How Many Wins, Strikeouts Will Indians Pitchers Get This Year?
This weekend marked the 81st game of the Cleveland Indians’ 2011 season, meaning that, if you’re not worried about things like changes in skill, luck, or playing time, you can just double each player’s counting stats to project what his numbers will be at the end of the season.
Yesterday, I offered these doubling projections for each Tribe position player. Today, we take a look at the pitchers.
Here’s how many wins, losses, saves, and the like that each hurler is on pace to accumulate over a full season:
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Interview: Prospect Guru Marc Hulet Talks Cleveland Indians’ Farm System, Future
As a small-market team that can’t afford big-name free agents, the Cleveland Indians’ farm system is particularly important to their future success. And after three years of trading established veterans for prospects, the organization should be filled to the brim with promising young players—right? Right?
As writers release their prospect lists and organizational rankings, the results are mixed. The Tribe’s farm system has been ranked as high as third and as low as 17th, with lists of top prospects including anywhere from one to five Indians.
As we try to make sense of it all, we turn to FanGraphs prospect expert Marc Hulet, who was named one of the 100 most influential Canadians in baseball in a Sun Media poll. Hulet has a relatively skeptical view of the Tribe’s farm system, ranking the Indians organization 12th in his 2011 rankings (his top prospect list has not yet been released).
Here’s what he had to say: (more…)
2011 Fantasy Preview: Which Cleveland Indians Pitchers Are Worth Drafting?
Yesterday, we took a look at the Cleveland Indians position players who could have fantasy relevance in 2011. Today, we turn our attention to the pitchers you should keep in mind when you head into the draft.
Quantity, Not Quality, Makes Cleveland Indians’ Farm System Great
After nearly a decade of rebuilding (with brief interruptions in 2005 and 2007), the Cleveland Indians have amassed one of the finest farm systems in all of baseball. At every position, there is at least one promising young player who could make an impact with the Tribe for years to come. And according to Doug Gray’s MLB farm system valuations, the Indians organization is the third-best in baseball.
But you wouldn’t know it from the slew of top prospect lists we’ve seen recently. No Cleveland prospects ranked higher than 36th on Keith Law, Frankie Piliere, or Jonathan Mayo‘s lists, and in all three cases Lonnie Chisenhall was the only one to crack the Top 50.
This sentiment is echoed by analysts who rank prospects by their projected ceilings. The highest grades John Sickels gave to a Tribe prospect were B-pluses, and while Adam Foster was kind enough to include five Indians on his Top 100 list, none earned better than a B-minus (meaning “Slightly-above-average regular”). And Marc Hulet‘s “Peak WAR” projections sit south of 5.0 WAR for every Cleveland prospect.
What gives? How good can the farm system really be if there aren’t any superstars on their way up to Progressive Field?
The key is the Tribe’s incredible minor-league depth. Twenty-six Indians prospects were good enough for Sickles to rank—second-most in the game—and that’s not including snubs like Jared Goedert, Hector Rondon, and Giovanni Soto. If you include the honorable mentions, that’s 42 promising prospects, or almost two full teams’ worth. And that’s not including the young players who already have significant big league experience like Matt LaPorta and Michael Brantley, or even guys who’ve had only tiny tastes of MLB action like Carlos Carrasco and Carlos Santana.
Is quantity better than quality when it comes to prospects? A couple B-level prospects might not be as exciting as a blue-chip first-rounder, but young players don’t always work out the way they’re supposed to. Think back to Mark Prior, Rick Ankiel, and Bryan Bullington. Even Stephen Strasburg might never be the same after Tommy John surgery.
Want a more relevant example? Try Carlos Santana. He’s supposedly healthy now, but he may never fully recover from an injury like that. If the Indians’ future depended on a few great prospects instead of a lot of good ones, that collision would have seemed catastrophic.
