Brian Lawrence probably won’t matter
Whether or not he signs here. Really.
He had shoulder surgery and didn’t pitch last year.
Almost no one comes back from shoulder surgery to retain their former glory.
Fewer still return to be that effective the year after a layoff.
The glory of Brian Lawrence was the perfectly good 2002 in San Diego where he went 12-12, threw 210 innings, didn’t give up many home runs, and put up a pretty nice K and walk numbers. From 2003-2004, he was pretty much the same low-walk, low-K every year, even though his W-L bounced around a lot.
If you get the perfectly healthy and rehabilitated Lawrence-in-decline, he’s overwhelmingly likely to be a below-average starter in the same general vein that Batista/Ramirez are. Healthy, he’d be an upgrade over the current candidates for the 5th starter slot… but probably not.
Of course, standard caveats apply: I’m not a doctor, I haven’t looked in his shoulder, I don’t know how he’s throwing, and so on and so forth. But the odds that he’ll be a significant contributor to any team next year are pretty slim.
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ah, but how apropos of this off-season if this is the one pitcher they are the front-runners for …
Ageed but not at the cost of Ramirez.
Fair enough about Lawrence, but is it right to call Batista a “below-average starter” when his ERA+ the last two years was 104 and 108 (meaning he was above average)? And Ramirez for that matter was at 99 last year as well while battling thru injuries. And yes he was at 92 the year before but he was at 178! in 2004 so if you want to take the average of those three years he is well above average pitcher.
I know there are many ways to evaluate a pitcher, but 100 does represent an average pitcher so lets not oversell what Batista and Ramirez are/aren’t.
Won’t matter? What about all the people who will buy tickets now, not to mention Brian Lawrence jerseys?
Re:3
100 does not indicate average pitcher. Rather it merely indicates an average ERA. I think the authors of this site have clearly stated that they don’t believe ERA to be the end all of pitching analysis
I know there are many ways to evaluate a pitcher, but 100 does represent an average pitcher so lets not oversell what Batista and Ramirez are/aren’t.
100 represents an average run prevention unit consisting, in no particular order, of the pitcher, his defense, and his bullpen as evaluated in the judgement of the official scorekeeper as pertains to earned/unearned runs. There are much better ways to evaluate pitching.
Batista, for instance, last year, had a disturbingly large number of unearned runs compared to his earned runs (making his RA higher than league average), which does not bode well for his performance going forward. He’s not terrible, but even by your metric, he’s not much above average and he’s getting older. It hardly seems misguided to consider Batista below average.
Maybe the Mariners are trawling for more Jamie Moyers.
Take an infinite amount of below-average stuff, decent control pitchers, and you’ll invariably come up with some finite number of Jamie Moyers.
If even one of the Mariner batch turns into Jamie Moyer, mission accomplished. Anyboy know how many of these guys are smart?
Intelligence would be my first criterion in any such endeavor.
More like trawling for garbage.
Lawrence had a torn labrum and cuff.
I know ERA isn’t the best way to measure pitchers because there are a lot of things that go into ERA outside the pitchers control, but ERA+ does make adjustments for ballpark factors and compares all pitchers so it is a useful tool.
With that said, if you want to look at FIP or xFIP you will also see that Batista and Ramirez are average to slightly above average, depending on the year. While they don’t have great K/BB ratios, they seem to make up for it with ground ball tendencies.
All I am saying is don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
There’s no reason to believe the post-injury, post-surgery Lawrence will necessary bear any resemblance to the pre-injury, pre-surgery Lawrence. Usually they become entirely different pitchers.
With that said, if you want to look at FIP or xFIP you will also see that Batista and Ramirez are average to slightly above average, depending on the year.
Let’s stick with Batista. The first thing we do is significantly discount his performance in ’05. It’s easier to pitch as a reliever, and it wasn’t that many innings, so the fact that he was better in ’05 than ’04 and ’06 shouldn’t surprise us.
Batista’s xFIP was 5.11 in ’04 and 4.88 in ’06. This year, in the AL, the league average FIP was 4.56, and in the NL, it was 4.49. Even if we adjust Batista’s xFIP down by 5% to adjust for park in ’06, he’s below average at 4.64. In ’04, if you adjust down by 5%, you get something like a 4.85 xFIP, which is worse than average.
On top of that, PECOTA thinks Batista’s going to be below average (again) next year, considering he’s going to be 36 years old and should be declining basically every year from here on out.
I just don’t see any reason to object to Batista being considered a below average pitcher going forward. Yeah, he’s been fairly close to average lately, but mostly on the wrong side of average and doesn’t figure to get any better.
As for Ramirez, pretty much every projection system thinks he’s basically going to be a disaster. Classifying him as below average is being kind.
Usually they become entirely different pitchers.
