So after seeing Tricer and THE dirkatron go at it over Millwood and Padilla and hearing about how Millwood was actually decent this past year, I wanted to look up some numbers on them past just TRA, FIP, etc.  Here is some interesting stats on both of these guys (stats are taken from FanGraphs and THT:

_______LD%_______BABIP____DER____K/9___BB/9

Millwood-25.3%_____.366______.645____6.67___2.61

Padilla-19.2%______.309______.697_____6.68___3.42

So from looking at that, its easy to see why Millwood has the better FIP, TRA+, xFIP, or whatever your defensive independent stat of choice is.  But the LD rate makes things interesting.  Millwood let a lot of line drives get hit against him which makes his BABIP and DER worse.  His K rate also isn't greater than Padilla's which means that he simply can't be allowing that much contact to be made against him with a LD rate that high.  When you look at Beckett or Santana, they're striking out enough guys to make up for the higher LD rate.  Furthermore, the general rule with BABIP is that it should be about .120 higher than a LD rate.  Padilla would then sit at around .312 while Millwood should be around .373.  Here are some more stats to chew on:

_______Contact%_____O-Contact%______Z-Contact%

Millwood-85.6%_______74.4%__________89.7%

Padilla-81.6%________65.3%__________87%

This pretty much just shows that regardless of if the pitch was in the strike zone or out of the strike zone, hitters didn't have much trouble making contact with Millwood, holder of the 90mph fastball.  High LD rate, high contact rates (16th highest overall contact rate out of all ML starters), and of course the unimpressive K/9 made Millwood have a poor ERA last year.