premium blogad:
blogads:
advertisement:
sitemeter:
|
|
|
March 4, 2008
Joe Smith: Dull Name, Funny Delivery
Spring training has finally sprung, with actual baseball games being broadcast on TV and everything. Hooray! Of course, Saturday’s game—the first I’ve gotten to see in 2008—featured somebody called Salomon Manriquez, a nasty collision in right, and Carlos Delgado going to New York for an MRI on his cranky hip, so it’s not all ponies and rainbows yet, either. Part of what can make spring training interesting, even when the games mean nothing, is the battle for roster spots. But this year the Mets lineup and starting rotation are pretty much set, assuming that Delgado’s hip doesn’t fall apart and El Duque’s bunion stops acting up. The one area where the Mets still have some decisions to make is the bullpen. Billy Wagner, Aaron Heilman, Pedro Feliciano, Jorge Sosa and Scott Schoeneweis are all locks to make it, which leaves just one spot. I think five guys have a reasonable chance at winning that last spot: Duaner Sanchez, Juan Padilla, Matt Wise, Steven Register and Joe Smith. This should be a familiar situation for Joe Smith, who forced his way onto the team last spring by giving up just two earned runs in 13 1/3 innings. His story was just too good—he’d only been in 27 games as a pro! Look at that crazy delivery—he’s like Chad Bradford, plus 10 miles per hour! I’ll admit that he quickly became a personal favorite; I’m a sucker for freak-show pitchers—knuckleballers, sidearmers and submariners. When the games started count he was awesome for two months. Then he got tired, or the league started to figure out that funky delivery, or something, and he stunk for two months before going back to the minors. He pitched eight games for the Zephyrs—frankly, not all that well—before getting called back up to help a desperately overworked bullpen, just in time to participate in one of the worst late-season collapses in history. Anyway, what happened to him? And should he be in the bullpen this year? Well, take a look at this:  Joe was lights-out for April and May, striking out more than 10 batters every nine innings. That is some quality pitching, friend. He also had decent control, maintaining an average walk rate.  Then, in June, the wheels just came off. His walks went through the roof at the same time that his strikeout rate plummeted. To top it all off, Joe got brutalized on BABIP. In April and May, he’d held batters to .250 and .240 batting averages on balls in play, respectively—around .300 is normal—but in June it leapt up to .483. Nearly half of the balls put into play against him fell in for hits. That’s ridiculous.  Joe’s bad luck didn’t get much better in July, as hits still fell in at a .379 rate. His walk rate came back down a bit, which was good, but it coincided with an even more severe drop in his strikeout rate. In June and July, Joe struck out fewer batters than he walked. That kind of rate is unsustainable, even when you aren’t getting hosed on balls in play. Anyway, Joe went to the minors for a while, then came back for the final two weeks of the season when the starters were incapable of pitching more than five innings per game and the bullpen arms were held together with silly putty and twine. That must have been fun. He pitched okay, I suppose, or at least no worse than anybody else. So the question is, what happened to him? Was his early dominance just a fluke? Did he get tired, or overexposed? And could he be an asset again this year? I don’t think Joe got fatigued. By the time he started having problems in June and July, Joe had thrown less than 35 innings in the majors. I realize that pitching in the big leagues is a lot harder than pitching in college or in the minors, but in 2006 Joe pitched almost 90 innings between Wright State, Brooklyn and Binghamton. I find it hard to believe that he would get worn down pitching fewer than half as many innings. For a while there, Joe just lost the strike zone. In June his walk rate skyrocketed, so I suspect Joe started to throw “get-me-over” pitches because he was desperate to throw strikes—nothing irritates managers more than a reliever who can’t throw a strike. This plan ended up backfiring, though, when all those balls put into play starting falling in for hits. When he came back in September, he was striking batters out at an excellent 14.3 K/9, so I don’t think that the league had figured out his funky delivery, either. At least, that’s what I think as far as you can extrapolate anything from five and two-thirds innings. And that brings us to the biggest problem with analyzing or projecting the performance of relievers: sample size. Do you know what the difference between Joe’s actual BABIP of .354 and the league average around .300 is? Seven hits. Take away seven singles from Joe’s record, and suddenly his so-so .757 OPS allowed becomes a sparkling .683. That’s like one hit a month. Boy, Crash was right. Relievers pitch so few innings that a little bit of bad luck can ruin their whole year. I hope that Joe makes the team this year. With Wagner, Feliciano, and Schoeneweis the bullpen is actually kind of heavy with lefties. I think it’d make sense to have a real ROOGY in the ‘pen, and Smith is one of the few real groundball pitchers the Mets have. If he’d had just average luck in 2007, Joe would have had a great year instead of merely an okay one. Finally, all else being equal, I’d rather have the weird delivery in the ‘pen—it’s just more fun. Special thanks to Baseball-Reference, easily my favorite time-waster/work-avoider. Well done, gentlemen. 11 Responses to “Joe Smith: Dull Name, Funny Delivery”Leave a ReplyYou must be logged in to post a comment. |
|
Great article. I always thought joe smith was pretty good, especially when they were trottin out mota every other day.
