Do the Twins need an Ace?

The Conventional Wisdom right now among the chattering classes is that the Twins absolutely need to get an "Ace" pitcher if they want to compete in the playoffs this year, or even make it to the playoffs for that matter. I heard this very thing on MPR on Tuesday morning from Howard Sinker, the Star Tribune's Twins blogger. There are many things about what Howard Sinker had to say in that interview that I fundamentally disagree with but the most egregious, in my view, is his complete lack of respect for the performance of one of the Twins starting pitchers. From the interview:

Four fifths of the starting rotation, really everybody except for Carl Pavano, has flown off badly in one way or another.

This was said in the context of discussing who was under performing on the team. What "flown off badly" means I'm not exactly sure, but to completely disregard the first half performance of Francisco Liriano would fall into the same category of "flying off badly."

Here's the stats of the entire Twins staff, the standard baseball stats everyone is familiar with and WHIP, walks + hits per inning, which is starting to be published in newspapers more often these days (all stats used in this post were as of the All Star break).



So right off the bat we can see that Howard Sinker doesn't know what he's talking about. Clearly Nick Blackburn has been terrible, but Scott Baker and Kevin Slowey have both been decent enough, they are on pace for about 200 innings of sub 5 ERA baseball. While that is not world beating, it is certainly acceptable from your third and forth starters. What you can see even looking at the standard stats though is that Francisco Liriano is at least the Twins second best pitcher and other than the fact that he has a losing record, is doing at least as well as Pavano. And about that losing record, in case there's anyone who thinks wins actually mean anything, here's a graphic you should see.



Guess who got credit for the win in that game and I'll give you a hint, it wasn't Liriano. There are many, many discussions on the internet about the uselessness of the win stat in evaluating pitching performance, but leave it to the traditional sports media to completely ignore all of the work going on in the field of baseball stats these days and instead rely on outdated methods of judging player performance.

Here is a comparison of Carl Pavano and Francisco Liriano using some different metrics.



If you don't know what some of these stats are, that's fine, I'll explain them or at least attempt to. The first two are strikeouts (K/9) and walks (BB/9) per nine innings and the one after that is strikeout to walk ratio (K/BB). What we see here is that Liriano is striking out significantly more batters than Pavano and Pavano is walking fewer batters than Liriano. This gives them essentially the same K/BB ratio; it's getting into the next series of numbers where the two pitchers start to really diverge, before we get can do that however, we must define a few concepts.

The most import one to understand is a concept called "regression to the mean". Simply stated this means that if a player has been in the big leagues for eight years and is a career .280 hitter, but this year he's hitting .330, we can expect that his batting average going forward will regress to his mean of .280. This is not a baseball concept; it is a statistics concept that has applications in predicting future performance, in this case for baseball players.

Also important to understand are a few of these advanced stats and what they mean; first BABIP, batting average on balls in play (from Baseball Prospectus):

Based on the research of Voros McCracken and others, BABIP is mostly a function of a pitcher's defense and luck, rather than persistent skill. Thus, pitchers with abnormally high or low BABIPs are good bets to see their performances regress to the mean. A typical BABIP is about .300.

This is an import concept that sometimes people have a hard time accepting, but what it means is that once a batter makes contact with a pitch there is nothing the pitcher can do about it anymore, it is out of the pitchers control weather that batted ball will fall for a hit or not. In other words there's nothing pitchers can do to prevent hits other than not letting batters make contact.

Another important stat that's related to this concept is FIP, fielding-independent pitching, a metric that forecasts a pitchers ERA based on their peripheral stats (from Hardball Times):

Fielding Independent Pitching, a measure of all those things for which a pitcher is specifically responsible. The formula is (HR*13+(BB+HBP-IBB)*3-K*2)/IP, plus a league-specific factor (usually around 3.2) to round out the number to an equivalent ERA number. FIP helps you understand how well a pitcher pitched, regardless of how well his fielders fielded.

What we can see by looking at the BABIP's of the two pitchers is that up to now Liriano has been exceptionally unlucky on batted balls while Carl Pavano has been exceptionally lucky. As the season goes on we can expect these numbers to regress to the mean of .300, meaning Liriano should give up fewer hits and Pavano should give up more.

This is supported by FIP, where Liriano is sporting a league best 2.18. That's league best as in all of Major League Baseball best; number two is Josh Johnson at 2.31 and number three is Cliff Lee at 2.58. That's Cliff "we absolutely must trade for him if we want to win a championship" Lee. You can also see by looking at the difference between his ERA and FIP (E-F) just how well he's doing compared to what his ERA says and just how badly his ERA is under valuing his performance to date.

The last metric is WAR, Wins Above Replacement, which is an estimation of how many wins a player adds versus a replacement level player, usually defined as an average AAA player. In that metric Francisco Liriano is currently third in all of baseball, behind only Roy Halladay at 4.6 and Josh Johnson at 4.4, again ahead of Cliff Lee who's at 3.8. If you also consider that the Twins are paying Liriano less money than Pavano, or any of those other pitchers for that matter, there is absolutely no question who the most valuable pitcher on the Twins staff has been so far this year and just how badly off the mark Howard Sinker is.

Liriano v Jimenez

Today at 1:10pm central time Francisco Liriano will face off against Ubaldo Jimenez in a matchup of two of the best young pitchers in baseball. Jimenez is having a Cy Young type season, 12-1 so far with a sparkling 1.16 ERA. Liriano isn't doing too shabby himself, going 6-3 with a 2.90 ERA. But this is the same type of comparison you will get before the game today by the studio announcers looking to "break down" the match-up, let's delve a little deeper and see what's really going on with these two pitchers. First we'll look at the two pitchers peripheral numbers to see how they compare.

