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Wolverton - Wavin' Wendells - Outs on Base (March 12, 2004)
Discussion ThreadPosted 9:43 p.m.,
March 21, 2004
(#50) -
MGL (the real one)
That freaked me out! I didn't remember posting that! I've done that before, BTW. Anyway, if a manager has 2 good relievers and insists on giving high leverage work to an inferior third one, that is just plain crazy (grounds for immediate firing in MGL's book).
One must be very careful how they characterize the quality of a reliever. You cannot characterize them as good or bad by their ERA after the fact. Your best releiver is one who has the best projected ERA at any point in time, certainly not the one who has the best actual ERA at any point in the season. That is the biggest mistakes that managers make - going with the "hot hand" in their bullpen. If you want to talk about whether ARI used their bullpen optimally or not, first you have to establish who were their best releivers going into the season (projections, projections, projections) and then updated as the season progressed. Any time we evaluate decisions based on quality of players we MUST always think in terms of the projections for the players in question at the time the deicision is made. All too often many otherwise intelligent analysts on Primer make that mistake. They either use short-terms stats, after the fact stats, or cherry pick some stats to support an opinion about a particular decision. If you are going to talk about a decision (whether it was a good or bad one) from a sabermetric perspective, you must use a sabermetric analysis at the time the deicison is made as the context for the analysis. A perfect example of that is the OAK signing of Dye, who has turned out to be bust (and injured) of course. Hardly anyone ever discusses "at the time of the signing, what was Dye's short and long term projection (VORP or whatever)?"
AED, you just did it yourself, assuming you are quoting their respective 2003 ERA's (although you did qualify that with the BIP thing).
BTW, Oropesa's ERC last year was 3.85, which is about average for a short reliever. He did suck though prior to that. He would not have even been pitching in my bullpen in 2003 let alone in high leveage situations. Even Mantei who was once good and had a real good ERC last year, sucked in 2001 and 2002 (was hurt I guess). Funny, Valverde and Villareal also sucked in 2001 and 2002 and they too had terrific 2003's. It's a good thing I wasn't in charge of the ARI bullpen last year. I wouldn't have had any of those guys (except maybe a healthy Mantei) pitching for me. Anyone know what the 2003 Pecota projections were for those 4 pitchers?