Yeah, poor phrasing on my part. I think his batting average so far is almost entirely bad luck. Barrel rate is great, ld% was the last time I checked. And his approach is obviously great. We're entirely in agreement.
"Success as a reliever" is a bit strong. In his regular season career he has 32.1 relief innings with a 6.12 ERA (as opposed to a 5.02 ERA as a starter).
Also a guilty Pivetta defender- based off his ability to throw lots of innings AND what I perceived as an either likely injured (Sale, Whitlock, Paxton) or innings capped (Bello, Houck) or possible ineffectiveness (Kluber). I assumed he'd at least be able to deliver consistent 4.50 ERA 5-6 IP per game. Average. That's tremendously valuable in a rotation with lots of question marks.
Hard to say. I think I'm sort of in a wait-and-see mode.
Not sure..... I'm "fine with Kluber" as the last man in the rotation sort of guy. Obviously it'd be great to have 5 pitchers all as good as I think Bello will be... but obviously that's not the case.
I had wanted to look up the most recent starts for our motley crew of starters and see if there were any encouraging signs. One down, thanks to you, 6 to go. . .
Chris Sale is looking OK and has generally been on an upward trend aside from his bizarre start against Baltimore where he somehow struck out nobody in 5 innings.
He had a run of 11 very good starts. . .which I think is a bit much to attribute to luck. Then he hit a wall with 3 very bad starts in July. After that he was a bit of a mixed bag, but there are no obvious patterns for good or bad stretches.
Thank you. Let's hope Paxton's return has us arguing over which of these guys should be sent to he pen.
One thing that leaps out looking at that stretch last year is the BBs and the HRs (unsurpisingly). In all of May he only gave up two home runs and walked 6 people, whereas he doubled that count in each of the surrounding months. He was still good in June.
I don't know where to get such fine detail but there was some way in which his stuff was playing up, and it probably had to do with command. So why does a guy have this level of command for such a long stretch and then no? Fatigue or injury? Mechanics? as Rovin said, it doesn't seem like luck.
First post! Cool. The problem is you're selling low, on a guy who is cheap for another year. But maybe? His ceiling isn't high enough to stress about losing him I don't think. Bloom won't rush into anything though, in part because we need to see a few guys stay healthy before we are sure he's expendable long term.
Worth putting the innings numbers in context a bit. Right now, league average for innings per start is just a hair under five and a third innings per start (5.2) with the Twins having the highest innings per start at 5.7. Between pitch count limits and deeper bullpens, the standard seems to be pitching into the sixth inning is enough to be an effective starting pitcher.
To your point, I looked at some of the Rays
I'm not a strong Pivetta supporter, but for accuracy, two starts ago against Toronto wasn't terrible at all.
If they get rid of the pitch clock and/or change to eight inning games to speed things up we can’t be stopped.
Yes, that’s the story of this weekend. I’m still in Show Me mode with Paxton, but Sale is looking damn good. Sale, Bello, and a Paxton like we saw on Friday is a damn good 3 man rotation.
I would hope the team is waiting to see if Paxton is the real deal and if so they cut bait with Kluber. My hope for the rotation a month from now:
After as long as he'd been out, Paxton's performance was unbelievable. I wasn't a fan of the pick-up, but I'm ready to change my mind really soon.
I think at least part of it was that he really had a full rehab period. His pitch counts were 58, 70, 43 (relief appearance), 82, 90, 96. He arguably had a more full spring training, in terms of ramping up, than the guys who broke camp in the rotation had. They didn't activate him as soon as he got to "close enough" with his pitch counts. They gave him a couple more starts to really ensure he was ready to roll. Just as a contrast, Garrett Whitlock's two minor league rehab starts before he made his season debut featured pitch counts of 75 and 81.
Those guys have the same issues through the order that Houck does, though.
Was he? 10 baserunners in 5 1/3 innings is a pretty low bar (though good point about that Duran catch).
I think Crawford is the most deserving of the three. I'd really like to see Houck as closer again. And if Jansen gets injured...well, no reason to speculate at this point.
Why hold on so tightly to Pivetta? His primary virtue is the volume of (supposed) league-average innings he can give a staff. Using him like this defeats the purpose, and it's not like he's any better the first time through the order. We only have him through 2024, so it's not like there's any upside to be wrung.
Not really what I was getting at. The guy basically hadn't pitched in the majors since 2020. To be that sharp after that long of a hiatus is incredible.
Drohan has been great but I really don't think he should be in the conversation at this point. Otherwise.... Sale (tends to be injured), Bello (young), Houck (should only pitch 4 innings), Whitlock (tends to be injured, hasn't really shown to be a great starter yet), Crawford (same as Whitlock)..... you've got insurance for those guys. He's not going to be bring back much in return and the Sox shouldn't be making assumptions about a 5 man rotation being healthy that doesn't include Pivetta in it. If you have him managed carefully with Houck, you can probably cobble together a good time through the rotation once every 5th time for them.
I think the point is that if you want an insurance policy, you want someone better than Pivetta.
I got the point.... it's sharp! And I agree.... but who is that? All the names that Chawson put out there will be needing an insurance policy. Who else is available? I'm not being snarky, but I don't think anyone really is a better insurance policy. Keeping Pivetta on the team and starting and carefully managing him with those guys behind him makes the most sense to me. If you want to flip Houck and have Pivetta come in after him... I think that'd be fine but it doesn't strike me as a gain or a loss either way.
But then you'd be starting that pitcher, basically. And if you weren't (meaning they're in the pen) you'd have to stretch them out to start. Unless they were at AAA, but there, you'd call them up if they were effective starters at the ML level.
