Also, thanks for not using Clemens in your calculation. There's certainly been enough fo that.

I'm with you re: Razzle Dazzle Rasner.

With Randy's back barking, I would have chosen him and Karstens over Lidle (RIP) and Wright last postseason, and probably Villone, as well.

You've given a lot of careful thought as to how best to proceed with Hughes. I agree his ML innings should not be wasted in April and May, while there are other servicable options. Still, I CAN'T WAIT TO SEE HIM!

I also agree it's best not to expect too much from Pavano at this point. For now, his progress and trade value should be measured one pitch at a time.

I with 3 in that I'm not sure Igawa is a legit 4 or isn't also a significant downgrade from Andy Wang Moose.

Back to choking on gasoline.

Kei Igawa is possible long relief maybe starter but no one to plan a season around. Pencil in as pleasant surprise we hope, could be gone by May. Ditto Pavano but wait to see how the big guy deals with the pressure. Does he really want to play? I say yes big time, but I seem to remember being wrong before. All right. I seem to remember being wrong three or four times before...Pavano comes up big and we have a season to remember.

So Wang, Moose and a fragile Pettite; make that a fragile Moose, too. Or do I mean a fragile Wang -- no guarantee he stays healthy through the whole season. Plenty of guys to throw in there for 2 or 3 missed starts so fragility is part of the game these days. But I really only count three starters so far....and I've written "fragile" too many times. At least I don't see Julian Tavarez' name anywhere.

Looking forward to seeing Hughes as well but not expecting as much as all the hype. Talk to me in 2008 and I will give you expectations.

You know what that means...A Shoe Drops In St. Paul... a new children's baseball book by....

Oh the suspense is killing me.

Johan my Johan...

Woo hoo.
Good analysis, Cliff.
Re: Pavano, if he's pitching well (ha ha ha ha ha, sorry, it's just too funny), then keep him. You can never have enough pitching, and Moose will spend a stint on the DL, so will Andy, and possibly the WormKiller too.

Ideal for me would be Igawa to the pen to be the lefty set-up (or the villone role) after Hughes come up full time in slot 5, and an unnamed texan to take the #4 slot as pavano's bum is re-bruised by the doorknob on his way out (to SEA for sexon? ;) haha)

Start him out in the pen for at least April and May, maybe June too, then into the rotation.

but... can we let up on comeback carl? a little? after all, he tossed the ball around yesterday and seemed to be alright.

you can see photographic evidence here (along with what i'm sure will be a slew of witty cutting remarks) here:

http://tinyurl.com/368a85

didn't we learn from last season that bombarding a player on your own team with negativity doesn't help? (and that was a player with exponentially more talent.)

i'm rooting for the guy. if he does well, it only helps the team.

can't we all just get along?

29 GS, 180 IP, 4.42 ERA, 6.1 K/9, 2.8 BB/9, 12-8

Igawa projects to be almost exactly league average in every way, which is just fine for a fourth starter.

Last year the Yankees' fourth starter was Jaret Wright. Here's his 2006 line:

27 GS, 140 1/3 IP, 4.49 ERA, 5.4 K/9, 3.7 BB/9, 11-7

Igawa should be an improvement.

I agree we shouldn't be penciling in Igawa over anyone else. The reports on him is that he throws a nice change, but relies heavily on a 90-mile-an-hour fastball. When healthy, we know Pavano can get major-league hitters out consistently. We don't know that about Igawa.

I think if it's June and Pavano is pitching effectively, and Igawa is merely average, you'll see Igawa moved to the 'pen for the rest of the year and Hughes made the fifth starter. Hopefully Clemens won't enter the picture (I hope he goes back to Houston).

I'm not saying there's anything different about NY (though there might be), just that pitching is very unpredictable. Plus, that's before trying to project Japanese numbers into MLB.

As far as I'm concerned, Igawa and Dice-K are huge questions marks. And while the latter will have the whole season to prove himself, Igawa may be out of the rotation in May/June if Mr. Green Tea doesn't like the karma. Pavano by contrast will get chance after chance to prove himself for Torre (assuming health).

I agree that Igawa and Matsuzaka are big question marks, but I expect both to do well. Japanese pitchers have a pretty solid track record, particularly in their first season in the majors.

