Bullpen needs more help but I don't see the need for a starter. No one on the free agent market moves the needle in the rotation as much as Ozuna did for the lineup. I would take Darvish or Lynn, especially if a really low bar is set by the former and Lynn ends up signing for cheap, because Wacha in the pen could really make a ton of sense, but I have little faith in Darvish, Arrieta, or Lynn, to really exceed expectations for more than a year or two tops. And if you're telling me Arrieta is not signing for less than four years--hard pass. Darvish I would go four, but he's not worth the Scherzer money he will be trying to command, IMO.
And speaking of Darvish, I think the reason we haven't seen the big arms sign even still is that teams are more and more incentivized to not break the bank every offseason. This new CBA is keeping salaries down, but the free agents don't want to admit it yet. This winter seems like the first real test of the balance of power between ownership and players. Which is just to say that there's a lot of sense to not playing the fool and jumping the market with Darvish on some 30MM AAV deal, when maybe his actual signing amount means you can swoop up Lynn (or the guys the Cubs have signed), for a historical pittance, just jetstreaming off of the lower rate for the stars of the market.
JL21 wrote:dmarx114 wrote:
Can this be true?
Without looking it up, it seemed like Cecil was great in blow outs, but terrible when trying to protect a lead.
Not sure what to make of that for this season.
WPA isn't repeatable or whatever, but he was genuinely bad in Win Probability Added last season. Meaning he did a lot of damage to their win probability when pitching. And it also implies- but we can't be sure using WPA alone- that he was probably especially bad in higher leverage situations.
To put how bad Cecil was in WPA in some perspective, he was 289th out of 291 relievers in WPA (20 IP or more). That's... really [expletive] bad.
Now... again... that's not really a repeatable thing. WPA will tell you a lot about how much a player impacted his team's chances in a previous year but next to nothing about future performance. So me bringing that up isn't intended as a dig on Cecil.
Truthfully, I don't know what to make of Cecil. I think he pitched better than his results. But his K rate took a nasty dive. Hitters were swinging more at him, and making much more contact. He did a good job of keeping the ball in the yard, and the percentage of hard contact was right in line with what he's normally done. I think he's a fine second LOOGY but you just have to know that there's a bust rate there and you may have to swallow a terrible season.
Fascinating that his WPA was that low--but I absolutely believe it thinking to the early part of last season especially. Brutal to watch him out there, especially when he was put in to close for a minute there. I think it was against the Cubs, maybe the Dodgers or someone, but on ESPN...just got shelled, blew the lead, the save, everything there was to blow.
Worth knowing about Cecil is that he somehow, for the first time in his career, dominated righties last year, after historically being hell on lefties and below-average on righties. In 2017 he allowed an opponent OPS+ of 50(very good!) against righties...and 146 against lefties(extremely bad). Which makes about zero sense, and given that he was decent on the whole, WPA aside, for the year, there's reason to be hopeful that he can get back to whatever it was that allowed him to be hard on opposing lefties, and maybe keep some of the gains against RHB.
