Jake Woods, Litmus Test
Jake Woods is 25-years-old, left-handed, makes the league minimum, is a former semi-hyped prospect, and has now thrown 95 innings this season with an ERA of 3.88, which is 15 percent better than the average AL pitcher in 2006.
What the Mariners decide to do with Jake Woods this offseason will be an interesting test of whether their methods for evaluating pitchers have improved at all in the past year. Woods’ combination of age, handedness, salary, and ERA will make him a somewhat valuable player to a decent number of teams this offseason. The Mariners, however, couldn’t need a guy like Jake Woods any less.
He’s a replacement level pitcher in an organization that has so many replacement level pitchers, they don’t have room for them all. If the Mariners are willing to look past the ERA and see him for what he is – a guy with average stuff and bad command whose ERA is a complete fluke – they should admit that the best service he could provide for them going forward is to return a more suitable player for this team in trade.
Jake Woods is a litmus test. An organization that understands pitching would trade him this offseason. We’ll see if the Mariners are up to the challenge.
Late to the party however…we’d be nuts to trade away JJ. He’s only 29 and likely to age well due to his limited number of innings.
He is the perfect late game pitcher: Tall, large, and and mean looking. He has a devestating fast ball with great movement and a splitter that disappears. He fools batters and gets outs.
He could be dominent for another 5-8 years, perhaps beyond. Here is the litmus test…If JJ is traded, we’ll know that the FO has absolutely no clue.
I say we go for James Woods.
James Woods should just stick to making cameos. The Simpsons, Family Guy and Entourage is a pretty impressive resume. You don’t want to mess that up by making actual acting performances.
Regarding Jake Woods last night, kind of a neat quote about Johjima…
“If you want to know what I did that was so effective, just ask Joh,” Woods said of his catcher. “I never shook him off all night. I threw what he wanted.”
Take that, ESPN.
Oh, Woods is out of options? And all of “Cruceta, Huber, Fruto, O’Flaherty, or Green” would be out of options as well? Well if we can’t keep them all, yeah, I guess Woods should go.
That being said, I simply don’t think whoever starts the season as your 5th starter is THAT big a deal- as long as 1-4 are clearly better options, it’s not a complete disaster, and ESPECIALLY if it’s just as roster filler for better options (and I think Feierabend is clearly the guy who SHOULD be the 5th starter out of the Woods/Baek/Feierabend trio- if not after winning a competition in spring training 2007, than after a stint in AAA that shows he can pitch). The difference between Woods and Baek isn’t a big deal to me. If any of those guys were clearly a better option in the rotation than those two, then sure- but you shouldn’t win or lose pennants based on your replacement-level players being 103% or 98% of replacement value.
And Butler was just an example. I doubt he’d come up unless he was REALLY setting things on fire, and even then, probably not.
Huber, Fruto, O’Flaherty and Green should all have options because they haven’t spent much time on the 40-man roster.
I think the M’s think Jake Woods is a legit #4 starter at this point, and I think they not only won’t trade him, but they’ll give him a job in the spring without so much as a tryout, and they will demonstrate the same comprehensive grasp of Dave’s analysis that they always have: none. When Bavasi says he uses “both analysis and scouting” to evaluate pitchers, he means “won-loss record and guts”.
I hope I’m wrong, but can you point to a SINGLE example of a player, pitcher or hitter, that Bavasi took where the fancy analysis recommended it and the old-boy thinking didn’t? I have no faith.
Dave, what’s the line between what you’d consider a relief ace and a plain old reliever?
Its a little subjective, I guess. Here are the major leaguers that I consider relief aces, in no particular order:
Papelbon, Zumaya, Ryan, Nathan, Putz, Rivera, K-Rod, Wagner, Saito, Lidge, Hoffman, and Street. I may have missed one or two.