It amazes me how some guys with shoulder problems can actually maintain some semblence of effectiveness pitching with the injured shoulder (Radke this year comes to mind, especially right after he got cortizone shots), and then generally go all goofy afterwards.
I’m going to paraphrase #55 in the JJ thread because I feel it applies to this discussion and not the JJ talk.
You’d be suprised at how much “luck” makes a good pitching rotation. The 2005 White Sox come to mind as a rotation which top to bottom got better results than their collective TTO’s would suggest. A little luck goes a long way. But the rotation didn’t have a Joel Pineiro who could wipe out the good done by the rest of the rotation. Having 5 pitchers who aren’t going to have a 5.50 ERA or higher is a good thing. Especially if we have Felix at the top of our rotation. If Brian Lawrence is healthy he can be that fifth guy. Since the top of our rotation is so weak, we can’t carry a black hole at the bottom of the rotation.
Safeco won’t benefit AJ Burnett as much as it would Jake Woods. Seattle should sell itself as a place for mediocre pitchers (filling out the back end of the rotation) to increase their value for a year.
Ya. I don’t like ERA+….it’s kind of like winshares….. its a lousy metric that hides it’s inadequacies by spitting out very precise numbers…
Except Bavasi would sign them for a 4-year, $25M contract.
Another stiff to throw in the pool. If he comes cheap, whatever.
Does anyone have any examples to back up this sort of statement. I mean, which pitchers have come back from rotator cuff surgery or frayed labrum surgery to do well. I think one is worse than the other…I know they’re different from TJ, I’m quite familliar with that one.
WHy not take a flier on this guy?
It depends on the pricetag, to me. If Lawrence doesn’t require an atrocious cost (in terms of money or length of contract), I think it’s worth a shot.
Ideally, this is the type person I’d like to see as an NRI. But in this pitching-starved market, it seems that he’ll command at least some guaranteed money.
Also, (trying really hard to look at the bright side here) you have to give the M’s at least partial credit for trying to make the right moves with starting pitching. The pitchers they have acquired are predominantly groundball type pitchers, which plays to the strength of the defense. If we could get them to stop overpaying for old and/or injury-prone groundball pitchers, that’d be great.
Shoulders are, by all accounts, far more complex than elbows and thus harder to rebuild. Tommy John is by now a fairly routine proceedure, with many success stories, but the list of successful pitchers who’ve come through major labrum problems is essentially ‘Chris Carpenter’
Lawrence ended up having both surgeries, as they found his cuff injury when fixing his labrum….
FWIW (“I’m not a doctor, I haven’t looked in his shoulder, I don’t know how he’s throwing, and so on and so forth.”)
The rotator cuff (formed by the tendons of four muscles) connects the humerus to the scapula. The rotator cuff helps raise and rotate the arm; as the arm is raised, the rotator cuff also keeps the humerus tightly in the socket of the scapula. A tendon tear usually occurs when the socket is weakened by another problem, so the surgery usually involved fixing several things beyond the initial diagnosis. Depending on the amount & location of damage, the repair can either be done with an arthoscope or with full open surgery, and so the recovery & recovery time varies with each person.
Brian Lawrence
Ryan Anderson
Kerry Woods
Dan Kolb
Pedro Martinez
Jamey Wright
Bret Saberhagen
Mark Leiter
Justin Thompson
The labrum is a rim of soft tissue that makes the socket more like a cup, and helps hold the humerus in the shoulder joint. It can get caught between the part of the scapula that forms the shoulder socket and the humerous and become frayed or torn (it also attached to several tendons & ligaments, and so when torn affects the stability of the shoulder) Orthopedists became more aware of labrum injuries after they began using the arthroscope; even with the scope, labral tears are still considered very difficult to diagnose — for example it took 2 doctors & three months to diagnose Mulder’s injury.
“Baseball pitchers are prone to labral tears because the action of throwing causes the biceps tendon to pull strongly against the top part of the labrum.”
Chris Carpenter
Gil Meche
Jeff Heaverlo
Ryan Anderson
Brian Lawrence
Brad Radke
Jon Rauch
Tony Armas
Mark Mulder
Eddie Guardado
The American Sports Medicine Institute has an intersting page on the shoulder & injuries.
After reading the THT article about the relative performance teams get out of their 4th and 5th slots, I’m becoming convinced that having 7-8 guys who “aren’t disasters” is probably a good idea. The average ERA from the 5th slot (here defined as the pitchers whose starts would form the set of the worst 32 starts that a team got) was well above 6. Having guys 4-8 who can give you at least 5ish ERA stuff might get you more wins over a year than having 4-5 guys who can get at least 4.5 ERA stuff and having your 6th guy be “a disaster”, though I’d love to see an analysis of whether slightly below average depth is a better investment than average in the 4-5 and well below average after that.
