Mike Scioscia’s tragic illness

Randy Wolf (A+)
(11-7, 3.23, 1.101 WHIP)

I’m not even sure an A+ really gets the job done here, considering that we’re judging guys on what we expected from them before the season. In Wolf’s case, since he was a free agent, I can tell you exactly what I expected from him, since I wrote an entire post in January trying to decide which of the three remaining FA starters (Wolf, Jon Garland, Braden Looper) I wanted to see the Dodgers sign. At the time, Wolf’s bizarre 2008 (horrible in a big ballpark with San Diego, then great in a hitter’s park with Houston) confused the hell out of me, so I went with Garland, saying:

Really, it comes down to the differences that Wolf and Garland can offer you. Wolf is probably the more talented pitcher, and if he’s healthy and on his game he’s a better option than Garland. But on the other hand, if these are the three guys you’re choosing from, you don’t need an ace. With the other questions in the rotation, you want a guy who you know can pick up innings. Between Billingsley’s leg and big innings increase, Kuroda’s shoulder, and Kershaw’s youth, there’s no one we can say will almost definitely give us 200 innings. Garland, by all accounts, can. They won’t be great innings, but league-average innings do carry value. So when one of those three hits the DL – and trust me, one will – I’d rather know we have a steady horse like Garland than a question mark like Wolf.

Actually, that still looks pretty good in retrospect. Wolf’s health was always a big question mark, and the idea that the Dodger starters didn’t provide enough innings persisted all year. So I don’t really look back upon this with too much regret, because who the hell figured that Wolf would end up setting a career high with 214.1 IP and leading the league in games started, while going 6 innings or more in 29 of his 34 starts?

But it’s not just the fact that Wolf was durable; it’s that he was good. In addition to setting career marks in WHIP and ERA+, Wolf was so good that he actually made it onto my list of 2009 “aces” from a few weeks back, and as we all remember ended up starting the first game of the playoffs.

So what changed for him? Obviously, being healthy and another year off of arm surgery has a lot to do with it, but what’s interesting here is that he wasn’t more dominating, since his 6.7 K/9 rate was the second lowest of his career. However, Wolf’s control improved greatly, as his 2.4 BB/9 rate was the best mark he’s had, and therefore the fact that he struck out 2.76 batters for every 1 walk was the second best he’s ever done in that regard. For his part, in an August chat, Wolf credited a change he made in Houston last year for his success:

Randy Wolf: I had a somewhat mechanical breakthrough last year when I was traded to the Astros which allows me to be more consistent in my delivery and I think it helps me from having less peaks and valleys throughout the season

I think a lot of people like Andre Ethier as the 2009 team MVP for his power surge and late-game heroics, or perhaps Matt Kemp for taking the next step into being the all-around stud we knew he could be. For my money, there wasn’t a single player more valuable than Randy Wolf on the 2009 Dodgers. What would the pitching staff have done without him?

As probably the second-most attractive starting pitcher on the market behind John Lackey, Wolf is unlikely to be back with the Dodgers. It’s unfortunate, as he was an effective pitcher and by all accounts a class act (and Star Wars nerd!), but some team is going to wildly overpay for him, and I think I’ll be glad when it’s not the Dodgers. Besides, one year of great pitching and two draft picks for the pittance they signed him for? Yes, please.

Chad Billingsley (C… sort of)
(12-11, 4.03, 1.319 WHIP)

Good lord, where to even start? You could write a novel about the ups and downs of Chad Billingsley’s 2009. The C doesn’t really feel right here, because that would mean he had an average performance. The fact that first-half Chad was an A, and second-half Chad was an F sort of evens out to a C, but not really in the way I intended. Oh well, that’s why these letter grades are subjective and for fun only.

Look, you know his story. Through the first three months of the season, he was 9-4 with a 3.12 ERA, striking out a man per inning, and was about to be named to his first All-Star team. He was making everyone forget about the idea that the Dodgers “needed an ace”.

And then it all fell apart. On July 10th in Milwaukee, he allowed 5 earned runs in 5 innings. On the 17th against Houston, he lasted just 1.2 innings, having allowed 6 earned runs. After a decent start against the Reds on the 22nd, he completely imploded in St. Louis on the 28th, allowing 6 more runs in a 10-0 loss. All told, he put up a 7.52 ERA in July, bumping his season mark from 3.12 to 3.96.

