Monday, November 30, 2009

Room For Improvement: Fausto Carmona

Well, yeah. Pitchers, by VORP ascending:

Manny Parra, -23.9
Andy Sonnanstine, -20.1
Chien-Ming Wang, -18.7
Brad Lidge, -15.6
Fausto Carmona, -15.5

Now, Wang was injured and only made 9 starts, but packed a helluva lot of badness into those 9 starts. Brad Lidge you may have heard of. It's a bit amazing that Tampa kept letting Andy Sonnanstine wander out to the mound to post a 6.77 ERA and give up 11.83 H/9, but then, he WAS held to 18 starts.

Fausto got 24. Including right down to the wire, on Sept. 30.

Manny Parra, amazingly, went 11-11 for a bad Brewers club despite managing a 6.36 ERA. But Milwaukee doesn't have the deep well of outstanding young pitching that the Rays do: it makes sense that they'd keep trotting Parra out there. They had Jeff Suppan, Dave Bush, and Braden Looper in the rotation, fer crine out loud. In this sense, they were a lot like the Indians: what Carmona needed as much as anything else was bulk innings against major-league hitters, and once he came back from the Instructional League, the Tribe was clearly out of playoff contention, so what could it hurt? What, he's blocking Matt Ginter?