What to do with Tommy Hunter

Honestly, of the six potential rotation candidates (Wilson, Lewis, Harry, Holland, Ogando, Hunter); I’d say that Hunter has the lowest probability of any of them to spin out a no-hitter or a perfect game (not that anyone has a high probability; Hunter just doesn’t have that potential for total dominance that the others have).

Holland’s FIP and xFIP are quite a bit better than Ogando’s numbers, but in the 2nd paragraph I was saying that Harrison’s FIP and xFIP are close to Ogando.

He can pitch 5 innings in every Harrison start.

he’s more of a “if I can’t walk there in a minute or two, go get in the car” type.

Have we lost any games in a closing situation OTHER than the eighth inning lately? No.

So how would Feliz have made any kind of a difference, had he been in the rotation or in the closer role? Our middle relievers aren’t getting it done, that has nothing to do with having Feliz around.

I could care less if any one individual players value is maximized or minimized. All I care about is what makes the team better.

If Ogando to the bullpen cuts his value to the team in half, but he’s a meaningful improvement over Strop/Lowe and Hunter replaces his rotation value effectively… then I’m very happy.

Everyone is having their little bullpen is worthless and that maximizing individuals WAR or whatever is the only consideration. I for one think Feliz, Ogando, Holland, Harry, Hunter, CJ, Lewis and Bush should ALL be in the rotation. Heck, even Oliver and Rhodes too. They’d be more valuable in the rotation than in their current slots.

Everyone in the rotation since starters are more valuable than relievers!

that Pitcher B can’t be a dominant late inning guy as well?

after all, before he got hurt, Pitcher C was a dominant late inning guy and he pretty much came out of nowhere. (I mean, really, how many 23 year old relievers in the Rookie Leagues go on to have major league careers).

And Pitchers D and E were starters way back during the Reagan Administration.

Yeah, I’m pretty fucking sure about that.

To be fair though, you are right about the “struggles of our middle relievers…” The problem is that our middle relievers are currently manning the 8th inning and closer roles.

Harrison will probably make it obvious regarding him one way or another – if in his next two starts he’s awful, he’ll be gone, but if he’s solid, he’ll stay.

Ogando will either regress for the reasons you point out, or he’ll bring his peripherals down to match his performance, either way what the team has with him will be clearer.

Lewis will either keep stumbling making the possibilty of an injury likely, or he’ll recover.

Holland may or may not fall apart completely, or he may continue his signs of being a very solid rotation piece.

Those are a lot of ifs. And if 2 weeks go by and it isn’t obvious who should go, then it probably will have been a very good two weeks to be a Ranger fan.

that I’m willing to trust the org either way in the short term. But given the assets on hand, I think Hunter to back end of the rotation and Ogando as the setup man and 2nd closer makes sense for the team’s current situation.

Hunter showed so little in Spring Training that I am hesitant to just give him a spot back in the rotation.

If this team is without Josh, and – forbid – without Nellie for a long while, then I think I’d rather roll with Ogando, Harry, and Dutch for the time being. Without Josh and Nellie, the offense isn’t great anymore, and I think they may be losing quite a few 5-3 and 4-2 games with someone like Hunter out there. At least with the other, high variance guys, you’ll get at least a chance to win low scoring games half the time.

Now, if Josh and Nellie are healthy; Hunter in his 3-5 runs / game will give the team a great chance to win every time out there.

with this defense, it is probably reasonable to expect every Rangers pitcher should outperform their FIP.

Exactly. But this moves past regressing past performance based on peripherals, this has to do with the fact that the small sample size we’ve seen so far is not likely to represent his true talent level. It’s not impossible that it is, but considering how far away from the mean he is on this, it’s not very likely.

I’m not guaranteeing it, but I think there’s a fairly strong argument to be made that the AL could ‘catch up’ to Ogando and his reliance on 2.5 pitches.

I have little information to go on as far as what Ogando can be as a starter, so nothing is preordained, it’s merely influenced by the best information I can gather.

He had an xFIP of 3.69 out of the pen last year, facing a lot more righties than he would as a starter. Even that’s a SSS, but whatever. Good for a reliever, and for a reliever he can believably outperform that. As a starter, if I remember the general estimation, you’d tack about a run on top of that, probably more because of facing more lefties, and you wouldn’t expect him to outperform it the way a reliever can. So now you’re talking about a 4.70 ERA kind of guy, like Tommy Hunter might be expected to be, probably lower thanks to a good defense when they stop with the outfield silliness.

So far, peripherally, he’s been better than that. 4.20 FIP, 4.04 xFIP. What other information we have, though, is someone like Jason Parks, a scout, saying he doesn’t have the arm action to pitch starter innings, and he doesn’t have the repertoire to continue to get hitters out as a starter. Jason may be wrong, and it’s an appeal to authority for me to say he’s right, but it’s also better information than I have myself, and in the absence of a good sample size, scouting is extra important. So that makes me think, while the FIP has been better than I would have expected, there’s more reason to expect it to not improve than improve, and reason to believe even if it does or does not he won’t be able to pitch a full season, anyway.

The confidence level from some various scouting reports shared and sample size stats is small, and it should be. Anyone here who’s extremely confident Ogando will be good is just being a blind optimist, or a slave to small sample size ERA. Anyone here who’s extremely confident he won’t be is just being a blind pessimist, or a slave to small sample size peripheral stats. However, in my belief, the best information points to him A) not continuing to pitch this well and B) not being able to pitch a starter’s work load. I could very well be wrong and have no problem admitting that, but the lack of confidence I have in the information doesn’t mean I go the opposite direction from what the information leads me to believe.

To predicting hot and cold streaks, I’m not sure people are predicting that. They are predicting, as am I, that he will at least regress much closer to his FIP than he has pitched so far, and perhaps even that FIP will regress and he’ll regress beyond where his FIP is now. That’s not predicting a cold streak, though. They’re not saying “at some point, Ogando will have a streak of Matt Harrison-esque games that will bring his ERA-FIP to 0 in two weeks.” They’re saying the games are more likely than not to start resembling what his sustainable performance numbers suggest, and over time that will cause noticeable regression.

As far as the arm blowing up, that’s not a cold streak, that’s worrying about so many pitches per game on an arm whose mechanics have made people more knowledgeable than us on such things worry.

Get it right, foo.

As I mentioned above, Ogando’s certainly been on a hot streak and it’s very likely unsustainable. But you don’t know it won’t continue in his next start. If it does it might continue for the start after that. To relegate someone to the bullpen or the bench because “they’re just not this good” doesn’t make any sense. You’re trying to dodge a bullet that hasn’t been fired yet.