An All-Padilla Rotation??

Bear with me here this is my first fanpost...

Last night when they were talking about Padilla and his apparent improved attitude and team enthusiasm on the Ticket post-game show, I  wondered to myself how would this team fare if all five of our starters had the exact performance of Padilla? Obviously, it would be better than what we have now but would we be contending for the division and pushing a .600 winning percentage? Or would the improvement be more modest? 

I wanted to use the Pythagorean W/L to project this hypothetical team's success, so I went ahead and calculated the Pythagorean W/L of the real team based on our actual runs (640) and runs allowed(667), which indicates we should be roughly 54-59.

Then I calculated that Padilla averages just a smidge over 6 innings per start with an average of 5.20 RA/9 innings. Our bullpen has a RA/9 of about 5.40. So that's 3.465 runs allowed over each six innings our starters pitch and 1.798 runs allowed for the three innings our bullpen pitches. This gives a projection of 595 runs allowed over the course of our 113 games. But then I took off about 3 runs since we average slightly less than 9 pitched innings per game due to games lost on the road where we dont pitch the ninth, giving us a total of 592 runs allowed.

If our offense holds steady and scores 640 and we give up 592 runs, our Pythagorean W/L says we should be roughly 61-52, a modest but not spectacular improvement. 

But then I considered the salutary effect that longer outings might have on the bullpen. With our current crop of starters averaging less than 5 1/3 innings per start, the all Padilla rotation would save the bullpen an extra 2 outs per game. The decreased workload for the entire pen, plus the fact that extra workload, I imagine,  tends to get doled out disproportionately to less effective relievers, could improve our bullpen ERA a lot. At a somewhat arbitrary, but I think conservative estimate of .3 runs per 9 innings saved due to the decreased bullpen workload, this adds another win to our Pythagorean W/L, taking it to 62-51. In dramatic scenarios, a sharp bullpen improvement could net us an additional 2-3 wins on top of this. I think that is a tad optimistic though.

So what is this all saying? I guess not a whole lot. I think it demonstrates Padilla is a very capable and effective starter, particularly for this team in this ballpark. Obviously we cant go out and pay five guys $11 million a year, but I dont think its unreasonable for us to eventually put together a rotation of guys performing at a similar level to him. On the other hand, even if we do, and if we are able to maintain the offensive juggernaut we've assembled, it still doesnt put us over the top, especially if the Angels keep doing their thing.  Our bullpen has been as big of a limiting factor as our rotation and it needs to be improved.