Big Amoco Sign wrote:Goal isn't to win a WS. It's to build a .500 team and hope for variance going your way. Problem is, it's going the other way and not bouncing in Mo's favor.
We have the talent to win the WS. It’s the managers, pitching coach, hitting coach and umps fault
Prior to today’s game, he had an era under 4. Bad game today warps everything, and sample size on the season is till too small for him to even things out.
I would definitely still take him over Wacha or whoever our fifth starter is.
Fat Strat wrote:Prior to today’s game, he had an era under 4. Bad game today warps everything, and sample size on the season is till too small for him to even things out.
I would definitely still take him over Wacha or whoever our fifth starter is.
Prior to today's game he still had a 4.75 FIP. He's just not good anymore.
Cardinals are obviously going to sign him this winter.
Didn’t we just have a big thread on how the Cardinals lack assets?
Sure, Keuchel is better than Wacha. But paying a guy the equivalent of a $20+MM AAV to just be better than your worst pitcher would have been just another bad decision in the past 12 months. “It’s only money and the Cardinals have plenty of it.” Cool. I know that makes me feel better to see Andrew Miller be better than Brett Cecil and the shell of Matt Carpenter be better than Edman.
I think there is an aspect to starting pitching that can be "greater than the sum of its parts". ERA and FIP and all those numbers matter, but another really important number is innings pitched. If you have starters that can regularly get into the 6th and 7th inning, it can keep your bullpen more rested, and then you get better innings out of the bullpen also.
Popeye_Card wrote:Didn’t we just have a big thread on how the Cardinals lack assets?
Sure, Keuchel is better than Wacha. But paying a guy the equivalent of a $20+MM AAV to just be better than your worst pitcher would have been just another bad decision in the past 12 months. “It’s only money and the Cardinals have plenty of it.” Cool. I know that makes me feel better to see Andrew Miller be better than Brett Cecil and the shell of Matt Carpenter be better than Edman.
It's a one year deal. I don't see how that has anything to do with our longterm assets. And we're deciding he's terrible the day after his worst start of the season, when he's still barely past a quarter of a season in innings? That's just bad analysis. If we had this conversation yesterday we're talking about how he's basically the same as he was last season, with some noise in his peripherals because of limited starts. Maybe you were clarvoyant enough to predict his imminent demise, but if you did so, you didn't do it based on any reasonable statisical analysis. ZiPS and other projection systems think he's just fine for the next three years. Not an ace -- not of us claimed he would be -- but not just better than terrible as your post seems to imply.
Here's the thing about signing assets, it rarely happens because the signing team is the definition of the highest bidder.. Not many people are lucky enough to win an auction and then turn around 5 seconds later and sell what they just bought for a profit. It's going to take at least a season or more of performance for the market to determine that the contract is an asset.
But, all that is irrelevant because the purpose of signing Keuchel was never to try to get him below market value. It was to sign him on a 1 year deal to fill the glaring hole the rotation had.
Cry me a river, Keuchel had one bad start. Michael Wacha is consistently providing equally bad starts every time he takes the bump. And he's our 5th starter.
Or, here, let's re-frame the conversation: Dallas Keuchel is better than Michael Wacha. Prove me wrong.