Let's Chat About CJ Wilson For a Second...

One of the funniest scenes in baseball. The youngster getting his ass handed to him by the old man.

Or any other California team not in so-cal.

I just got a PS3 with my g/f a few weeks ago.

Angels, you’re doing it wrong!

With holes in them

Would be like receiving a Nintendo 64 today

Weaver, Haren, CJ, Santana, Williams

If I’m wrong I’ll have to buy some scalper tix for his debut.

but regardless of whether or not he was against the other team’s ace, he pitched poorly. The other team’s ace doesn’t make the opposing lineup harder.

and independant thoughts, feelings, or emotions never go through their heads?

If that was the case it sure would make predicting the outcomes much easier.

That’s what the real OG’s do.

3 Ws.
H = home
S = style

as we wallowed in all that suckage

If you accept the premise that AJ Burnett and John Lackey signed ill-advised contracts, as pretty much everyone does, then there’s no reason to feel good about the Wilson deal. All three of them were roughly the same age at the time of signing, but Burnett and Lackey both had much longer histories of sustained achievement than Wilson.

I just don’t buy the “fewer miles on his arm” argument, which sounds like the kind of thing CJ’s agent would say to spin the fact that he’s been a starter for only two seasons. Yes, relief pitchers have a slightly flatter aging curve, but they still get injured just as often as starters, and they still decline with age. And yet we only have two seasons of meaningful data upon which to base a decision. Can he really keep throwing 200 innings every year?

This brings up the other argument I have trouble with: “he pitched well in a bandbox.” Well, Arlington isn’t much different than any other ballpark if you keep the ball on the ground, which CJ does. He’s also had an exceptionally good infield to help him out for most of his time as a starting pitcher. That makes it hard for me to take seriously a simple stat like ERA over just two seasons.

Look at his peripherals instead; his 2010 performance looks pretty pedestrian when you consider his 93 walks. It was actually pretty closely in line with what he did as a relief pitcher. The advanced fielding independent metrics, xFIP and SIERA, rated that season as just about league average. So that leaves 2011 as the single unquestionable success of his seven-year career, and I’m just not comfortable with the thought of betting $78 million on the hope that 2011 was the stable point, and everything that happened from 2005 to 2010 was a fluke.

At the end of the day, we’re still talking about a 31 year-old with a career BB/9 over 4.00. His elevated K/9 and GB/FB just don’t offset that enough. Those years as a mediocre reliever still happened.

I don’t think I’m just being a wet blanket here just for the sake of wet blanketry. CJ’s performance last year was encouraging enough to be worth assuming some risk. Three years? Sure. Four? Maybe. Five is too many, especially if your plans call for trading Ervin Santana. That would make this deal totally inexplicable to me, because I just can’t see any reason to automatically presume that CJ Wilson will out-pitch Ervin Santana over the next two seasons.

Which still amazes me for its crudeness, but the bottom line is that there’s still no really good way to measure pitching WAR. Nevertheless, my contention is that when you stack them up by their more dependable statistics, CJ Wilson is no Weaver, Sabathia, Hernandez, or Verlander, nor is he as young as any of those guys when they signed. Legitimating Wilson’s contract against Lackey’s is not really encouraging to me.