And MLB pretty much agrees… the finalists for The 2nd annual “DHL Presents the Major League Baseball Delivery Man of the Year Award” (aka best reliever – has this replaced the old award that Tums sponsored? Does this mean every time an award gets a new sponsor they start counting it from 1 again?)on MLB.com are:
Hoffman, Jenks, Nathan, Rivera, Rodriguez, Ryan, Papelbon, Putz, Wagner, Zumaya
Green and Huber may have had options burned with their previous clubs.
That being said, I simply don’t think whoever starts the season as your 5th starter is THAT big a deal
EC, didn’t you argue strongly against trading Pineiro at the end of the spring training because it would have created a big hole with the rotation’s fifth spot?
Pretty sure the previous award was sponsored by Rolaids, not Tums. If anyone cares.
Zumaya is an interesting choice among those since he only has 1 save in 6 opportunities this year — Jones has been the Tigers’ closer, for better or worse. He’s really been a top set-up man, a la Soriano. I guess throwing the big Heat gets you some credit.
I think he’s just fine as a long man/spot starter. When Grover began to be smart enough to give him semi-regular work out of the pen seemed to coincide with his pitching being more effective. Granted, I’d hope we could do better for the rotation though come next year.
The Diamondbacks did it. Nobody else has for quite a while, though.
If Byung-Hyun Kim wasn’t a relief ace that year, he was pretty close.
I hope I’m wrong, but can you point to a SINGLE example of a player, pitcher or hitter, that Bavasi took where the fancy analysis recommended it and the old-boy thinking didn’t? I have no faith.
At least w/r/t Woods, Dave seems to be making a fairly old-fashioned scouty analysis of his abilities going forward. Overvaluing Woods is more a matter of caring too much about stats that don’t matter (ERA, etc.) than it is about being old-fashioned.
EC, didn’t you argue strongly against trading Pineiro at the end of the spring training because it would have created a big hole with the rotation’s fifth spot?
See my point about “it’s not a complete disaster”. There weren’t a lot of “hey, she should start at 5” candidates in spring training. In hindsight, yeah, I guess you could have thrown Baek in there to have a season like Piñeiro’s- but that’s with the benefit of hindsight knowing that Piñeiro tanked and Baek came back from being pretty awful. Plus, um, Piñeiro made a lot of money, so it’s not like he was WORTH muvh on the trade market.
Mat, I think looking at ERA as the be-all and end-all IS old-fashioned, and Dave’s analysis of Woods is more advanced than that: but it is is statistical.
I dunno. 19 saves, 5 wins, 6 losses — I don’t know how many blown saves — 2.94 ERA doesn’t look like a relief ace to me, or pretty close. You may remember he had a terrible world series, too (after pitching well in the NL division and championship series).
19 saves, 5 wins, 6 losses — I don’t know how many blown saves — 2.94 ERA doesn’t look like a relief ace to me, or pretty close.
Saves, wins, losses, ERA? I didn’t consider any of these when I evaluated Kim, and they don’t seem like any help.
Looking closer than what I did before, his walk rate was a bit higher than I remember, but he was striking out a ton of guys, and his DT translated HR rate looks pretty good, too, suggesting groundball tendancies, which I would also suspect with his sidearm/submarine delivery. Relief ace is a big too strong for Kim, he’s not in the class Dave was describing, but I think it’s fair to say he wasn’t too far behind.
Also, as far as the WS goes, remember how many innings he was asked to work? I think it was more of a usage issue than any particular failing on Kim’s part.
The issue with Jake Woods here isn’t that he should/shouldn’t be the 5th starter, but rather that his present perceived value is higher than his projectible real value, and so his _perceived_ value should be cashed out in a trade. I only wished that the Ms thought like this in assessing their players, but very clearly they do not. This is a ‘test case’ set up for them to fail, then—and they will.
