The game of baseball is full of uncertainties and with every new season there are surprises, both good and bad, when it comes to individual player performance and a team’s performance overall. The team’s you expect to be very good, the 2012 Boston Red Sox are a perfect example of this, end up doing really bad. Whether that’s due to injury, poor performance, bad team chemistry, or a combination of all of the above doesn’t really matter – anything can happen in baseball at any given time.
While a team that we expect to do well can suddenly flop and be one of the worst over the course of the season the exact opposite can be true for teams expected to do poorly, with the 2012 Baltimore Orioles being a perfect example of this. Many analysts and some fans expected the Orioles to lose between 95 and 100 games this past season but instead they won 93 and were just one win away from the ALCS.
Orioles manager Buck Showalter managed to squeeze every ounce of talent and “want-to” from just about every player on his roster throughout the season. The one factor that contributed the most to the team’s success though would have to be the way he managed the pitching staff and bullpen. The bullpen alone is the key contributing factor here, given the fact that the Birds were 29-9 in one-run games and were 16-2 in extra-innings.
However, it is very unlikely to expect – let alone get – that kind of production going into the 2013 season and we should certainly expect some regression in regards to overall performance and some of that “luck” that went our way in a few of those games. Extra-inning affairs could easily be considered a coin flip so the fact that the Orioles had a .763 win percentage in those contests was nothing short of amazing.
There are some guys who make this breakdown fairly straightforward because they didn’t have much success at all in 2012 – see Jake Arrieta. There are others who struggled for long stretches but were able to put together a string of starts or appearances that at least gave us hope for 2013 – see Brian Matusz and Zach Britton. Then there are some who performed well above their career norms, or don’t have as many career innings as other pitchers do so you’re not really sure what to expect.
So which pitchers are unlikely to repeat their 2012 success with the Orioles next year?
The first pitcher that comes to mind when I think about a player who will not repeat his 2012 performance for the 2013 season is reliever Luis Ayala. This is a guy who has performed incredibly well for two straight seasons now and put up some numbers reminiscent of his 2004 season (the best year of his career). He posted a 2.64/3.67 ERA/FIP over 75 innings this past season with the Orioles after posting a 2.09/4.19 ERA/FIP over 56 innings with the New York Yankees in 2011.
When evaluating Ayala’s performance this past season there are a few things you have to take into consideration when trying to determine whether you can expect him to repeat that in 2013. First and foremost, he put up a BB/9 rate of 1.68 which happens to be his lowest rate since 2004 when he posted a 1.49 BB/9 rate.
His swinging strike rate of 7.4 percent is also the highest number he’s put up since 2004 as well, when it was 7.7 percent, and his career swinging strike rate sits at just 7.1 percent. That may not seem like a huge difference but when you’re talking about a career that spans almost 10 years and over 500 innings, it actually kind of is.
Finally, the last thing worth mentioning about Ayala’s performance this past season is how well he performed in clutch situations. Now let me say this about clutch performances – it is not a good predictor of future performance for the simple fact that just because a player performs well in clutch situations in one year does not, I repeat – does not, mean that they will perform so well in future clutch situations.
What I mean by that is this – Ayala performed at a far better than average rate in clutch situations during the 2012 season, to the tune of a 1.04 rating (according to FanGraphs) and that’s actually considered (by them) to be a great rating in terms of “clutchiness”. Before this past season Ayala actually had a negative clutch rating in every single year of his career with exception to 2003, his rookie season.
What that tells me is that we cannot, and should not, expect that kind of performance from Ayala in the future and I would even go so far as to say that he won’t post an ERA under three next year. Another reason we should be concerned about his potential performance in 2013 is the fact that he will be 35 years old in January, and if you couple his already low K/9 rates and his declining velocity with a relief pitcher aging curve from FanGraphs, you should expect a decline in his performance.
The second reliever that I do not believe we should expect to put up the same type of numbers in 2013 that he put up this past season is Pedro Strop. It’s not that I don’t believe that he will completely implode, but it’s important to remember that he did close out the final months of the regular season (August through October) with a 5.12 ERA and 1.91 WHIP.
Strop is probably the clear-cut favorite to take over the closing duties if anything were to happen to Jim Johnson, whether that something is a health issue or him being traded, but let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. 2012 was the first year in which Strop pitched through a full season in the majors, appearing in a career high 70 games and working a career high 66.1 innings. His previous high in games and innings pitched was 23 games and 22 innings in 2011 when he spent part of the season with the Texas Rangers before being picked up by the Orioles – although he did pitch 47.2 innings with the Rangers Triple-A affiliate, bringing his total 2011 innings to 69.2, but the competition level is vastly different.
Given the large increase in his workload from 2011 to 2012,and the level of competition he was facing, it wouldn’t be surprising if Strop developed some health issues if he doesn’t allow his body to rest enough this off-season. It was pretty clear towards the end of the season that he became more and more ineffective due to overall fatigue. He has always been a guy that has struggled with command, which isn’t surprising for a guy that can touch 98 mph consistently, but the last quarter of the season was especially bad when it came to him having command of his pitches.
Keeping with his command issues though, for a guy that had a BB/9 rate of 5.02 this past year, and has a 5.26 BB/9 rate for his career, it’s surprising that he posted an ERA as low as the 2.44 mark he had during this magical Orioles season. The other surprising thing is that he only gave up two homeruns while pitching in a hitters park (OPACY) as well as in the imposing American League East. Expect his homerun allowed numbers to trend upward next season and I wouldn’t expect his career high groundball rate of 64.8 percent in 2012 to remain that high either.
Strop has the “stuff” to be one of the more dominant late-inning relievers in baseball, but he has been a bit lucky in the sense that his shortcomings with command this past season, as well as 2011, didn’t hurt him nearly as badly as you would’ve expected. Look at it this way – when he was brought into games the average leverage index (and the LI is a metric that takes into account the types of situations, pressure wise, a player is involved in) of the situations he was coming into was at 1.43, but the leverage index would go up to 1.82 when he was finally pulled and his walks have a great deal to do with that.
Given everything that we know, and utilizing the information that we have – even though it’s really just one full season worth of data on Strop, this is someone that could figure out how to better command his pitches and become one of the more dominant late-inning relievers in all of baseball or he could be a guy that will finally have that poor command catch up to him – thus causing him to put up average to below average numbers over another full season.
The Orioles cannot, and should not, count on their bullpen performing at the same level in 2013 the way they did in 2012 – nor should they expect every single guy to perform at such a high, individual, level which in turn helps keep other relievers overall numbers down. Exercising Ayla’s option was somewhat of a head scratcher to me given his age and how unreliable relief pitching can be from one year to the next. That is why these are two relievers that I believe are due for some serious regression, relative to their 2012 performances.