What I don't agree with is that Pavano will get repeated chances from Torre. I think he's on the shortest of short leashes with the entire organization. The way I see it, the only reason he's being given any chance at all is so that he can develop enough value to allow Cashman to trade him.

28 GS, 175 1/3 IP, 4.08 ERA, 6.6 K/9, 2.3 BB/9, 11-9

And his actual 2006 line:

32 GS, 197 1/3 IP, 3.51 ERA, 7.8 K/9, 1.6 BB/9, 15-7

Pitching might be like weather. You know good and bad when you see it. But no one knows what tomorrow or next month or next year will bring apart from the most general trends.

I'd probably feel much better about a projection system if they started showing their error rates and for particular players and years. Unless they do? Like Mussina last year - what was the projection? Or Josh Becket? To take two extreme examples.

True on the first year for Japanese pitchers. Still, the only thing that will convince me is their performance.

We'll have to see on Pavano. But I'm still not sure, given the "veteran" proclivities of the manager, how Meat doesn't get more time than Igawa to prove himself.

Let's use that variance (as I have no idea what the actual variance of PECOTA is) and look again at Igawa:

Good Iggy:
33 GS, 200 IP, 3.92 ERA, 7.3 K/9, 2.1 BB/9, 16-6

Fat Toad Iggy:
25 GS, 160 IP, 4.92 ERA, 4.9 K/9, 3.5 BB/9, 8-10

Of course, if we consider the difference between predicted and actual 2006 Moose as somehow representative of the projection system, then Igawa is just as likely to be very good as very bad. So really what have we learned? What's the point of paying their subscription fee if that's the best they can tell us?

Mussina I posted above. Here's Beckett:

PECOTA 2006:

29 GS, 184 1/3 IP, 3.87 ERA, 7.3 K/9, 2.7 BB/9, 12-8

Actual 2006:

33 GS, 204 2/3 IP, 5.01 ERA, 6.95 K/9, 3.25 BB/9, 16-11

Finally, Torre also has major trust issues, especially when it comes to pitchers, and he's been give every reason not to trust Pavano.

I believe this was how the O's broke in their great rotation of the 70s, Palmer et al.

Again, why waste some of his admittedly limited innings in the minors. He's already dominated AA. Great pitchers traditionally, I've read, don't spend much time in AAA. For Hughes it ought to be nada.

He's still a big question mark for them. Funny when I was terrified of what he'd do over there.

Okay, I'm done.

"cutting himself shaving"...why can I already see this image in my head? Mr. Glass's got a long long way to go.

That's how Weaver broke in guys like Flanagan, McGregor, and Dennis Martinez - but not Palmer. He was one of the "Baby Birds" of an earlier, pre-Weaver era, a crop of very young pitchers who were thrown into the rotation and promptly blew out their arms. Palmer and Dave McNally recovered; Wally bunker and Steve Barber never really did.

1 Thanks. I had seen elsewhere that Rasner was out of options, but I'll go with your word. I've also seen that Sean Henn is out of options. If so, he has an inside track on a bullpen spot.

27 Actually the move from the pitching-friendly Dolphins Stadium in the NL to the homer-happy Fenway in the DH league suggested an increase in home run rate, so I wouldn't say there was no way that could have been predicted. PECOTA clearly thought highly of Beckett and thus limited that homer rate increase to an '06 projection of 0.9 HR/9. A more pessimistic projection could easiliy have pushed that past 1.0, though I will admit that his actual 1.58 HR/9 was pretty surprising.

"If Pavano gets a splinter, the Yankees will need someone other than Hughes to take those turns."

I also think we are already having expectations of Hughes. Hopefully we won't NEED to bring him up.

We are short on SP right now. Lots of questions. I don't think we can afford to get rid of ANY league average pitchers, ie: possibly Meat unless:

...One of the kids is consistantly better then Meat and can hold up for the PS
...We get a mid-season guy, Clemens or whoever.

Since 'you can never have too much pitching' and pitching is the reason we keep losing in the PS, I say Meat stays with us.

Rather I'd like to see the weighted mean with some standard error term (assuming chance variation) around each factor. For instance, it's alot different to give the Igawa weighted mean versus the very real range of 22 (if in fact that's his variance by chance alone). Those are two entirely different pitchers and he could wind up as either one based on nothing more than random variation from what we know right now (or correct me please if PECOTA gives those terms).

