Hairyducked Idiot

I'd be pretty surprised if he didn't.

I'm glad I'm not the only one. I thought it was some stupid Kyle-ism for something. There was a report this week that he's up to throwing live batting practice. I'd imagine that puts him on a pace to be pitching sometime this season, even though I have no idea if he'll be worth using or not.

Dropping the mic after one fluke-lucky WS win? Weak sauce.

His fastball velocity has been down 2.2 MPH from last year. A little bit of that might be early-season effect, but that's still noticeable. Add it all up, and that does not sound good.

I can see it all coming together. Garza's return pushes Villanueva to the pen. They decide to break Vizcaino in for 2014 in the pen. Baker and Lim come back and suddenly we're loaded with pitching even in the bullpen. We draft Appel or Gray and decide to get them some MLB bullpen time to end the season. We go 17-11 between now and June 16, sparking a spirited debate about whether we should be buyers or sellers. We're buyers and pick up Headley from San Diego. We steal the wild card from Cincinnati and enter the playoffs with: DeJesus/Castro/Rizzo/Headley/Soriano/Schierholtz/Valbuena/Castillo Samardzija/Garza/Jackson/Wood Gregg/Vizcaino/Villanueva/Feldman/Lim/Baker/No2Draftpick Samardzija strikes out 16 Braves in the WC game and we cruise from there through three mor short series. Epstein drops the mic, declaring "Theo out."

It may be a coincidence, but I loved how it immediately turned around right after there was that story that one of the coaches noticed something in his swing on video and they fixed it. I want our organization to be making players better like that. Outman is kind of an awesome name for a pitcher.

Crisis averted.

yeah his stats are mediocre after like a month and a half in his first crack at AA, at age 22. mineaswell just release him now. Yes. Pointing out that a top 10 organizational prospect is having a mediocre season means that I'm advocating for his release.

The free agent market is Garza, Josh Johnson, Phil Hughes and a bunch of dreck. The most interesting starting pitching prospect we have currently actually pitching above low A is Alberto Cabrera. Locking in too many starting pitchers is not a problem for us.

CxFIP

I'd rather just go by whole-season stat lines than try to parse hot streaks and such. Too much room to insert bias when you do that. For example, Villanueva had an OPS of .578 after 5/5, but is now up to .706. In the 29 PAs that rose his OPS 128 points: 21% K, 3% BB, 1 HR, .579 BABIP. Is he really performing any better? For his season totals, he doesn't have any blaring black holes like Baez's K rate. It's just a general pile of mediocrity, and mediocre AA stats is not a good sign for a hopeful MLB career.

Going by our NSBB top 11: Good: Soler, Vogelbach, Johnson Disappointing: Baez, Jackson, Villanueva Limited to no action: Almora, Vizcaino, Paniagua, Maples, Vitters That's a whole lot of out of action. Was going to do 10, but looking at the talent, there seems to be a logical tier divider after Johnson.

When we talked about this last year, I recall several people insisting that it was fruitless without including all the near-ready pitching we were going to get in a Garza deal. Yeah, there's a route to it getting better. Paniagua gets his visa and dominates Daytona before a brief taste of Tennessee. Alberto Cabrera keeps it up. Appel falls to us. We get three really good pitching prospects at the deadline. Suddenly it's all roses.

I'm complaining that we only have 3 starters locked in for a season that is two years away with very little to nothing in the minors behind them. That lack of depth sinks seasons. It's already primarily responsible for this season going downhill. You can't go into a season with just enough pitching and expect to come out of it OK, 2012 Reds notwithstanding. We added five useful MLB-quality pitchers as free agents last offseason. That's a huge haul, so much that "they added a ton of pitching" was the hallmark of our offseason. And it wasn't enough. We had two injuries (Garza, Fujikawa) plus a rehab setback to a guy who was expected to join the team after a month or so (Baker) and the whole house of cards collapsed. Suddenly you've got replacement-level pitchers like Loe and Bowden pitching high-leverage innings and the bullpen is almost entirely the reason we aren't talking about the wild-card fight. For 2014, we're facing the same conundrum. We lose Feldman, Garza, Baker, Gregg, Camp and Marmol to free agency (and who knows what we might lose to the trading deadline). Vizcaino and maybe the No. 2 draft picks are our only tenuous pitching projected to be supplied by the farm system. So we're going to need another 5-pitcher haul kind of offseason just to get to the point where we are now: Hoping for no injuries and precariously holding on. By 2016, I'd guess the first waves of the Hoyer/Epstein era (plus Maples) should be hitting the majors and we won't have this problem anymore. But until then, we are definitely on the pitching side in one of those farm-system gaps Epstein talked about in Boston.

