreme K/BB ratio in AAA. Milone performance is such an outlier that I'm not sure what we can extrapolate from other data sets.

My guess is that Milone will get a chance with the Nationals at some point this season. His performance has been too good to ignore, despite what the radar gun says. If the Nationals aren't interested in giving him a chance, somebody else certainly will. Once in the majors, it's anybody's guess what kind of success he'll have. I'm rooting for him though. One of the things I love about baseball is the fact there are many, many ways one can succeed at it. Maybe Milone can't - maybe he gets hit hard and falls out of the major leagues, and I find this post 10 years from now and laugh. Who knows? Even it's rare for someone with stuff like Tom Milone to excel, perhaps it's simply because there's never been another like Tom Milone.



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Is Andy Pettitte a Hall of Famer?

As you probably have heard, Andy Pettitte is set to announce his retirement today. We'll save the discussion for how this affects the Yankees in 2011 (the answer is "a lot") for another day. Today, we're going to look at Pettitte's Hall of Fame candidacy.

"Now wait a minute" you might ask. "Don't we have five years until we need to talk about this? Shouldn't we let his record stand up for a few years until we make a decision for someone in the Class of 2016?" Well, yes and no. If more information comes out in the next few years, by all means it should be considered. Bert Blyleven's numbers didn't change at all between 1993 and 2010 - only the analysis of them did. So of course, if we find out that, say, Pettitte's ability to hold runners actually let to him preventing significantly more runs than we think, then that should be considered. Still, as of today, his raw numbers are not changing, so it can't hurt to start the discussion. If I look like an idiot in six years... hey, it won't be the first time.

Much of the discussion about Pettitte's Hall of Fame candidacy seems to be related to his "record-setting" 19 postseason wins. I do accept that postseason should be considered in Hall of Fame voting. If someone's case may otherwise be borderline, but their postseason numbers are outstanding, I think it's reasonable to put them in. For example, Mariano Rivera has a postseaon ERA of 0.71 in 139.7 innings. That's ridiculous. Against the best competition in the world, during the most important games, he gives up a run every 13 innings. Pettitte though? Once we get past those 19 wins, it gets a little shaky. We find out that his postseason ERA is 3.83 - right in line with his regular season numbers. We find that he's started 42 postseason games, so he has wins in less than half of those. We also find that he's third all time in postseason losses, with 10. Digging a little deeper, we find that there have been 11 pitchers in history with 130 or more postseason innings. Pettitte has the highest postseason ERA of all of them. So giving Pettitte credit for all of those postseason wins would essentially be giving him credit for pitching on the Yankees. There doesn't seem any way that I can boost him above his regular season value, since his claim to postseason fame simply seems to be "having been there a lot on a team that happened to be the best at the time."

So, without further adieu, let's get into Pettitte's regular season qualifications. I've chosen to compare him with eight contemporaries, who are near him in innings pitched and wins. I've chosen to leave out Roger Clemens, Greg Maddux, Randy Johnson and Tom Glavine who, as incredibly durable 300 game winners and first ballot slam dunks, are unfair comparisons to someone who will have a borderline case. The contemporaries here are Mike Mussina, Curt Schilling, Kevin Brown, Chuck Finley, John Smoltz, Pedro Martinez, David Wells and David Cone.

We will start by comparing them in the standard first order stats that voters will look at immediately:

	W	L	IP	CG	SHO	ERA	K
Andy Pettitte	240	138	3055.3	25	4	3.88	2251
Chuck Finley	200	173	3197.3	63	15	3.86	2610
Curt Schilling	216	146	3261.0	83	20	3.46	3116
David Cone	194	126	2898.6	56	22	3.46	2668
David Wells	239	157	3439.0	54	12	4.13	2201
John Smoltz	213	155	3473.0	53	16	3.33	3084
Kevin Brown	211	144	3256.3	72	17	3.28	2397
Mike Mussina	270	153	3562.7	57	23	3.68	2813
Pedro Martinez	219	100	2827.3	46	17	2.93	3154

Of this group of stats, Pettitte's winning percentage certainly stands out. Beyond that, though, he ranks seventh out of these nine in innings, eighth in ERA, ahead of David Wells, and eighth in strikeouts, also ahead of only Wells. The complete games and shutout numbers are shockingly low - Mussina himself had two individual SEASONS where he had as many shutouts as Pettitte did in his career. It's hard to make the argument that complete games were simply no longer part of the game anymore, since these were all his contemporaries. We're not comparing him to Rube Marquard and Three Finger Brown here.

However, the Hall of Fame doesn't just honor durability, it is concerned more with dominance. We've shown above that Pettitte didn't pitch as much or as long as these guys - but maybe he pitched better? Plus, Pettitte's backers will point out that he pitched most of his career in Yankee Stadium, which is a tough place to pitch. So, while I turn my cheek to the flaw in that argument, since the old Yankee Stadium was actually quite kind to lefthanded pitchers, here is another round of stats, this time just slightly more advanced.

