Hey and welcome to year number two of MPH on The Daily Stache.
The minor league season is about a month from getting underway, and I’m extremely stoked about it, we have several really intriguing lower level prospects to sink our teeth into (Rob Whalen, Chris Flexen, Dom Smith, Gavin Cecchini to name a few for Savannah), amongst others.
But, that’s not the focus for this article/rant. I might do a minor league preview article on MPH in the coming weeks, as we get closer to figuring out exactly who’s going where.
However, over the last few days there’s been more and more chatter from Mets ‘insiders’, related via the beat writers, of Daisuke Matsuzaka in particular being favored internally for the 5th starters role.
A particular sentence in Adam Rubin’s roster projection on March 11th set me off on Twitter, and prompted me to write this article. Rubin wrote, “… The club also currently favors Daisuke Matsuzaka for the fifth spot because he is a known commodity…”.
Dice-K is a “Proven commodity” that SUCKS is the first thing I tweeted out in response to that.
Dice-K owns a career 4.52 era/4.37 FIP/4.57 xFIP in 707 innings spanning 7 seasons. He has never posted a FIP or xFIP under four,and always has walked four (or more) per nine innings with the exception of his “rookie” season.
He’s a known/proven commodity because you can generally count on him to be a mediocre pitcher in the major leagues, who will give up between three and four runs an outing and pitch between 5.1 and 6.1 innings per outing.
In the strictest sense, Dice-K does not “suck”, he’s just not very good. His ERA+ from 2009 to 2013 are: 81, 93, 82, 51, 81. Meaning he’s generally been 20% below average (where 100 is average).
The fallacy of “proven commodities” isn’t just limited to the Mets, or even baseball, of course. It’s everywhere, in every sport, rookies and non-top prospects get buried year after year under the guise of “we’d rather have _______, we know we can count on him to give us __________”.
Oh well… sure, that’s true, Dice-K is reliable, you generally know what you’re going to get from him, the only issue is, it’s NOT VERY GOOD.
Meanwhile, you look at his main competitor for the 5th starter’s role, Jenrry Mejia. Mejia is extremely light on major league work, for a multitude of reasons which for my sanity, I’ll only gloss over 2010.
Omar Minaya. Jerry “CackleMaster Light on IQ” Manuel. Probably Jeffy Boy Wilpon as by then Omar had been spade and neutered. Danny Boy Warthen (who’s apparently now made of teflon since he turned Harvey into a league-ace).
So that, combined with three years of subsequent arm injuries (which was also all that cackling imbecile’s fault), leaves Mejia having amassed a TOTAL of 188.2 innings from 2011-2013, all the while being jerked from starter to reliever and back again (32 starts and 18 relief outings), seemingly with no cohesive plan, reasoning, or anything. And this from supposedly a group of geniuses (Sandy&Co).
So fast forward to July 27th, 2013. Zack Wheeler’s already made his much, MUCH highly hyped/heralded ML debut and was every bit what we’d heard. Mid 90s, great curve, so so slider/change, wild as a March hare (thanks Keith). So, when forgotten man Jenrry Mejia starts Game 1 of a doubleheader in Washington, no one’s really sure what to expect.
I’m 100% positive in saying no one expected to see the best pure stuff shown by any starter in a Mets uniform to date that season. And yeah, that includes Matt Harvey. But that’s what they got from Mejia for five scintillating starts before he went on the shelf to get a bone spur taken care of.
Fast forward again to this spring. Mejia’s fully healthy, apparently fully nasty as he was last season, and yet, in spite of those five starts, he, as of this writing, is on the outside looking in at the starting rotation.
His chief obstacle?
Matsuzaka.
The same guy who’s been below average since Jenrry Mejia was 19 years old. And why is Matsuzaka ahead? Because of his last FOUR STARTS in 2013. Really? DiceK’s four starts > Mejia’s five because…
uh…
gimme a sec here, …
… … I got nothing.
Look, DiceK had a terrific four starts to end 2013, I get it. But he’s a decade older, with no upside, with less stuff. I’ve had people tell me Mejia’s never pitched a full season (hell, half a season’s worth of innings) in his life. Yeah, true. Know what the good thing about this is, in 2014? He doesn’t have to. Here it is, the plan I’ve outlined twice on Twitter, and now here on The Daily Stache…
The Jenrry to Noah plan.
1. DiceK/Lannan go to AAA Las Vegas.
Because lets be honest here, Lannan gets smoked by lefties, he shouldn’t be a matchup guy in our pen, and we already have a GREAT option for long reliever in Carlos Torres (who, apparently secretly? Put up a 3.44 era/4.30 fip/3.50 xFIP last year).
DiceK/Lannan are on minor league deals with June 1 opt outs. Use them for that.
2. Jenrry Mejia, fully healthy, is your #5 starter.
3. DiceK/Lannan will opt out on June 1st. OK, that’s great, let em. Who cares. We’ll have Raffy Montero, Dana Eveland (I know, I know) and Jacob deGrom to hold the fort down for the three weeks it takes for the Super Two date to come and go (usually around June 20th – though it’s always a fluid thing depending on other callups/service time of all players with sub two years).
Once Thor is unleashed upon hapless fruitless NL batters, Mejia transitions into a bridge role with him. You limit Noah to five innings per start, because he, too, is on an innings limit (around 145ish).
Mejia picks up the slack from the 6th to the 8th, going three innings every five days as you nurse him through to his innings limit (his prior high in innings is 108, so figure he’s on the same 145 number as Thor).
The fallacy of proven commodities? Yeah. It does several things against you.
It entices you into the known, into the… light of information, we KNOW what Dice-K is likely to give us, we have no idea what Mejia will.
At the end of the day, I hope that I changed your minds if you were on the Dice-K bandwagon.
Minor League opening day is 26 days away, don’t forget to check out MetsProspectHub for all the recaps, more opinion pieces than usual, and all sorts of other fun stuff throughout the season.
You can follow Tejesh on Twitter @MetsProspectHub.
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