6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog: Can You Find The Ace In This Picture?

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Saturday, March 06, 2004

Can You Find The Ace In This Picture?

A few days ago, Dodger Hill ran a breakdown on Ishii showing that, pretty much, his line in 2003 was his line in 2002. But Hill didn't look closely enough at some of his other stats, in particular K/9 and K/BB, generally associated with dominance (does he strike out a lot of guys) and control (how many strikes does he throw). That got me thinking about our supposed staff ace for 2004, Hideo Nomo. Let's take a look at those numbers for the Dodgers staff with previous MLB experience in recent years. (Note this explicitly excludes rookie Edwin Jackson.)

	Alvarez			Ishii			Nomo			Perez
Year	IP	K/9	K/BB	IP	K/9	K/BB	IP	K/9	K/BB	IP	K/9	K/BB
2001	-	-	-	-	-	-	198.0	10.00	2.24	95.1	6.70	1.82
2002	75.0	6.72	1.44	154.0	8.36	1.31	220.1	7.88	1.82	222.1	6.27	3.60
2003	95.0	7.77	3.42	147.0	8.57	1.33	218.1	7.30	1.70	185.1	6.85	2.82

This is not a pretty picture. Nomo's strikeout rate and control have been slipping for three years now. He's clearly on a downward slide, and Baseball Prospectus' PECOTA projections has even worse things to say about him: he's due for a loss of over half his VORP (subscription required? scroll halfway down). For an ace, that's scary news. I'm a lazy man: here, I'll just copy their 2004 VORP projections for the starting rotation:

2003 Actual		2004 Projected
Player	VORP	Player	VORP
Hideo Nomo	48.7	Hideo Nomo	20.2
Odalis Perez	10.8	Odalis Perez	29.3
Kevin Brown	60.2	Jeff Weaver	17.9
Kazuhisa Ishii	14.7	Kazuhisa Ishii	4.9
Andy Ashby	0.6	Edwin Jackson	18.9
Darren Dreifort	6.6	Darren Dreifort	15.5
Wilson Alvarez	30.5	Wilson Alvarez	26.4
Total pitching VORP	172.1	Total pitching VORP	133.1

So, PECOTA sees Nomo going down, hard, this year... but tradebait Perez rebounding nicely. Looking at the 2003 DIPS numbers for each of our starters, you see also that OP is on the leaderboard for ERA-dERA, that is, he's been pitching in bad luck, where our friends Ishii and Nomo both are on the dERA-ERA leaderboard -- pitching in good luck.

I've always been leery of trading Odalis. He said what needed to be said last year about the offense. For a combination of durability and dominance, he's going to be extremely hard to replace. I'd look to Perez (if he doesn't get traded), Alvarez, or (gulp) Ishii, in descending order of likelihood, to be the staff ace this year, not Nomo.

Margin Note: No, you're not hallucinating. I took this down for additional info and DIPS analysis.

// posted by Rob @ 1:14 PM link // 0 comments