No Such Thing as Too Much Pitching, Right?

I  also feel the Twins need to sign 1 top flight starter and a flyer or two.  Things may work out, but squadering the chance is not good.

We could sign every available FA pitcher and still not have too much pitching.

Damn, Erv - what the heck happened? Starting the season with the Ace of the staff missing the first MONTH? Not happy about this development.

The scary part of Santana's surgery is that he's not likely to be effective for a while after his return, maybe even the entire season.

Yesterday I saw in Puckett's Pond that Cobb's and Lynn's expected contracts were. Together it was less than Darvish, and it was for 4 years.  If it's true, I'd love to have both.

Here it is:  https://puckettspond.com/2018/02/05/minnesota-twins-if-not-yu-darvish-who/

Unfortunate news about Santana, but at least it's not an 80 game suspension of something where he'd be gone half the season. But as the poster before me noted, Erv may not be able to contribute effectively as soon as some of us would expect or hope for. So, what to do? Last year the Twins were able to find players like Gee and Colon to fill in temporarily, but that was mid-season. Do we continue to hope for someone like Darvish or start raiding the dumpster now?

. I agree with your sign two to major league AND a flyer on a minor league contract.   

I also agree, if we sign FA(s) and our prospects are awesome, they will find their way on the Twins. If we don't sign FA(s) and we push the prospects and they don't succeed we are burning options and running AAA pitchers our their every 2 to 3 days and wasting a season and making fans mad.

If we sign one or a combo of 1 of the 4 top free agents and they fail, most fans will be mad at the player but accept the team was trying to win.

If the plan ends up being Gibson #2 and lets see what Hughes, May and Duffey can do and hopefully a rookie steps up.

Well that is GROSS!

I realize that signing pitchers like Cashner and Jimenez aren't going to excite many --- or any --- people out there, but someone in that "lower level" tier of veteran free agents might be able to help solidify the rotation.

It may be the right move to sign Garcia for 1 year instead of locking up Cobb or Lynn for 4 years a piece. 

I wouldn't say no to that idea either. I'd still prefer Cobb from that bunch, but having Garcia for a full year wouldn't depress me.

I wish I knew how they project ERAs.  I've looked, but I haven't been able to find any Steamer projections for 2017.  It would be interesting to see what he projected for other pitchers in 2017.  I just think it's weird that he projects Cobb's and Lynn's ERAs up a point from 2017.  They're both another year past TJ surgery, and they both threw really well last year.

It looks like Duffy is the fall back option if he is stretching out to start. If we get Darvish, and we should get to skip the 5th starter a few times during the first month of the season. These 2 things will lessen the blow considerably.

With Hughes and May comming back from injury, we should have plenty of depth, once they are ready to go. We are only thin to start the season. This makes it more important to sign a high end pitcher. Also, too bad we didn't resign Colon to the minor league contract as that is the type of signing that is perfect for a few starts at the beginning of the season. If needed maybe we can find an emergency starter via waiver wire towards the end of spring. Lastly, I hope Mejia is ready to take a step forward and become a 6 inning pitcher....ok 5.33 inning pitcher this year...

I think it should be "you can never have too much Good pitching".

Getting a couple of lesser pitchers means the Twins can sign them to 1 year deals, that works perfectly in case a couple of these young guys pans out, if they don't then they will need to re-visit this next year also.

So they could've shut him down before the playoff game to have surgery, had a better chance of winning the game, AND got him back at the start of the '18 season.

Sounds like a couple of missed opportunities there.

FIP predicts future ERA better than ERA itself. Lynn and Cobb both had worse FIPs than ERAs last year (Lynn especially so).

I'm not sure it does when comparing Lynn and Darvish, here's why.  

Darvish had more SOs than Lynn, and that's a big factor in FIP, but these aren't: 

BABIP: Darvish .284, Lynn .248, and both teams had identical FPs. I think most of us would agree that some pitchers are easier to field, and I think this is a big enough difference to say it's a factor here.

Wild Pitches Darvish 12, Lynn 2

SB Darvish 20, Lynn 4. You could say that the catcher determines the SB numbers too, except for that Darvish accounted for 30% of all Rangers SBs (pre all star because Darvish went to the Dodgers) while Lynn accounted for 7% of St Louis'.

I think it would be more than fair to say FIP doesn't account for a lot of Darvish's shortcomings.  In this case I don't think FIP is a better indicator, and I'm not saying ERA is perfect, but I don't think the FIP difference is justified in this case.

You are diving in deep here, my friend.

 

Career BABIP: Darvish .292, Lynn .297.  League average has been between .293-.298 since 2012.

 

Lynn was a .244 BABIP pitcher last year in much the same way Danny Santana was a .405 BABIP hitter in his rookie season.

Well, the only way to figure out why something doesn't make sense is to do a little digging.The only defense I've ever seen you use is to say something doesn't apply (without much support, and in a flippant way) or just to say that X stat is better than Y stat because that's what Statcast/Steamer or Teams use to determine value. I'm pretty sure that MLB teams are much more sophisticated than Steamer is, but I realize there are probably some really dumb GMs out there.

I think that the Steamer gang would probably tell you that they aren't very good, relatively speaking, at accurately predicting an individual player's numbers. I've seen no comparisons of Steamer to the 2016 or 2017 projections that they made other than they were generally better than the other 7 or 8 prognosticators, however they don't give the method they used to rank them. For instance, what percentage of their WAR projections are within 25% of the actual WAR? 

A somewhat sideways BAPIP IS considered in FIP. FIP is an attempt to eliminate defensive players from the picture, but it does it by weighing things that may or may not do what it tries to do. To assume that every batted ball is hit in the same way is not really a great way to do it.I freely admit that it would be a very hard thing to do, but because it's hard to do, and SOs are very heavily weighted, it doesn't really reflect what makes a pitcher effective. It would be a better stat if it made an allowance for the deviation from the player's BAPIP to the league BAPIP, because that WOULD give pitchers credit for being more fieldable.

Your example of an average from career BAPIP doesn't work because it doesn't look like FIP considers more than the single past year. So, apples to apples, only the single year BAPIP should be used to compare Darvish and Lynn to the projected FIP that was being discussed My points were to show why FIP wasn't a good measure for these two pitchers in this current year. Once again I'd bet Steamer would agree, because so many of Darvish's singles turn into doubles, and doubles to triples because Darvish can't hold people on base and he throws a ton of wild pitches.  

One other thing, I think Santana did have a BAPIP that was pretty high as a rookie. How do you suppose his WAR from that year looked compared to the following year's projection?

Maybe you could take some time to give us your take on why Darvish's ERA was 15% higher than Lynn's. Dig in to the stats a bit. It might help us understand why Darvish is clearly more productive than Lynn.