The Bedard/Washburn Myth
Whenever the discussion of what the M’s should do in terms of trading this summer comes up, inevitably, someone will make the point that this team can’t trade away Erik Bedard or Jarrod Washburn and hope to keep contending because “those guys are the reason the team is where they are”. The belief is that the team can’t trade either of their left-handed free agents to be without sinking the 2009 season, because those two are pitching so well that the team would experience a sudden collapse if either of them left.
The problem, however, is that the facts don’t support that belief.
Mariners record when Bedard or Washburn start: 12-13, .480 winning percentage
Mariners record when anyone else starts: 27-23, .540 winning percentage
67% of the Mariner games this season have been started by pitchers other than Bedard and Washburn. We’re supposed to believe that the M’s aren’t contenders without either of those two, yet the team has done just fine with those guys acting as spectators. Why? Because the reasons this team is winning go far beyond an old cliche that overvalues veteran starting pitching.
This team is winning because of Felix Hernandez, Ichiro, Russell Branyan, Franklin Gutierrez, David Aardsma, and Sean White, among others. They’re getting ridiculously good performances from that group, all of whom are producing all-star caliber results.
This isn’t to disparage Bedard or Washburn. Both guys have pitched well this season, and both are valuable members of the club. The team is better with them than without them, certainly. However, the reality of baseball is that starting pitching isn’t as important as most people think. Bedard and Washburn are not critical pieces that this team can’t live without. Felix, Ichiro, Branyan, Gutierrez, this version of Aardsma… those are guys the M’s can’t replace. Washburn and Bedard can be replaced.
If Bedard is healthy enough to rejoin the team before the all-star break, the M’s will have seven candidates for their starting rotation – Felix, Bedard, Washburn, Morrow, Vargas, Olson, and Rowland-Smith. Even though RR-S and Olson aren’t that good as starters and profile better out of the bullpen, that’s still a surplus. For a team with some gaping holes on the position player side of things, running a surplus of pitching when other major league teams are dying to trade for a starting pitcher isn’t a very good idea.
Even if you think the M’s should be going for it this year, you should still support the idea that the M’s should look to trade Bedard or Washburn in an effort to upgrade other parts of the club. The dropoff from either of those guys to Garrett Olson is smaller than the difference between Chris Woodward and a major league infielder. Or Yuniesky Betancourt and a big league shortstop.
Position players matter more than pitchers. It’s a sellers market for pitchers, and the M’s have starting pitchers to trade, while they have position players they need to buy. When people start busting out the old cliches about not messing with the rotation because “that’s why they’re winning”, don’t listen to them. The Mariners have options open to upgrading the team by trading Bedard or Washburn. They can deal one of the two and still get better this year.
When Texas reached the playoffs in 1996 their run prevention was among the best in baseball.
If you stop the other team from scoring you are in every game. In every sport, defense wins.
And if you can score runs in bunches, you are in every game. This whole idea that defense is more important than offense in sports is baffling. They’re equally important, and they work toward the exact same goal — outscoring your opponent.
Teams that win have a starting staff with an ERA under 4.00.
The first-place Angels’ ERA is 4.62. The first-place Phillies’ is 4.80. The first-place Red Sox are 47-29 with an ERA slightly above 4.
The Mariners have the worst offense in baseball, and below average middle infied defense. Why are we two games over .500?
Because of run prevention, which involves more than just pitching. Even with Yuni and Lopez, the M’s have a great defense.
My inability to read ruined my own nickname for Bedard, as it should read TPFKAJ. Sure doesn’t roll off the tongue like TPFAJ though.
Pitching is less important than your lineup because position players contribute on both offense and on defense, while pitchers contribute solely on defense.
Auburn: run production and run prevention are obviously equal.
Run prevention breaks into pitching and defense. So position players contribute partly to run prevention with their defense and are solely responsible for run production with their offense. If you look at it this way, position players are clearly more important. It gets more complicated when you break down which positions field more batted balls and what percentage of the teams innings a pitcher pitches in, but it should be pretty easy to accept that certain position players like shortstops and centerfielders contribute significantly more than starting pitchers.