OK, let's take a tour of the NL Central. Top to bottom by standings. Listing MLB pitchers locked up through at least 2015 and prospects who netted at least a B- from minorleagueball.com. Cardinals Locked up: Wainwright, Garcia, Miller, Lynn Prospects: Martinez (A-), Rosenthal (B+), Wacha (B+), Jenkins (B-) Reds Locked up: Latos, Leake, Cingriani Prospects: Stephenson (B+), Corcino (B+), Travieso (B-) Pirates Locked up: McDonald, Locke, Gomez Prospects: Cole (A), Taillon (A-), Heredia (B+), Kingham (B-), Holmes (B-) Brewers Locked up: Lohse, Estrada, Burgos, Peralta Prospects: Thornburg (B), Hellweg (B-), Jungmann (B-), Pena (B-) Cubs Locked up: Samardzija, Jackson, Wood Prospects: Vizcaino (B-), Johnson (B-), Underwood (B-), Maples (B-) If I had a better knowledge of the other systems, it'd be even more enlightening to trim out the guys who don't have a 2015 or sooner ETA. Because 3 of the Cubs' 4 are clearly much further away than that. The Cardinals are clearly ahead of everyone not just in this division but everywhere for all time. Freaking pixie dust. I'm pretty sure I'd take the Reds before us without too much reservation. I could go either way on the Brewers. The Pirates are walking an even tighter line than we are. The guys they have in the majors are pretty blech. The prospects are awesome and there's a lot of them, but that's a high-risk, high-reward situation. Which is probably appropriate for a small-market team, but I wouldn't want to trade places with them.

What you call tripping over myself to make a point, I simply call backing up my point with information. It was 2011, and it wasn't meant to be a direct comparison. Since we were imagining going forward two years, I thought it'd be interesting to go back two years. Getting back to the actual point of our short- and medium-term pitching outlook. Actually under contract for 2015, we have: Jeff Samardzija's age 30 season Edwin Jackson's age 31 season Travis Wood's age 28 season And that's backed by one of the the least inspiring bunch of upper-minors pitching prospects in baseball. We can hold it together with some skill, luck and money in the next two years. But if things go badly and we aren't a very good team by that time, I'd suspect lack of pitching to be the most likely culprit.

Garza has a massive track record of issues leading up to this point (and hasn't actually been signed to any sort of extension), there's been a ton of doubt about Wood's ability to stick around, and we could easily trade any of them. You could use almost any year. The 2009 Cubs had a 27-year-old Rich Harden. The 2007 Cubs had a 27-year-old Rich Hill and a 24-year-old Sean Marshall. The 2005 Cubs had a 24-year-old Mark Prior, a 28-year-old Kerry Wood and a 23-year-old Jerome Williams. Starting pitcher is just a high-attrition position. A significant percentage of guys will get hurt, get moved to the pen, or simply lose effectiveness. I'm a big fan of this chart (and the article it comes from): Attrition rate for starting pitchers with at least 150 innings in the previous season: http://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/images/20030226_01_silver.gif http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=1658 Even in their primes, starting pitchers have an attrition rate of about 1-in-7. You're going to lose 1-2 every two years on average.

Ordinary attrition would probably be expected to rob you of at least one of those locked-up four. Maybe you'll get luck and all four will still be useful in 2014 and 2015, but you might just as well be dealing with two of them falling off to injury or loss of skill. I mean, heck, heading into 2011 we had Zambrano (30), Randy Wells (28) and Cashner (24) all ready to go, and two years later none of them are here. That list of high-ceiling prospects just isn't particularly impressive to me. I don't think Vizcaino can stick as a starter, we have no clue what Paniagua can do, Johnson is in low-A and we don't actually have Appel or Gray. I don't think we should so easily assume that because Epstein/Hoyer did a fantastic job finding cheap, adequate pitching this offseason that they'll be able to do it every time. It reminds me of how we were going to keep making Rizzo-like acqusitions, except there still hasn't been one since. Maybe things will go well, sure. Maybe Vizcaino can handle 30 starts a year, we draft Appel and he's in the rotation immediately, nobody gets hurt and we're loaded. But the implosion potential seems pretty high to me.

It's a very specific power.

I think it has to be a real opinion. I can't force it. And I've never thought Alcantara was worth forming a strong opinion about. (wait, maybe that did it?)

After the draft, the controversy involving Baez may be whether he's in our top 5.

As always when I use my power, you're welcome guys.

Don't screw with Jeff Samardzija just because you can't bear to see Carlos Villanueva or Scott Feldman out of the rotation.

It's been good right now, but pitching is a high-attrition position and the lack of depth does not bode well. It's not an insurmountable problem, but imo it's the biggest one facing us in the next few years.

KyleJRM ‏@KyleJRM 1h @CarrieMuskat Vizcaino in Chicago a checkup or setback? Carrie Muskat ‏@CarrieMuskat 40m @KyleJRM Checkup