What’s more, these rankings don’t reflect that many of the Tribe’s prospects do have elite upsides. Nick Weglarz, Jason Knapp, and Nick Hagadone’s grades are brought down by their injury histories. LeVon Washington has incredible raw talent and definite star potential. Alex White has the makings of an ace, and while I don’t claim that my scouting and prospect-projecting abilities are better than Marc Hulet’s, I have a hard time swallowing his estimation that Drew Pomeranz, probably the best college pitcher in last year’s draft, will have a Peak WAR of just 4.0.
The Indians might not have a future Cy Young or MVP in their midst, but who cares? Even if the organization doesn’t have any great talent, it has a great amount of good talent. Don’t let Cleveland’s underrepresentation on these top prospect lists fool you—the Tribe looks poised to compete for years to come.
Do the Cleveland Indians Really Need an Innings Eater?
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Much ink has already been spilled over the Indians’ desire to import a starting pitcher this offseason. But while Cleveland reportedly wants to bring in a veteran starter, no one expects to see a new ace warming up in the Tribe’s bullpen in 2011. We don’t want a great hurler—we want an “innings eater.”
In case you’re not hip to the latest baseball lingo, an innings eater is a roughly average pitcher whose value comes solely from consistency and durability. We’re talking 150-200 innings with an ERA around 4.25, plus or minus half a run. An innings eater isn’t supposed to carry his team on his back. His job is to go out every fifth day and not screw up too badly.
But let’s forget the apparent inevitability of such a move and focus on the normative—should a team like the Indians really be going after a pitcher like that?
For the sake of argument, let’s say that there are three types of teams, herefter referred to as A, B, and C. Team A enters the season looking like a surefire contender and considers it a disappointment if they miss the playoffs; Team B isn’t expecting to see the postseason, but they have a realistic chance of making it to October if everything goes right; and Team C has raised the white flag on the season before it even starts. Think of Team A as like the Red Sox and Yankees every year, Team B as 2010′s White Sox and Mariners, and Team C as the Royals or Pirates. How would an innings eater fit into each team’s plans?
If Team A has any holes in its rotation, an innings eater would be a great addition. Why? Because if they’re already expecting to make the playoffs, they presumably have the talent to contend before filling the gap in their staff. On a good-hitting club, his job is to keep his team in the game; on a pitching-heavy team, the point is to ensure that the back of the rotation isn’t a complete disaster. The Cardinals’ signing of Jake Westbrook is a good example of the latter.
With Team B, things get a little fuzzier. For a team with an outside chance of making the playoffs, potential is more important than stability. A consistently average pitcher will probably be better than someone who has, say, a 30% chance of being an All-Star and 70% chance of busting, but if a team is in need of someone to put them over the top, playing it safe is counterintuitive. The only reason to go after an innings eater is if there are no other options whose realistic upsides are better than what you’d expect from the innings eater.
With Team C, we get to the worst case of all. If the team has nothing to play for, the only productive use of the season is to further the development of the team’s young players. Every pitch an innings eater throws is an opportunity lost for a prospect to refine his stuff in the bigs. Unless all of a team’s best pitching prospects still have major refinements to make in the minors, signing an innings eater makes no sense at all.
So what of the Indians? The 2011 Tribe probably falls somewhere between Teams B and C, so the argument that an innings eater would bring stability doesn’t hold much water.
And we don’t have a dearth of pitching. Unless they’re traded, Fausto Carmona and Mitch Talbot are virtual locks for rotation spots, and Justin Masterson will probably keep his as well. One has to assume Carlos Carrasco will get the chance to start after impressing in seven starts at the end of 2010, and Josh Tomlin should be the favorite for the fifth spot after leading Triple-A Columbus Clippers starters in ERA last year (2.68).
That means Corey Kluber, Zach McAllister, Jeanmar Gomez, and Justin Germano will be battling it out for backup duty—and that’s assuming no lower-minors prospects take the next step and there’s no resurgence from Aaron Laffey and David Huff. How will that situation be bettered by adding Vicente Padilla or Freddy Garcia?
The bottom line is, the Indians needn’t worry about eating innings. Maybe we should just wolf down some Cracker Jacks instead.