Pitchers contribute to run prevention only, and with that for 6-7 innings out of every 45 innings played.
Alternate take: failing to plug gaping holes in lineup left by injuries is seen as waving the white flag and team morale and performance and fan interest suffers for it.
Dave’s point is that the team has a better chance of competing this year if they trade Washburn/Bedard for infield help because the organization has candidates to replace those two pitchers who might realiastically turn in big-league performances. But they don’t have candidates to replace Beltre and Yuni.
Zduriencik saying “we’re going to trade one of our quality starting pitchers for a quality infielder to replace Adrian and ask Ryan/Garret/Justin to step up and replace Erik/Jarrod” is a perfectly reasonable statement.
Now, for Auburn:
And playing defense is a huge, huge part of stopping the other team from scoring runs. Run prevention is half the game, but Run Prevention is way more than just the pitcher.
And the reason starters make it to the 7th is because they don’t have to face six or seven batters every inning. Part of that is not walking guys, part of it is striking guys out, and part of it is defenders turing BIP into outs. With Washburn, that last part is critical since he’s not a K guy. And with Bedard, talking about going 7 plus is, well, let’s just forget that.
The sad thing about ERA is that it attributes everything to the pitcher. Any out made is the pitcher’s doing, and unless someone boots a ball every run scored is the pitcher’s fault too. Gutierrez turning doubles into outs doesn’t factor into it. Why do you think the M’s have such a better ERA this year compared to the last couple? I mean aside from Silva not being in the rotation.
But they don’t have candidates to replace Beltre and Yuni.
The first one I agree with, but the way Betancourt has played most of the year, they have plenty of candidates to replace him. Their names are Cedeno, Woodward, and Wilson. Now, if you want the replacement to be an upgrade, that’s another thing.
The discussion of which is more important, position players or pitchers, is just silly, from the get-go. Importance (i.e. value) can be measured. Don’t keep talking about which is more “important” in the abstract… look what a player is actually worth. Hell, by WAR, the two best starters (Zach Greinke and Tim Lincecum) have each been worth about 1 win more than the best hitter (Albert Pujols) this year. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. My guess is it’ll just give you a headache.
I think Dave is right that, in general, teams and even moreso casual fans overvalue pitching, probably because of the cliche that “pitching wins”. So, maybe you can take advantage of that be trading pitching and upgrading the middle infield. But you aren’t going to persuade anyone who’s paying attention with vague generalities like “position players matter more than pitchers”.
To keep things simple: The game is 50% run scoring and 50% run prevention.
Especially given this is the AL, position players may be considered to contribute the full 50% on scoring.
Assuming you give any weight to defense, you must also accept that part of the run prevention portion adds on to that for position players and subtracts from the remaining 50% left for pitchers.
So, position players > pitchers even before allowing for the reduction for playing time.
Sort of. I rather got the impression though that Dave was simply painting a broad-brush picture of where the team was at with and without Bedard and Washburn and no actual analysis or conclusions were based on those W-L records. I may be wrong, of course.
The response said it was easier to find a 1.5 WAR starting pitcher than an average 3B or SS, not replacement.
Your original point, even allowing the considerably-less-than-conservative projections for the remainder of the season of Bedard and Washburn wouldn’t show a significant drop if an average 3B or SS was picked up for one of them (i.e. -1.5 WAR (drop to replacement SP) +1 (jump to average IF)) and that doesn’t allow for the fact that Yuni is below replacement and that those expectations are probably high.
Even if you only accept it as an approximate wash (no pun intended) rather than a specific in-season upgrade, if the replacement is signed (especially if cheaply) beyond this year surely that’s an overall gain, notwithstanding draft picks if they materialise?
“I might be persuaded they are of equal importance.”