It's in that sense that I just can't buy too heavily into projections for pitchers.

32 And that's the thing about about Beckett's HR/9. A .9 or 1.0 would have been probably within two standard deviations from his mean - not likely but not that surprising either. The actual number was so far beyond any possible projection, it just makes me wonder how valuable they can be overall for pitchers. Even Moose too. Where did last year fall for him? his 80th or 90th percentile?

My response: That's a prediction!?

What's the point of pretending 13 that the predictions are accurate if they're not. All along I've drawn the line at pitchers.

You present Igawa's weighted mean in 13 as evidence that he "should be better" than Wright. You're saying he's a league average pitcher. I'm saying he might be - but there's a huge variance on his 2007 outcome.

If you're going to go that far, then you've already drunk the Kool-Aid (with your subscription fee) far more than I'm comfortable with.

All I want is an error estimate and depending on how good it is I might think I can learn something from BP about pitchers. The evidence for Moose is less than compelling (where did it fall in their 2006 distribution for him?) because that same variance results in two vastly different Igawas and would for most pitchers.

The Beckett projection was much better, but there's no dancing around the big miss in the HR rate. And so any projection for him this year is just a wild guess as to whether he rebounds from that even if everything else stays the same. Do I really need PECOTA for that bit of logic?

The range of predictions for 2006 are no longer available, the weighted means for both Mussina and Becket I got from Baseball Prospectus 2006. Odd that you think the Beckett prediction is better, though.

Look, all I was trying to say when I brought up the Igawa PECOTA was that I think he'll be a perfectly fine fourth starter and look, here's an advanced analysis system--the most accurate there is in fact--that supports my point of view. I don't believe that the numbers in 13 are what Igawa will actually do in 2007, but I think they are a fair baseline. Certainly he could be better or worse. The point is there's room for him to be worse and still match Wright's production in the fourth spot last year and if he's better, well hot damn! Either way I think that going into the season expecting him to be anything less than the fourth starter is self-defeating. The guy was a strikeout champ and winner of the Japanese equivalent of the Cy Young in Japan and he's here to be a productive part of the rotation. Until he proves he can't do that, I see no reason not to assume he will.

In scientific reports, when someone shows a graph it's almost always necessary to show the variability, confidence interval, range, standard deviation, etc to fill out the numbers and to give a sense of how they can move around.

The weighted mean doesn't do that.

Me, I'd like to see:

Igawa 2007

29 (+/- 5) GS, 180 (+/- 20) IP, 4.42 (+/- .50) ERA, 6.1 (+/- 1.2) K/9, 2.8 (+/- .7)BB/9, 12-8 (+/- 4 W 2 L).

It doesn't look pretty but it conveys so much more information. And for Igawa it should be no surprise that his variability is much higher than for a Moose or Beckett because of the Japan-US translation of rates.

Indeed, the Becket and Mussina examples are illustrative.

The error in the Moose projection varied by

4 GS, 22 IP, 0.57 ERA, 1.2 K/9, 0.7 BB/9, 4 W and 2 L

By contrast, the error in the Beckett projection was:

4 GS, 20 IP, 1.24 ERA, 0.35 K/9, 0.55 BB/9, 4W 3L

So it's starting to look like the error for pitchers with a few MLB seasons:

GS is +/- 4, +/- 20 IP, ERA and W-L we know are a function of other things (BABIP, HR/9, BB/9, K/9).

And the rest looks like the particulars of the individual pitchers. Moose K'ed more guys but was also hunting for them (increased BB rate). I'll bet he also did better than his projected HR/9 (actual = 1.00)

I think they did better on Beckett because the error on BB/9 and especially K/9 was so much less. They just really missed on the HR/9 and that's ultimately what killed him (and their projection). If they had gotten that right then the rest (ERA and W-L) would have followed very naturally, I think. With Moose they missed wide on everything.

See, it's not that I think PECOTA is bad. I just they they could do so much better with typical error rates and leave it there. Percentiles become pretty meaningless precisely because of the variability. Instead they should stick to the mean and how it's likely to vary. But the two should be inseparable, esp. for pitchers.

Sorry for getting all geeked up.