The truth is hard to accept for these blowhards however. Even if someone does send it to him he won’t believe one of us “statheads.”

I think this is more Tom Verrducci saying “Look at me…I’m important”

or we’d have no #3 pitcher

irked me also.

Is the epitome of applying pseudo-science to baseball.

Aside from the fact that guys like Pelf and Hamels had essentially the same DIPS numbers, this is exactly what you should expect from a group of young pitchers who saw a huge innings increase. By definition, a large number of these pitchers will also be coming off of the best years of their young careers. Lots of them had substantial performance spikes. Others had limited major league experience. Not many rookie pitchers are throwing 200 innings with ERAs over 5.00. The only rookie pitchers who really sniff that mark are the ones who are pitching effectively. 200 innings, 5.00 ERA years are typically reserved for grissled (is in “of grission”) vets. If the guy has options and he’s not performing, most likely he’s getting demoted.

Look at Chad Billingsly. He’s an example of a pitcher who actually did see his performance drop off this year, not just on the surface but on the DIPS side too. But he was still very effective, he was just ridiculously good in 2008. Even in 2009, his performance was as good or better than anything he did at any level, majors or minors, since his dominant 2004 season across HiA and Double-A. A player peaking isn’t a linear function when looked at in sets of single seasons, and regardless of how much Billingsly really did improve in 2008, he was almost certainly due some regression based on his previous track record.

but it depends on what you mean by the phrase.

I think most here have realized he was underrated for awhile. Pretty much all of his peripherals indicate he’s better than his traditional stats would indicate.

FIP isn’t saying his season was solely the effect of bad fielding, it’s more saying his season this year wasn’t really any different than 08 he just wasn’t as good in 08 as people thought and wasn’t as bad this season as people thought. I’m not really a fan of FIP though I prefer xFIP and tRA and neither of them sell Pelfrey as a victim of bad fielding, more like a middle/back end starter who looked much better than he actually is in 08 and worse than he actually is in 09. But even by FIP/xFIP/tRA, he didn’t improve at all over 08, I’m pretty sure all of them, and his peripheals had him getting slightly worse, which might not actually be getting worse just regressing.

I think people are coming off as Pelf fans because we’re assuming he’s better than his ERA from last year indicated. But I also don’t think most of us would assume his ERA from 2008 was all that indicative of his skill level.

The same can be said about Cole Hamels. He probably was neither as good as he appeared in 2008 nor as bad as he appeared in 2009. Very similar cases.

But oh wait, Tom Verducci, yeah, forgot.

Harold Reynolds get glassy eyed. I mean for christ sakes he doesn’t know what OPS is

but there’s no actual analysis to it. He doesn’t state the average FIP before, and after, or the correlation between more innings and a higher FIP. Of course, Verducci is a lazy journalist, so he doesn’t do this. Also, the number of innings doesn’t really matter. It’s pitches that matter more, imho.

I would imagine that the biggest effects would be injuries.