Breaking Balls

Now, the Phillies are not usually my rant topic of choice, but I feel somehow invested in this year's tragicomic run. The Phillies are a fascinating team. They have one of the most exciting young infield trios in the majors, including great talents at premium positions up the middle. Year after year, however, they give it back in the form of mediocrity at the hot corner. They committed to rebuilding last year in one of the most egregious salary/talent dumps in recent memory, only to finish a mere 3 games back from the wild card in an exciting close to the season. GM Pat Gillick then used the offseason to prove that he missed the point, spending the Abreu blood money on Wes Helms, Adam Eaton, Rod Barajas. Trading for Freddy Garcia was the only move that seemed plausibly likely to help the team, and that blew up with injuries to the starter and a break-out year for Gio Gonzalez in the White Sox system.

Pretty frustrating. Even if Pat Gillick was the man who set 'em up, however, it was Charlie Manuel who stepped in and knocked 'em down. I care because I attended the decisive game of the Phillies' season. While most teams appear to make or break their chances with September heroics or streaky summer performances against division rivals, the Phillies crystallized their season on April 13. The Phillies went into April with a pair of young aces and a good number three in front of the requisite bad and the ugly (er, old) at the back of the rotation. After Brett Myers' loss on April 13th, however, Manuel elected to banish him to the bullpen for the rest of the season. As a result, they are coming down the stretch with an ace, an overachieving rookie, and four guys who can only be ≤ 5. Can any combination of managerial decisions this year have cost a team more wins than Manuel's desperation move two weeks into the season? I can't answer that here, but I can look at how ridiculous that decision actually was.

Over the previous two seasons, Brett Myers began to earn the much coveted "Young Ace" logo. He broke out with a shiny new cut fastball and 208K in his 2005 campaign as a 24 year-old, and he barely regressed in his follow-up season. (His ERA suffered a bit due to an elevated BABIP, but his peripherals were steady). This year, his age 26 season, he lost his rotation spot after three starts. Here are his lines for those games:

IP  H  R  ER BB SO HR
7.2 4  3  3  2  9  2
4.1 8  6  6  2  6  1
3.1 3  7  7  5  4  2 (2 ER allowed to score as inherited runners)

So we have one excellent start (with a couple mistakes) and two shellings. Some of his pitches must have been moving, as he struck out 19 over 15.1 IP. However, he was getting hit hard, with 12 of 15 hits allowed going for extra bases. Myers is a guy who has a history of getting stung for the long ball. If I had time and resources, I would look at the pitch outcome data to see how he serves them up. Since I don't, I will look at BP 2003:

"What he needs to develop now is consistency and the ability to adjust when he doesn’t have his best stuff. At this point when he struggles he tends to react by trying to throw even harder, usually with poor results."

Even though that was four years ago, it seems consistent with Myers' personality and some of his feast or famine numbers. Throwing harder (and straighter) with frustration will make for some high K numbers (especially in the NL, where there are more batters who can't catch up), but also for some long fly balls. This Myersian problem hasn't stopped him from regaining his form after bad starts in previous years. This year, however, he wasn't afforded the opportunity.

Don't get me wrong, the Phillies needed a bullpen boost. However, it should be common sense that a team wants it's best pitchers to throw the most innings. A guy like Myers, who has proven success in the rotation, should be kept there to iron things out. Instead, he was moved to an unfamiliar role, where he predictably landed on the disabled list after appearing in 18 out of 32 games. That is not just bad management; it's reckless endangerment.

Let's talk about the alternative. Perhaps Manuel feels that there is something aesthetically unacceptable about giving up more runs than IP in a start. Myers did that twice in a row this year before getting the heave ho. Of course, he did it in two consecutive starts in June of last year as well, and in his next start he trotted out and struck out 11 Yankees. In June of 2005, his most dominant campaign, he gave up 13 ER over two starts and 7.1 IP, but he bounced back to beat the Braves handily five days later and return to form. Disaster starts happen. They happen to good pitchers, like Brett Myers.

Charlie Manuel should know that they also happen to bad pitchers. In fact, they happen with increased frequency to the worst pitcher in the majors this year, Adam Eaton. The flip side of the decision to remove Brett Myers from the rotation is the fact that Adam Eaton is second on the team in starts (26) and has an ERA of 6.28 and peripherals to show for it (in the National League, no less). That's good for dead last among MLB pitchers qualifying for the Cy Young Award. In other words, he is by far the worst pitcher to retain a rotation spot on any team this year. If Myers' consecutive disasters weighed so heavily, why has Manuel turned a blind eye to Eaton's total of 8 such starts? That total is only outstripped by Seattle's Master of Disaster, Jeff Weaver (9). (Everybody knows that Weaver was secretly assigned the task of skewing the Mariners' run differential to discredit the stathead community.)

As I write, the Phillies are once again closing in on a near miss in the NL wildcard race. Some of the untallied wins can surely be chalked up to the situation at 3B. Others can be attributed to the subtleties of catcher selection discussed elsewhere in this space. The lion's share of the blame, however, must be hung on Charlie Manuel's office door, where misguided creativity bumped the team's co-best starter into the bullpen, and some perverted sense of staying the course kept him there. A couple of days ago, Manuel announced that the team will skip Eaton's next turn, the first time it has done so all year for a non injury-related reason. Apparently the hopeless skipper has picked up a taste for the cruel irony of the ubiquitous EAGLES chants that fill his suffering team's stadium.

posted by Caleb at 12:01 PM
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