ogc thoughts
Because, other than the twice as many homers as most pitchers give up, he was a good pitcher in his first stint. Reduce the homers down to league norms, and his WHIP is okay to good, his strikeouts and walks were already good, which is why his SIERA and FIP+ were roughly around 4.00 ERA, which is what Lincecum did in his first season, Cain in his first full season. And not far from where Cobb is now.
There is no shame or worry in taking a step back. Cain, Dirty and MadBum all were held back a start when they were struggling with something and came back stronger. Lincecum had a really bad spell in August of his first season where they were considering skipping a start, and he won the Cy Young the next season. We’ll see if Kyle can do the adjustment too, like other good Giants SP have.
Given his elite ability to strike out hitters, and demonstrated ability to adjust to each level, and become elite, although he’s so young for the league at every step, he looks like he can do the same.
If he does, and I think he can, he would be a co-ace atop the rotation with Webb for the rest of the decade, at minimum.
Having co-aces would make our team a serious contender annually. And adding a third ace (for example, finding the next Gausman or Rodon or Cobb) would make us serious contenders to reach the World Series at some point.
We also have promising young pitchers in Whisenhunt, Birdsong, Winn, Beck, Black, and others, who can fill out the rest of the rotation competently, and Zaidi has been usually pretty good at targeting and finding a good pitcher to add to the rotation, to supplement where we are lacking.
We are not that far away, it all depends on Kyle Harrison fulfilling the promise that his minor league stats suggests (and what made him the top LH SP prospect on most rankings).
His start was a good one. 5.1 IP (limited to 75 pitches because he was sick with something), only 3 hits, 1 HR (more importantly), 2 strikeouts (not as good), 1 walk (still good).
ReplyDeleteGame score was 55, which is good. PQS was 3, which is okay.
As nondescript as this start was, he went up 0.2 bWAR with the start. If he has 30 starts like this, that's roughly 4.5 to 7.5 bWAR (assuming range of 0.15 bWAR to 0.25 bWAR for the start).
What people don't really realize about WAR is how much is contributed by the pitchers vs. the position players.
In 2022, Rodon and Webb averaged 0.17 and 0.15 bWAR per start (roughly 5.0 bWAR, which was roughly what Harrison produced in this start). Lincecum in his Cy Young years, about 0.25 bWAR, gives a good range between good and great pitching from a Giants history perspective.
In 2001-2, Bonds averaged roughly 0.08 bWAR, and that's close to the best all time, if not the best (close enough, not going to research). However, most of the rest of the line up is roughly 1.5-2.0 bWAR, average, if not less for the bottom of the order. That works out to 0.01 bWAR per game. So Bonds plus 7 average hitters work out to 0.15 bWAR, which is roughly what our good starting pitchers, like Rodon and Webb, did last season.
Now look at a regular lineup. If there's 4 good hitters (say, 3.24 bWAR each = 0.02 bWAR per game), plus two average (0.01 bWAR) and two replacement level (0.00 bWAR), that adds up to 0.10 bWAR per game, which is less contribution, on average, than a good pitcher.
And as we see in baseball, the variance for lineups is huge, 0 to 10, but for the better to good pitchers, they have a consistent generation of quality starts (as seen in my studies of PQS over the years), and that leads to more influence on each game, as well as less variance, game to game.
This demonstrates how much influence a pitcher actually has on any start, a much more outsized influence, the best are double and triple the influence Bonds had, and 5-10 times the influence that regular players have. And when the pitcher is one of the good pitchers, their quality starts are much more regular contributors to winning than the home runs for most hitters.
Girls (and fans) dig the long ball, but it's pitching that yields the wins and championships.