I have no interest in Jake Woods coming back in the bullpen. As said above, there are 6-7 guys better than him for ‘pen roles. I think even the Ms management is likely to see it that way if only because promoting Fruto, O’Flaherty, Huber et. al. makes their player development program look shiny and nice. (And in the category of Useful Reliever, their program is in fact shiny and nice.). However, the Ms have three spots to fill in their rotation next year. They have been terrified for years of moving starting pitchers only to have them shine and their replacements here suck –> Garcia. The org is likely to push Meche out the door, gritting their collective teeth all the while for just that reason, while calling for the trashman to come and cart away Joel Pinata who one ‘could have been somebody’ here. In that context, it’s very hard for me to see the Ms let go of ‘a starter’ who is showing anything that has the appearance, however illusory, or success in that role. Just yet. Come next May, they’ll be dumping the detritus, but I just don’t think they have the cojones to trade down in an area of obvious weakness—even though in this instance they probably should.
In essence, I’m not sure that the Ms org really has a non-faith-based strategy for filling the starting rotation. The team has held onto low-value veterans too long in this role; the team has rushed young guys unready into this role; the team has signed free agents well above their actual talent for this role. They’ve bungled it every way possible over the last three years. Why should the same crew suddenly get smart now? I only wish.
I don’t mean to imply in #120 that F. Garcia has thrown all that well for Chicago. We’re talking about perceptions not reality since it’s the Ms FO we’re speaking of.
See my point about “it’s not a complete disasterâ€. There weren’t a lot of “hey, she should start at 5″ candidates in spring training.
There’s not a lot of candidates for next year. So Jake Woods, major league starter, is “not a complete disaster,†but Jeff Harris would have been?
Plus, um, Piñeiro made a lot of money, so it’s not like he was WORTH muvh on the trade market.
At the time, Pineiro had some value. The Pineiro discussion came up in a thread on a possible Pineiro for Craig Wilson deal, which would have saved us both Asdrubal Cabrera and three months of Carl Everett futility against lefties.
The Pineiro for Craig Wilson trade was never a possibility. Bavasi and Littlefield barely even said hello to each other over the offseason. That was a media fabrication.
Or re: the team’s multi-bungle approach to overhauling the starting rotation, they haven’t yet made a trade for a physically declining famous name who then shatters on them in mid-season. Perhaps this is what we’ll see this offseason.
There’s not a lot of candidates for next year.
For 5? There’s Baek, Woods, Cruceta and Feierabend. Which is the entire POINT of Dave’s piece- Woods represents a surplus.
The Pineiro discussion came up in a thread on a possible Pineiro for Craig Wilson deal, which would have saved us both Asdrubal Cabrera and three months of Carl Everett futility against lefties.
Right, because the M’s were going to decide not to use Carl Everett once they acquired Wilson in spring training, even though they gave him a deal no-one else in the majors would have given him and was hyped as our big FA signing.
Here’s the thing- Piñeiro wasn’t viewed as a 5th starter/replacement level guy back in March. He’d had some decent peripheral stats in the later part of 2005 and his fastball was back a bit. Once it finally deserted him for good this year, yeah, he’s Jeff Harris with bleached hair.
I can think of a lot of things that would have made sense in hindsight- not trading for Benuardo, Olivo, etc. It wasn’t unreasonable to hope Piñeiro would have a year like Meche is having.
I think a What went right/What went wrong thread is in order, but the too many ‘what went wrong’ categories may put a damper on the season. However, there were plenty that did go right.
As to Woods, it amazes me that he’s done this well when he’s not blowing anybody away. Give the nod to Baek for 5th starter, but I wouldn’t mind having Woods in the pen as a longman, either. If we can get something valuable in return for him, give him the boot.
EC, they all still project as replacement level candidates (at least for the start of 2007), just as Harris, Livingston, Foppert (prior to his re-injury), Appier, etc. were last year. The point is that in spring training you made a “sky is falling” argument that a replacement level starter in the rotation would be a disaster, but now take the position that it is not that big a deal. If you want to take the position that Woods is less a “complete disaster” than Harris, that’s fine, but the availablity of four replacement level pitchers instead of two or three does not really explain your change in position.