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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Indians Needn’t Worry About Fausto Carmona
In 2010, Cleveland Indians starting pitcher Fausto Carmona experienced a resurgence. After two years of mediocrity, he emerged as the ace of the Tribe’s staff, going 13-14 with a 3.77 ERA in 33 starts. It was by far his best season since 2007, when he nearly won the AL Cy Young award.
This year, though, something seems to be going wrong. Carmona is 3-8 (on pace for 8-20) with a 5.71 ERA in his first 14 outings. Indians fans seem to be losing patience, and the blogosphere has been abuzz with calls for Cleveland to replace him in the rotation.
However, Carmona does not deserve this kind of criticism. He’s not the ace he was proclaimed to be after last season and it seems unlikely that he’ll ever again match his 2007 dominance, but he’s been far, far better than his 2011 to-date numbers would suggest. (more…)
Nine Cleveland Indians Would Qualify for Free Agent Compensation Picks
It’s way too early for the Cleveland Indians to be thinking about free agency—only four Tribe players are not under team control for the 2012 season, and there will (hopefully) be a pennant run at Progressive Field between now and November. But the latest updates of the Elias free agent rankings are still noteworthy.
Every offseason, the Elias Sports Bureau designates the top free agents on the market as either “Type A” or “Type B.” If the Type A or B player’s team offers him arbitration after his contract expires and the player rejects, his former team is compensated for its loss in the coming year’s amateur draft.
In every case, the team that unsuccessfully offered arbitration to a ranked free agent gets a “sandwich pick” between the first and second rounds of the draft. In addition, whoever signs a Type A free agent must give its first-round pick to the player’s former team (unless the signing team has one of the first 15 picks, in which case they lose give up their second-round pick).
According to MLBTradeRumors.com’s latest Elias Rankings Update, nine Cleveland Indians players would qualify as either Type A or Type B picks if their contracts expired tomorrow. (more…)
Fausto Carmona Dominates Again: Is He a Strikeout Pitcher Now?
The Cleveland Indians’ biggest problem in 2010 was pitching. More specifically, the Tribe’s starting pitchers walked too many batters and didn’t strike anyone out.
Cleveland starters’ collective 3.4 BB/9 rate was the highest in the American League. Even worse, the Indians rotation managed just 5.6 K/9, the worst in all of baseball. Lots of teams struggled with one or the other, but the Tribe starters’ miserable 1.62 K:BB ratio was by far the worst in the league.
Indians pitchers partially made up for their bat-missing struggles by inducing weak contact—their 49.9% groundball rate was tops in the league, and their 17.1% line-drive rate ranked third in baseball. Even so, the Tribe rotation’s 4.44 tERA was good for just 12th in the AL.
Much of the problem could be blamed on de facto ace Fausto Carmona. Carmona, 27, parlayed a 1.72 K:BB ratio (depressingly, it was his best mark in three years) into a 3.77 ERA (4.25 xFIP) thanks largely to a .283 BABIP (it was .319 in 2009, so it’s not as though he’s demonstrated an ability to post consistently low hit rates).
Given his weak peripheral stats last year and the fact that he actually walked more batters than he struck out from 2008-9, there was ample reason to be down on Carmona entering the 2011 season. And after he allowed 10 runs in three innings on Opening Day, things looked bleak.
But since then, Carmona has been phenomenal—including last night, when he held the Baltimore Orioles to just one earned run on five hits in seven innings.
Here’s how each of his starts have gone, to date:
4/1: 3 IP, 10 ER, 11 H, 5 K, 1 BB
4/7: 7 IP, 0 ER, 2 H, 4 K, 2 BB
4/12: 7.2 IP, 2 ER, 4 H, 6 K, 3 BB
4/17: 7 IP, 1 ER, 5 H, 5 K, 1 BB
Notice a trend? And I don’t just mean low numbers of earned runs and hits. I’m talking strikeouts. (more…)
Did New York Yankees Forget About Fausto Carmona?
There’s been a ton of buzz surrounding Fausto Carmona this offseason. From rumors in December that he was drawing more trade interest than Zack Greinke to his inclusion in the Grady Sizemore-to-the-Nationals rumors at the end of January, it might not be a stretch to say that he’s been the most talked about player of the winter who didn’t change teams.
Meanwhile, the New York Yankees are still in the hunt for starting pitchers to join their depleted rotation. That’s why this quote from Yankees GM Brian Cashman this week seems puzzling: (more…)
