I think he is like Pavano with Pavano’s arm.

I thought that myth had been dispelled. Just about everything I’ve read says he’s always been a low 90’s fastball guy who racked up K’s in the minors by fooling guys with his changeup and curve. Now, he may have stopped throwing the curve this spring, but according to what we’re hearing out of Arizona, slider/slurve he’s throwing now isn’t a bad offering either.

Second, I don’t think we really got “fleeced”. At the time of the trade, McCarthy was one of the more highly regarded prospects around, with no previous health issues and Danks was a lefty with a decent fastball/curve but lacked a good third pitch. Once McCarthy came here, he met Connor and then the freak injuries started. Once Danks arrived in Chicago, he sucked until someone taught him a cutter and he flourished last year. If anything, I think some people enjoy thinking we got genuinely fleeced in the Chicago deal and perpetually take shots at McCarthy just because they liked Danks. I think the truth is though, the trade is just an example of developmental fortunes: sometimes everything clicks, sometimes it doesn’t. Both teams got good players in the trade, they just went in opposite directions afterward.

If you want to talk actual fleecing, you’d have to go all the way back to CY/Eaton – but I think people might finally have learned to put that one behind them. Now they need to do the same with Danks/McCarthy.

That people—I should say the smart kind of people that post here—cherry-pick individual statistics to “make a case” for a player.

Really, the whole point of statistics from the personnel side is to make informed decisions. Saying that Player X had a good K or BB rate doesn’t mean you’re making a blanket performance evaluation. It’s just that good evaluations are done on a sliding scale, and those stats that Adam mentioned tip the scale in one direction. Player X could still have had a shitty HR rate or some other negative attribute that makes him less attractive as an option for the team.

Also, W/L is macro, but it’s so vague that it means nothing. To me, saying that a guy has a good W/L record is like asking someone what the weather’s like and getting “it’s alright” as a response. Well, there might not be a tornado outside, but it could still be windy, cold, etc.

Admittedly, I suck at analogies, but I think you understand what I’m saying.

and idiotic. Doesn’t the fact that Millwood and Padilla have drastically different surface stats with the same set of circumstances prove the unreliability and fickleness of stats like wins/losses/ERA? Instead of continuing on this nonsense, I’ll comment that it’s not about whether you “love” peripherals or not. It is about if you understand their value and your baseball outlook. And you have no idea what peripherals represent relative to performance.

Especially for a Ranger pitcher.

Since the 2000 season, a Ranger starting pitcher has had a full-season ERA below 4.09 only twice- and both times it was Kenny Rogers. Ismael Valdez did it in 2002 as well, but only pitched about 130 innings with the Rangers.

If the Rangers had a rotation full of 4.09 ERA guys, they’d be a playoff team this year.