When It’s Time For a Change

Friday found the Giants losing yet again, this time to the New York Yankees. Yes, Barry Bonds hit yet another home run, but for me that means very little while watching the team play so poorly.

So my thoughts have been drifting off to next season and the years to follow. While there seems to be no immediate help coming to fix the team’s biggest need, offense, the Giant’s young rotation of Matt Cain, Tim Lincecum and Noah Lowry (plus the ever present specter of Barry Zito) seems to point to a at least a semi-above average staff.

But is Bruce Bochy keeping the staff ready for next year? I checked out Baseball Prospectus’ abuse points leader boards to see if we can expect anything terrifying in the future from this core of pitchers. And I wasn’t happy.

First off, I would be much less happy if I was a Red Sox fan. So far Dice-K leads the majors in Stress at 45. In his 2004 article outlining BP’s changes to PAP, Keith Woolner estimated that anyone with over 30 had a 20 percent chance of a major arm injury sometime in their career.

Now the Giants don’t have any major cases such as Dice-K. What they do have is a consistent pattern of pushing their starters to their limit, putting five pitchers (Zito, Cain, Morris, Lowry and Russ Ortiz) into the top 16 of Stress and PAP per start. Only one team — Cincinnati, With Bronson Arroyo and Aaron Harang – had more than one. Even throwing out Ortiz with only five starts, having 4/5 of a rotation that high in PAP rankings seems like a warning.

One thing I wanted to put out there right now is that the pitchers don’t astronomic Stress numbers. Between Lowry at 14 and Jeff Francis at 31 there’s only a four-point drop. The chart below shows the range of Stress points for the five Giants pitchers in the top 15.

But like I’ve said, what concerns me is the systematic over-use of pitchers, even if it is only by a small amount. Especially with younger arms such as Cain and Lowry I would hate to see high workloads in a season such as this ruin the team’s rebuilding plan (if such a thing exists).

One other thing I wanted to point out is Bochy’s willingness to send his starters deep into games. BP splits starts up into five categories, with CAT_1 under 100 pitches and Cat_5 starting at 133, with breaks roughly every 10 pitches between. So far there have been no CAT_5 starts this season, but there have been 26 CAT_4 (122-132 pitches) starts, with the total split amongst 18 pitchers. Four of them have been Giants. Only two other teams, the Reds and Mets, have even two.

With six total starts the Giants account for almost a quarter (23 percent) of CAT_4 starts. Barry Zito has been the culprit in three of those starts, not a good sign for the player the team just gave a 347 year contract for $Umpteeneleventee million. What’s even worse, at least from a strategy point of view, is that his three CAT_4 starts haven’t even been that great. The classic example of an OK use of 120 pitches is the player finishing off a complete game. Zito’s starts haven’t lasted longer than 7.1 innings, though he has been effective, giving up only two runs in the three starts. But seriously, 122 pitches in 7.1 innings?

Before I leave this, I wanted to point out that this is only half a season’s worth of data and may be colored by Bochy’s feelings about turning over close games to his bullpen. But even with that, the thing that scares me the most is that of the top 10 players in Stress, Cain is the youngest by almost two years. It will be interesting to see if this changes by the end of the year with the team out of contention, but right now I’m a little concerned.