Except for total innings pitched, Liriano has been significantly better this year, striking out almost two more batters per 9 innings, walking close to one less and allowing slightly fewer homeruns (although you could argue Liriano has been a bit lucky in regard to homeruns allowed). So what has allowed Jimenez to put up such ridiculous numbers so far this year?

Jimenez is playing way above his head in terms of BABIP and LOB%, his career BABIP is .282 and for LOB% it's 73.8, so we can expect some serious regression of those two numbers going forward. Liriano meanwhile sports a career .316 BABIP and 71.6 LOB%, so any regression he experiences will likely go in his favor.

So what about that 1.16 ERA that Jimenez has right now? That's pretty good right?

Not according to FIP. Don't get me wrong, a 2.93 FIP is nothing to laugh at, but it's quite a bit worse than Liriano's 2.11. It's even more apparent how badly ERA is overstating Jimenez's performance when you look at E-F, the delta between ERA and FIP. Even when you use the xFIP stat, which normalizes the Home Run's allowed component (which should account for Liriano's Home Run luck), Liriano is still having the better season, in fact Liriano is ranked second in FIP, first in xFIP and second in WAR among all pitchers.

Ubaldo Limenez is having a fantastic season by the traditional pitching metrics, wins and ERA. Francisco Liriano is having the better season, it just doesn't show up as well in the traditional stats.

Twins drop the F-bomb

Francisco Liriano makes his long awaited return to the major leagues today against the Indians, with the Twins a half game back of the White Sox for the division lead. Instead of making a deadline deal, the Twins called up Liriano, who is a significant upgrade over the guy he's replacing, Livan Hernandez. Whereas the Chicago White Sox brought in a guy, Ken Griffey Jr., who doesn't provide an upgrade over what they have now and if they continue to play him at CF might end up costing them more runs than he creates. All of that assumes he can even stay on the field though, he had to leave yesterdays game with leg cramps, not a good sign for their hopes of playing him in CF.

The Twins now have a starting rotation without any liabilities and a solid bullpen with a great backend. They could use an infield bat and a return to productivity from Michael Cuddyer, but I think the team that wins the division will be the team who's starting pitching holds up down the stretch. That could be a challenge for both teams, the Twins pitching is young and the Sox rotation is peppered with injuries and question marks.

Liriano could be the difference for the Twins like he was in 2006. He has the potential to be the Ace that the staff lacks right now, a left-handed flamethrower who can dominate a game and anchor a rotation. Today will be his first step in that direction.

Liriano finally called up

The Twins made the move today that everyone knew they were going to make, calling up Francisco Liriano from AAA Rochester. They also called up career minor leaguer Randy Ruiz and optioned Craig Monroe and Livan Hernandez, neither of whom has played up to the Twins modest expectations.

Hawkins, Liriano coming?

Joe Christensen says the Twins are looking at LaTroy Hawkins to help their bullpen, which is sort of like looking for a flamethrower to put out a fire. There's a reason that the Yankee's designated him for assignment, he's not any good, not anymore. More interestingly, Anthony Swarzak has been called up to AAA and will pitch Wednesday. This could be a sign that Liriano will get called up soon, having pitched Sunday he won't be available for the Chicago series, but I would be surprised if he wasn't on the major league team by the end of the week.

Grow a pair

Here's Baseball Prospectus' take on the Francisco Liriano situation. They agree with Liriano's agent that the only reason Liriano is still in the minors is to limit his service time and delay arbitration. I don't have a good read on Twins GM Bill Smith yet, his ridiculous comment about wins aside, but either way you look at it, this situation doesn't make him look good. He's either too stupid and/or stubborn to bring Liriano up, or he's trying to avoid paying the kid, which is stupid.

Liriano is supposed to pitch tonight for the Red Wings and everything coming out of the Twins seems to indicate that they'll let him. With a big 4 game Chicago series coming up and Livan scheduled to pitch in it they need to make a move, but I have a feeling that Smith would rather have Livan go against the White Sox because he's "unflappable."

"We thought getting Livan here would be a big plus because of the experience he brings. He's been through more on and off the field in his life, as a Cuban defector and all that; he's been through the World Series; and in 10 years he's never been on the disabled list."

"He's unflappable. When you watch him pitch, you never know if he's up 3-0 or down 3-0."

But either way the bases are loaded with one out.

Liriano adds emphasis to request to get called up

Francisco Liriano threw another great game today, further making his case for an immediate call-up. If the Twins handle this situation like they handled the Gomez situation then Liriano should get called up sometime in mid-August.

One of the problems the Twins are going to face down the stretch is the inevitable regression of most of their starting pitchers who have, up till now, overachieved. You could see some early signs of it in the now wrapped up Yankees series, although it is just one series. Of course in the previous series they completely neutralized the vaunted Rangers offense, but the fact still remains that all four of these guys are having better seasons then anyone thought they would and are going to be pitching more innings then any of them have before, that usually means they will regress some in the second half.

The logical thing to do is move Livan into the pen and stick Liriano in his rotation spot. The main obstacle to this move is the fact that Twins GM Bill Smith doesn't like pitchers with low ERA's, instead he prefers pitchers who have wins.