Pitchers are dependent on their defense for run prevention. They don’t strike every single guy out. and in the AL at least contribute nothing to run production. How about you persuade me how a pitcher can even be considered equal to a position player given those conditions.
It’s similar to how only a QB can be penalized for an INT using counting stats. Counting stats don’t tell you if a WR ran the wrong route or the ball got tipped, just as outs aren’t solely attributable to the guy on the mound.
Yeah, but WAR is position-adjusted. The fact that Greinke/Lincecum are further above replacement relative to the population of starting pitchers than Pujols is relative to 1Bs says nothing about their worth relative to each other.
Hell, by WAR, the two best starters (Zach Greinke and Tim Lincecum) have each been worth about 1 win more than the best hitter (Albert Pujols) this year.
I’m not sure if that’s a very sound way to look at the question, but for what it’s worth, the opposite has been true for every year that Fangraphs has UZR data.
I don’t think that’s correct. The whole point of using the concept of replacement level, and WAR, is so you CAN compare the value of players at different positions, including pitchers and players at any position, against one another.
You’d rather have Greinke’s performance this year so far and a team full of replacement level players than Pujols’ performance so far this year and a team full of replacement level players. Greinke has been more valuable, worth more wins, more important, or whatever term you want to use, than Pujols, so far this year.
I think…
Agreed – it doesn’t tell you a whole lot. I was just pointing out the question whether position players or pitchers are more “important” or “valuable”, in the abstract, while maybe interesting on a theoretical level, has very little practical significance. If you want to answer a question that matters, you need to look at the actual value of the actual players you are discussing.
Leaving aside the results-based analysis question and the pitching-versus-hitting argument, I think the heart of the post is here…
Emphasis on the last to words–‘this year’. Given what everyone in baseball knows about their contract situations/injury history/under bus throwing, I think it’s wishful thinking to see us using either of the pitchers to get a major-league ready replacement for Beltre. Not someone as good as Beltre–just someone better than Branyan or Shelton or Woodward or whomever. If we do, let’s start the parade for Z early, no matter what the team does from here on out.
So what I’d like to see added to this conversation are the relative reversals we’re going to see trying to replace Beltre’s defense. In other words, how good do we expect any of the logical internal replacements to be with the glove…or for that matter, any of the hopefuls we might be able to pry away from other teams?
I don’t think that’s correct. The whole point of using the concept of replacement level, and WAR, is so you CAN compare the value of players at different positions, including pitchers and players at any position, against one another.
I believe that’s wrong – WAR specifically separates position players from pitchers in a variety of ways per THE BOOK.
Also, CCW, the extremes aren’t really relevant to the generalization. What matters w/r/t the generalization is whether, in general, a team’s position players as a whole are more important to its success than its pitching staff; and in general, this generalization is true, and demonstrably so.
Couldn’t agree more. I was surprised to see this ‘evidence’ used on this site. I agree that shipping one of them off for a ML ready SS could add more wins than it loses, but W/L… come on. Like CCW said, if you want to play the results-based game, look at how much worse we would be without Bedard and Washburn
This article is now accessible straight from the online PI…hope they pay a royalty fee to the boys of the USS Mariner. Way to go guys…
Baker is now arguing that Bedard makes a difference because he can regularly go at least six or seven innings. (You know, the chain-reaction-wearing-out-the-bullpen-in-the-second-half theory from 2007.) As well as Bedard has pitched when he’s been available, I’d like to know what Baker’s been watching, because we haven’t seen that Erik Bedard in the past year and a half, and I don’t know why you’d think he would suddenly appear now when we’re building him back off his latest injury setback.
Yes, but I think the point is that there is a very real scarcity of “big league shortstops” in baseball this year. I imagine plenty of suitors seeking infield help and relatively few sellers. Do the Mariners really want to compete in the deadline trade market for one of a very few potentially available SS (a Jack Wilson or Felipe Lopez or…)? Is that the best way to expend the team’s resources?