	ERA+	K/9	BB/9	HR/9	WAR (Total)	FIP
Andy Pettitte	117	6.6	2.8	0.8	50.2	3.75
Chuck Finley	115	7.3	3.7	0.9	55	3.91
Curt Schilling	128	8.6	2	1	69.7	3.23
David Cone	121	8.3	3.5	0.8	57.5	3.57
David Wells	108	5.8	1.9	1.1	50.7	3.99
John Smoltz	125	8	2.6	0.7	63.9	3.24
Kevin Brown	127	6.6	2.5	0.6	64.8	3.33
Mike Mussina	123	7.1	2	0.9	74.8	3.57
Pedro Martinez	154	10	2.4	0.8	75.9	2.91

ERA+ is a measure of a pitcher's ERA over the course of a season when compared to the league average - it does include Park Effects. WAR is Wins Above Replacement. There are many formulas for this, I used baseball-reference.com because it was most convenient. There isn't a whole ton of disparity here, but if you want to search for other sites calculations, please do. FIP is Fielding Independent Pitching, which is exactly what it sounds like - it filters out the things a pitcher does himself, and normalizes balls in play.

As you can see from the numbers, this is where Pedro Martinez really shines. 10 strikeouts per nine innings over his entire career, and a stellar 2.91 FIP. Furthermore, despite being dead last among these nine in innings, he leads the way in WAR.

On the other hand, this really emphasizes how weak Pettitte's Hall of Fame case is. Among these nine, he's dead last in WAR, behind David Wells and Chuck Finley, neither of whom will come close to the Hall of Fame. He has the second lowest strikeout percentage, and the third highest walk percentage. His FIP shows that he wasn't especially unlucky, and ranks ahead of only Finley and Wells. Meanwhile, David Cone and Kevin Brown, who both fell off of the ballot after one year, both blow him away in WAR, ERA+ and FIP.

To further illustrate the point, I've broken down the outstanding seasons for each of these pitchers. I've defined that in two categories - seasons with an ERA+ of over 130, and seasons with a WAR above four:

	WAR > 4.0	ERA+>130
Andy Pettitte	3	2
Chuck Finley	7	4
Curt Schilling	11	9
David Cone	8	6
David Wells	5	2
John Smoltz	8	8
Kevin Brown	8	7
Mike Mussina	12	9
Pedro Martinez	10	8

This scale just makes it that much more evident that Pettitte didn't compare to the other top pitchers of his time. In order to enter the Hall of Fame, a player should be either extremely durable or exceptionally outstanding. Pettitte was very good, but he was neither of those things. With the bar already set at a level where Brown, Finley and Cone are not on the ballot for even a second try, a vote for Pettitte is essentially a vote for the Yankees, because Pettitte's individual performance does not warrant it.

Photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/27003603@N00/3877027082

Statistics credit: www.baseball-reference.com and www.fangraphs.com

Also, special thanks to http://tableizer.journalistopia.com/ which enabled me to take my spreadsheets and convert them to HTML, saving me lots of time and headache.

Soriano's Usage Likely Will Be Sub-optimal. His Pitching Likely Won't.

A lot has been said over the past few weeks about the Yankees signing of Rafael Soriano - the sensibility in giving an "8th inning guy" to a three year, $35M contract; Soriano's ability to transition from "closer" to "set-up guy"; Yankee GM Brian Cashman's public disagreement with the move, stating that they would have preferred the draft pick. One fairly important matter has been lost in all the noise. Rafael Soriano is a very good pitcher, and there is no reason to believe that he won't continue to be a very good pitcher in the near future.

Much attention has been placed about Soriano's ability to "save" games at a better rate than any other pitcher in the American League in 2010. During the season, a lot is made of having a guy who pitches only in the 9th inning, and only when his team is winning. 2-2 game, on the road, bottom of the 9th, middle of the lineup due up? Let's get our fourth best reliever in there - we don't want to waste our best pitcher, just in case our fourth best relieve holds the tie and we score next inning. For whatever reason, that is the logic that has permeated the minds of essentially every MLB organization for 23 years. There are exceptions - Jim Leyland's Pirates teams of the early 90's were the last team that had sustained success without the help of the trademarked proven closer. In 2003, the Red Sox attempted to go into the season with a "bullpen by committee" which failed miserably. In the Red Sox case though, too much attention was paid to their usage of pitchers, and not enough attention to the fact that those pitchers were not very good (with a definite exception of Mike Timlin, a good pitcher who had one of his best years).