As much as liked Joe Smith last year with the arms we have in the pen and Smith having options I dont think he’ll make the team out of ST. It might come down to Wags,Heilman, Sanchez, Feliciano, SHow, Sosa, and Wise/Register. It might suit him better to start out in NO anyways for a bit.
Smith is the perfect example of why BABIP is not 100% luck. He got hit hard because he couldn’t locate his pitches. He was throwing 85 mph meatballs down the middle of the plate while he was behind in the count and he got crushed. That’s not bad luck, its bad pitching. Hopefully he’ll get his control back and be aable to contribute.
It actually leaves 2 since the Mets always carry 12 pitchers. And if Sanchez is healthy he gets one of them.
During yesterday’s game they talked about the rumors that the MEts are shopping Sosa and Show. They thought cutting payroll was part of the motivation. It would be unusual for a team to carry 7 releivers who were all making real money. Usually you mix in a couple of cheap guys to balance things. The announcers seemed to think that the Mets like Nelson Figueroa as the long man and want to keep Register, too. So if they moved Show and Sosa you could have: Wagner, Heilman, Sanchez, Feliciano, Wise, Register and Figueroa. Plus Smith, Padilla, Stokes, etc. as insurance.
Sosa for ROOGY!
he can do more than Smith and owns righties.
I am actually thinking that Omar is leaning towards Smith in AAA, and Register on the team. The recent rumors that he is looking to move The Show makes me think he wants his spot and I think the reason for that is to keep Register on the team so we don’t have to give him back.
Should be interesting to see
I really hope we dont move Sosa, we need him on the team as insurance. Move The Show and add Sanchez/Register/Wise to the pen. BTW, we only have one spot open because Wise will be in the pen this year.
I get the feeling Omar likes Figueroa as the long man/spot starter out of the pen.
One thing that I kept coming back to while reading this article is that I really don’t like all the emphasis from statheads on BABIP and its correlation to luck. While I’m sure luck has a significant aspect on the stat, it overlooks the fact that maybe Smith’s BABIP skyrocketed because his pitches were flat and right over the heart of the plate. What you don’t see with BABIP is the percentage of those hits that were line drives and deep flyballs. If a guy is getting pounded the way Smith was, it’s usually because hitters are making solid contact and spraying line drives all over the park, not because they’re getting lucky by having a bunch of dying quails and ground balls with eyes (to borrow two phrases from Crash in that great scene).
Having his LD% per month would help when looking at his BABIP i guess.
The general rule of thumb is that a pitcher’s expected BABIP is his LD% plus .120. I don’t have Joe’s LD% by month, but he only allowed 16.9% line drives for the season, which means we would expect a BABIP around .290, 65 points better than his actual .354. I think that’s due to bad luck, but of course with a rookie pitcher we don’t have any data to form a comparison.
Dude got rushed into the role and did really well for stretches.
If he stays healthy, he’ll eventually be a really solid bullpen arm.