Still, it got worse. On August 2nd in Atlanta, Billingsley strained his right hamstring, ending what had otherwise been a dominating night after 5 innings. One week later against those same Braves, he pulled his left hamstring running to first base, and as we know, eventually ended up being pulled from the rotation entirely before making two starts at the end of September.

So what happened? Rick Honeycutt thinks he knows the answer:

Billingsley and pitching coach Rick Honeycutt agree on what went wrong this season. Comparing game videos frame by frame, Honeycutt noticed that Billingsley’s mechanics began changing July 10 in Milwaukee, the last start before the All-Star break.

“His arm path was drifting behind him, and almost as a counterbalance, his head started going toward third base and it was creating a cross-fire,” said Honeycutt.

“Then he overcorrected and got his arm slot higher and it was a domino effect of bad habits. And he got frustrated, and that’s where the mental side comes in. Chad expects a lot of himself and he’s hard on himself. He’s always battled through things like this, but maybe he had a stretch with a lack of confidence and tried to do too much. You can only produce what you have.”

As we noted above, July 10th is really where things started to go wrong for Billingsley, and the wonky mechanics combined with the leg injuries and building pressure about what was wrong really seemed to pile up for him. This, of course, led to all kinds of ridiculous calls for him to be traded, demoted, or even cut, by those who clearly know nothing about baseball or young pitching – as though three months of struggles somehow wipe out three years of solid pitching.

My opinion? Things were never as bad as they seemed.  Yes, his July was horrid, and I don’t dispute that. But look at the rest of his year. He was outstanding in April, May, and June, and even after that awful July had a very nice August (3.21 ERA and second-lowest monthly WHIP of the year). Then in September, the stats don’t look good (0-3, 5.16 ERA), but they’re also very misleading. Do you remember what happened when he made his return to the rotation late in the month? The record books will show that he was 0-1, allowed 5 ER in 11 IP, and the Dodgers lost both games. But here’s what really happened…

Sept. 23 @ WAS:

Welcome back, Chad Billingsley!

Yes, he hung a breaking ball to Ryan Zimmerman that ended up in the left field bullpen for a three run homer that tainted his night. Yes, there’s a bit of a worry that he imploded again in the 5th or 6th inning. But you know what? I’m taking this as a win, a big win. 4 walks is of course not a great thing, but taking a no-hitter (with 9 K’s!) into the 6th inning? Uh, yeah. I’ll take that just about any day, thanks.

Sept. 30 @ SD:

Last night against the Padres, he gave up one hit – granted, a solo homer – before falling apart in the sixth.

So if you take just the first five innings of those two starts, you get: 10 IP, 1 hit, 1 run, 13 K, and 5 walks. Granted, the walks are more than you’d like to see, but how is anyone possibly complaining about a guy who strikes out 13 and allows 1 hit in 10 innings?

So fine, he’s got an issue with the 6th inning he needs to overcome. You know what? He’s 25 years old. We’ve said it a million times, but the two pitchers everyone wanted to dump him for, Cliff Lee & Roy Halladay, each ended up back in the minors after first establishing themselves. Lee was 28, and it was just 2 years ago!

The point is, things were never as bad as they seemed with Billingsley. And if you just let him be and work things out, he’ll be just fine. What would Blue Jay fans have thought if they’d given up on Halladay in 2000?

Clayton Kershaw (A)
(8-8, 2.79, 1.228 WHIP)

Really, the only thing keeping Kershaw from getting an A+ is that hideous growth on his face he’s calling a “beard”, because he was everything you could have hoped for and more in his first full season in the bigs. It sort of feels like Kershaw is somehow underrated if only because of his .500 record, yet we should all know by now that wins mean absolutely nothing, right?

Why don’t we set aside his age entirely for the moment, and focus just on what he was able to achieve on the mound in 2009. Right from the start, you knew this was going to be a good year; his second start of the season was an absolute beauty, which I recapped by saying:

13 strikeouts against just 1 hit over 7 innings is fantastic, but almost as impressive is that he allowed just 1 walk. Really, all you needed to do was hear Vin Scully laughing in awe at his Bugs Bunny curveball, because you figure that Vin’s seen it all by this point – so when you’re getting his attention, you know you’re doing something right.

