agree with giving some starts off, but at the same time, you never know, maybe with the starts off they go into a funk, or injure themselves because of too much time off, I like this signing because of the peripherals, if smoltz cant start we have a set up man, if he can start, wellemeyer is banished for at least this year. its a win-win with a cheap contract.

my problem is i grew up hating this guy because of the 96 NLCS playoffs against the braves. damn its going to be hard to root for this guy

Saying “decline in velocity” is specious. Obviously, he would have been expected to lose velocity. He’s 42 and coming off of a major surgery!!! The question, is whether or not his velocity is still good, and it is about 91-92 MPH, which is fine for a starter. Furthermore, the fact that his swinging strike rate and contact rate are both better than average, leads me to believe that his stuff is still good.

As to his control, I actually took a quick look at it. Here is his strike zone plot this year:

And here is the average major leaguer’s:

While he is throwing more pitches over the middle of the plate in comparison to the average starter, he is also elevating fewer pitches.

everyone’s talking about how we only have to use the 5th starter 6 more times this year. if this experiment with Smoltz does work out and/or we extend our lead in the division, then we may want to rethink that. i’d prefer not to stress out the arms of Carp/Waino/Lohse, all of whom have had worrying injuries in the past year, any more than necessary.

To some extent that’s fair comment, but I’m not sure I agree – the whole “5th starter only needs to pitch 6 or 7 more times” meme is based on off-days, not on pitching the frontline guys on shorter rest. There’s a pretty good argument (and I think there may even be some statistical back-up, though I couldn’t find any with a cursory glance at the internets) that pitchers who are used to pitching on 4-days rest, pitch better on 4-days rest. Missing a turn in the rotation may not be a bad thing, but artificially pitching Carp/Waino on 5-days rest (with the other 4 starters plus an off-day in between) probably isn’t going to do much to alleviate their workload, and could potentially put them a little out-of-sync with the extra rest.

In summary – pitching guys on 2 or 3 days rest like the Brewers did with CC last year (which basically beat all the life out of him for the playoffs, leading to a rusty start in the one post-season game he started) is bad, but I think keeping your best guys on a solid schedule with 4-day rests is probably optimal. I dunno if guys like Carp/Waino will want to be rested, either.

a couple mph off the fastball but its still at 91. that combined with an effective slider is a pretty good one two. he can get the righties out.

if he can get his splitter working against lefties, loshe might get some competition for the fourth spot.

what i love about this deal though is that it doesnt have to be best case scenario to work out. worst case scenario still fills a huge hole (our biggest) on this team.

look at his k:bb ratio its like 3.5 and batters are just missing a ton of his pitches. his babip is up over 400 which is just ridiculous, and his hr fly ball ratio is over 14%. also ridiculous.

i hope our memories aren’t so short as to have already forgotten that boston gives up on people a little too quickly….

not to blame boston though they have to. they need power pitching not a guy who’s going to go out and give up 4 runs in six innings every five days. whereas that’s an improvement for us. and once october comes around, he slots into the pen as a shut down set up man to franklin.

this is the missing piece.

that for every day that Smoltz was on the roster, they had to pay him more than just his base. By cutting him, I think they saved like 2.5 million. I know its not a huge sum, but its worth noting. Also, they had other options to take his spot for far less than that 2.5 mi.

but it’s also fair to say that they had better options. They’ve got a stack of young, solid arms waiting for a crack at the rotation, and they have 3 or 4 good-to-excellent pitchers in the pen. If Smoltz couldn’t hold down the fifth starter role, they’ve got guys like Junichi Tazawa (good, young import, tearing up the minors) and Clay Buccholz to come in behind the usual Lester/Beckett/Penny/Wakefield/Dice-K group. Even though they’ve had a couple of injuries, you could argue that the bulk of their options is considerably better than the Welly/Boggs/Thompson/Walters group.

They asked him to move to the pen in AAA to let Tazawa up, and he said (basically) no – they’re left with the option of keeping him on the 25-man roster as a spare part, using him as a long man (presumably creating some friction as he said he didn’t really want to work from the pen), or displacing one of their very good late-inning relievers. Honestly, look at their pen – they have FOUR guys with sub-4 FIPs who are all healthy, plus Takashi Saito, plus Ramon Ramirez (two relatively big-name guys who were excellent last year). Smoltz is, I guess, the odd man out. They took the risk of waiving him to try and get something in return.

the work of the BoSox front office or “the tools they use to assess performance.” I said that the 40 innings he’s pitched this year aren’t a sufficient sample size to assume that he’s finished or that’s the way he’s going to pitch going forward.

would be interesting. The St. Louis Cardinals’ Memorial Home for Old Closers.

So maybe he’d be interested?

how many times smoltz has shaken off varitek/whoever else caught him, his unlucky streak could be attributed to lausy pitch selection and the catcher not thinking ahead of the batter

Really fucking good stuff in the comments section. Are you working on a broader piece?

Seriously appreciate the work.

“I found the problem and I’ve fixed it!” That’s gotta add confidence, right?

As far as actually taking care of the problem, I’ll believe it when I see it. I’m honestly excited about the move, and I really hope he does well – I think he’ll certainly be better than he was in Boston and probably better than Welly. But I’m skeptical about these “fixed it!” claims. Remember Pineiro in 2007? “Oh, I was tipping my pitches! Now I’ll dominate!” (I admit its weird to use this example, because he has been great this year. But remember how awful he was in 2008, right after he “fixed” his pitch tipping?)

I guess the whole Mark Mulder saga really hardened my cynical tendencies. (Changed my arm slot! – I feel great! – Just need to stretch out my arm a little more! – Fixed the shoulder (again)!)

1. It was a mechanical problem that he has now fixed.

2. He is still missing bats, but his location is poor.

3. Lefties are lighting him up.

I think it is a grand experiement. I’m just not getting my hopes up because I think we have seen the last of a productive John Smoltz. I really do hope I’m wrong.

Also, there is a decent chance that he wasn’t getting shelled, but just unlucky, as his xFIP indicates.

Anyway, the point that Dave was making was that 40 innings is way to small of a sample to make any definitive conclusions from his stats so far. So it seems like this is a situation where scouting (or pitch f/x) is important.

St. Louis shortstop Brendan Ryan looks like a rapist.

true, but unnecessary

The picture is hilarious, Albert looks like the most magnanimous purse snatcher ever. He’s smiling like he knows he’s doing that old woman a favor, and he’s just happy to help out his fellow human being. But the “Pooholes” cliche is so very tired.

kicking it off

But shouldn’t it read “The adventure in left field continues”?

Or were you already working on it and it just happened to fit what I was talking about?

But i received an Indiana Jones lego set as a gift from my boss today. Well played, sir.

I saw no great gain in GRIT. Well, Albert too, but his GRIT always goes up.

Pujols is the grittiest player I’ve ever watched play. The guy is a grinder who does all the little things and possesses all of those “intangibles” (I think, but don’t know, because they’re intangible). If he weren’t the greatest hitter in a generation, his grit would get far more play.

After they did the Tigers-in-Three thing, I don’t give them much credence.

It’s a wonderful site.

So, his HR rate would be a bit different if he had merely been lucky? It would go from the very high 1.8 to the somewhat high 1.125? That’s very interesting to me, but who is to say that wearing the birds on the bat will change his luck…

;=8)

go rangers go!

They don’t even make it to the playoffs. Let the Rays or the Rangers take the Wild Card

The team won’t dfa him with only 10 days to go until rosters expand. There are two spots open on the 40 man so there is no immediate space need either. Leave him on the dl give him a rehab start in memphis and move him back on the rotation for mop up duty after Sept 1st.