That fith guy who stinks up the joint can have a much bigger impact on your team than a single good starter can.
Look at Josh Towers. Replacing Josh Towers with, say, Gil Meche last season, Toronto wins an extra 5 games and turns the AL East into an actual race.
Yes I have to agree. THe Jays last year were a great example of what league average pitching can do. Ted Lilly was a great pitcher for us. Why? League average pitching, and with a good offence, can win games. Having a couple more last yaer, or better 6 through 8 starters, would have given us way more wins. While its good to have good pitchers at the front, if the rest of your rotatoin is just mediocre and pitches all those innings, its fantastic in light of the THT article. To win you need 8 decent starters, and no disasters or crappy AAA pitchers in the minors. At least given a good offence.
Look at the Dodgers, in case of injury:
Schmidt, Lowe, Penny, Wolf, Billingsley, KUO, HENDRICKSON, etc.
I’m in total agreement with the last couple statements.
Let’s face it, none of these guys — Lawrence, Ramirez, Batista, Woods, Baek — is likely to set the world on fire. There aren’t statistics to suggest they’ll even be average pitchers.
But there is some value, as has been pointed out, in building a rotation eight or more deep and hoping that one or two of the eight produce above expectations.
It’s a heck of a bad way to run a franchise. But in the Mariners situation in 2007, it’s all that we’ve got.
I say bring on Lawrence. And Tony Armas too. And then all of us should just gather around in a prayer circle.
Yeah, if you don’t have Francisco Liriano and Johan Santana, your best bet seems to be to take a (hopefully cheap) flyer on as many #4 starters. It’s the “throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks” philosophy, but I think it’s a good idea in lieu of having actual stud pitchers.
Or, said another way, “make up for lack of quality with quantity”?
…or “if you can’t dazzle them with brilliance…”
Seriously, quantity makes the team less affected by injury and also allows the manager to quickly pull a pitcher having a bad start.
Hey, you never really know. Remember Paul Abbott? Almost anyone can break out once for a career year (and then fall back to earth), which is why I don’t mind taking chances on one-year contracts.
It’s when they sign mediocre guys to three-year deals that pisses me off.
I don’t think this is, at all, a bad secondary strategy.
Well, actually, that’s what happens when one of those Paul Abbotts have a career year….
The only problem with the way the M’s are doing this is they’re overpaying and giving away talent in order to get these guys.
That said, if the team is willing to give away Doyle and Fruto to get Vidro, we know they have some talent evaluation problems.
#31: You’re right. If one of these quasi-5th starters has a great year, Bavasi will probably sign him long-term..
Scary.
Indians agree with Nixon for one year, $3 million
This is what the Mariners needed to do instead of Vidro!!!!
D’Backs, Davis agree to $22 million contract
And this is what we should have done instead of Ramirez. Or, for financial equality, instead of Batista. (Davis is younger, cheaper, and better)
Davis is a lot older than Ramirez.
It still blows my mind that out of all the possible options we could have gone after for a DH, we traded away good young talent for Vidro.
Repeat question from yesterday’s thread but never got answered. Does anyone know the current status of Foppert and if we can realistically expect him to contribute anytime in the future?
Davis also wasn’t available.
Last I heard about Foppert, his velocity was down, and his control was shoddy. He was re-signed to a minor leasgue deal over the offseason. My guess would be that he would play at AAA Tacoma again next year.
#35 Better yet instead of Nixon, don’t do anything and let Snelling and Broussard DH.
Ah, Snelling. Those were the days.
Broussard will be the DH once Vidro flops…
We’ll have a platoon-DH that Hargrove won’t admit is a platoon… or he’ll just run Vidro out there every day like he did with C-Rex…
I think most would agree that Vidro won’t put up good numbers. But, if he does it would be a fluke where the M’s got lucky not because of some gift for player evaluation by the M’s.
#42: Aren’t Snelling and Broussard both lefties? Tough platoon if they are.
Although Snelling never should have been platooned.
Especially when your platoon option is WFB.
It sure seems like they are throwing money around without a plan. I mean they could multiple questionable pitchers. And they just paid Broussard several million to be what, the back up DH and first baseman?
Maybe the motto could be: “Your 2007 Mariners: More questionably productive millionaires than ever before!”
Or perhaps: “So-dough No-go.”
WFB should be in a platoon with the batboy, and that’s about it.
WFB should be in the movie Platoon, gloriously fighting for democracy against those savage commies.
That’s where his grit and hussle would really pay off!
Looks like we’re losing out on Lawrence.
Word out of the Rockies camp is he’s about to sign a 1 year deal with the Rockies even though the M’s offered him more.
Onto the next reclamation project.
What’s wrong with Tomo Ohka?