For all the attention paid to the save statistic and the need for a proven closer, when they become free agents in the offseason, teams are just not interested in paying top dollar for what amounts to 60 innings a year. Coming off his record setting year in 2008, Francisco Rodriguez received 3 years, $37M. For comparison's sake, in the same offseason, AJ Burnett, a zero-time all star starting pitcher who is five years older than K-Rod, was given a five year, $82.5M contract. Sure, signing Burnett for that much money was really stupid, but it showed where priorities were for GMs.

In 2010, Rafael Soriano led the American League with 45 saves, and was to become a free agent. Based on his save total, many assumed that he would be flooded with offers from teams looking for bullpen help. Instead, he was unsigned into mid-January. The Yankees, whose bullpen beyond Mariano Rivera had been pretty bad in 2010, were considered by some to be a smart fit, especially when taking into account the money that they tried to and failed to spend on Cliff Lee. Brian Cashman, however, said that he wasn't interested in signing Soriano, because of the necessary money, and more importantly, the draft pick they would lose because Soriano is listed as a Type A free agent and had been offered arbitration. In the end though, Soriano did end up on the Yankees. The details are fuzzy, but as best as people can tell, Randy Levine overruled and went straight to the Steinbrenner Brothers, and Brian Cashman was peeved about the whole thing.

In the wake of the signing, some were quick to point of the dissention in the ranks of the Yankee organization. Others were mocking of spending $37M on a set-up man, and defended Cashman. However, I think those who question the deal are focused too much on the role of set-up man (and by extension, the ridiculous way in which modern bullpens are run), and not enough on the fact that Soriano is excellent. There is one proviso, that being Soriano's injury history. He missed significant time in 2004, 2005 and 2008. As a 31 year old, it's not impossible to see these injury issues cropping back up. That said, Soriano's numbers are outstanding. Since the start of 2005, when he was still with the Mariners, Soriano has pitched 291 innings. His ERA is 2.53, (an ERA+ of 167), with 319 strikeouts to only 87 walks. Over the last two years, he's been even better, posting a 2.41 ERA in 138 innings, striking out 159 and walking only 41. That's not Mariano Rivera's level, but the quality speaks for itself.

Cashman's reluctance to part with his draft pick in this situation reminds me of joke my friends and I have. Every year a round NFL draft time reports come out about teams who are refusing to part with draft picks for proven players, who are likely much better than the ones they'd be able to draft. Certainly, some of that comes from a payroll perspective - the proven players is going to get paid based on past performance, while the rookie will be a low cost measure. However, more than that, it is the new toy mentality. Sure, I'd like Randy Moss, but that fourth round draft pick could turn into ANYONE! Well, that #31 pick in the draft that the Yankees essentially traded for Soriano could turn into "anyone." But instead of anyone, lets look at #31 overall picks from 2000 to 2009.

2000: Aaron Heilman, P - New York Mets.
2001: Brian Bass, SS - Baltimore Orioles
2002: Greg Miller, P - Los Angeles Dodgers
2003: Adam Miller, P - Cleveland Indians
2004: James Howell, P - Kansas City Royals
2005: Matthew Torra, P - Arizona Diamondbacks
2006: Preston Mattingly, SS - Los Angeles Dodgers
2007: Josh Smoker, P - Washington Nationals
2008: Shooter Hunt, P - Minnesota Twins
2009: Tyler Matzek, P - Colorado Rockies

Yes, the Rays are better than most teams at making their draft picks turn into major leaguers, but the point still stands - the likelihood that the Yankees were going to get someone of Rafael Soriano quality at #31 this June is kind of silly.

Now that we're beyond the draft pick thing, the main criticism is that Soriano will now be an overpaid "8th inning guy." Critics say there's no way he'll "earn" $37 million over the next three years just by setting up by Mariano Rivera, no matter how well he pitches. Well, if that's true, isn't that more of an indictment on the way bullpens are used, and by extension, a criticism of Joe Girardi for his by-the-book sub-optimal system? If the Yankees can't get value out of one of the best relief pitchers in baseball, then shouldn't they be re-evaluating how they use their bullpen? Wouldn't the Yankees be devestating if Soriano were used earlier in one-run or tie games, or to come in between innings, leaving Rivera to do the standard one-inning closer role? Wouldn't it make sense to use Soriano on days after Rivera pitches, so that neither have to frequently pitch on consecutive days, and since they are pitching less frequently, are able to pitch for multiple innings more often? Wouldn't that even lead to them getting some silly combined nickname thing come the end of the season to describe their dominance, like Rafariano Riveriano? What should be feared as the most lethal bullpen duo in baseball is instead scorned, because onlookers believe Soriano isn't likely to get the opportunities to help his team win games.

So, what will Joe Girardi do? It's tough to say. But as a Red Sox fan, I'm crossing my fingers and hoping that he proves the critics and Cashman right, and uses his bullpen in the most predictable, standard, sub-optimal way possible.