This wasn’t one of those “it was just okay, but for his age it was great!” games. This was a dominant effort, no matter who you are – to the point that Vin even mentioned Sandy Koufax when running down his list of K’s. When we’re watching Kershaw prepare for his Pepsi Hall of Fame (presented by Carl’s Jr.!) speech in 2032, this is going to be one of the games they point back to as when you just knew the kid was going to be something special.

Kershaw’s following two starts were both actually disastrous, leaving him with a 7.29 ERA for April. From then on, it was nothing but gravy. His monthly ERA’s for the rest of the year: 2.57, 2.36, 0.71, 3.62, and 1.50. It was that 0.71 July (6 starts, 3 earned runs allowed) that led me to put the dreaded “A” word on him on July 29:

Look, what Kershaw is doing right now is simply unbelievable, as his 2.76 ERA is good for 11th in all of baseball. Forget his age for a moment, because the performances we’re seeing are outstanding no matter what year he was born. In the 9 starts since his 2.2 inning struggle on June 10, Kershaw’s pitched 56 2/3 innings… and given up all of five earned runs. That’s an ERA of 0.80, which would be awesome if it didn’t make the blood rush to my head hard enough to make me think I’m going to pass out. Really, you think there’s anyone in baseball that’s going to improve on that? There’s a pretty solid case to be made that Clayton Kershaw has been the best pitcher in baseball for the last two months, and that’s even with Mark Buehrle doing nothing but throwing perfect games lately (he gave up 8 ER in 3.1 IP four starts ago).

Though he clearly couldn’t sustain that pace, in many ways he got better as the year went on. His K/BB ratio improved every month of the season, from 1.38 in May to 2.63 in Sept/Oct, and his OPS against – already a sterling .618 in the first half – dropped to .548 in the second half. A separated non-throwing shoulder in September actually turned out to be a blessing in surprise, saving some innings on his arm, though of course he faltered in Game 1 of the NLCS, not that Joe Torre’s mismanagement helped any.

Still, look at all that Kershaw accomplished this year; 8th in MLB in ERA, tied with the mystical Roy Halladay himself. 7th in K/9. Perhaps most notably, #1 in lowest batting average against. He was the hardest pitcher in all the land to hit against, and isn’t that really the entire point?

This is not to suggest that Kershaw’s year was perfect, of course. He needs to continue harnessing his control to cut down on walks, thus allowing himself to pitcher deeper into games. His quality start rate – even though I hate that stat – was just 53%, far lower than any of his peers at the top of the leaderboards. But then you remember that he achieved all this… and he still won’t even be 22 until two weeks before Opening Day next year.

What you saw this year was one of the top pitchers in baseball right now, regardless of what label you attach to him. Think about that, and then think about how much more he still has to offer. You know what? Screw the “awful beard demerit”. A+, Clayton. A+.

Hiroki Kuroda (D+)
(8-7, 3.76, 1.142 WHIP)

Well, hey, at least he was the Opening Day starter, right? Sure, he then missed two solid months with a shoulder issue, came back only to miss a few weeks after taking a scary liner to the head, came back from that just to miss the NLDS with a neck injury, and finally came back for the NLCS to give up 6 earned runs in 1.1 disastrous innings of Game 3.

Sure sounds like a recipe for a total washout of a year, right? Well, not exactly. Kuroda gets a D+ just because he was unavailable for so much of the time – not that I’m in any way blaming him for the liner, which was one of the most horrible things I’ve ever seen, and he gets forty A+’s for coming back from that so quickly – and that’s not what we needed out of him this year.

Still, horrific playoff start aside, Kuroda was surprisingly effective when he was healthy. I think Dodger fans were all pretty pleased at his 2008 debut, and he managed to walk fewer and strike out more this year, giving him an excellent 3.63 K/BB ratio. Kuroda also proved tougher to hit, allowing 0.5 fewer hits per nine and lowering his WHIP nicely.

Unfortunately, he wasn’t able to avoid the longball in 2009.  After allowing just 13 homers in 183.1 IP in his first year, he allowed nearly that many (12) in just 117.1 IP this year. It’s sort of hard to judge a guy who was in and out of the trainer’s room so often, but he at least allayed any fears about his head injury after returning from the concussion, putting up a 2.79 ERA and 24/7 K/BB ratio in 5 September starts.

Of course, then he imploded in Game 3 of the NLCS. I won’t put too much blame on a guy who had spent the previous two and a half weeks throwing simulated games in Arizona, but still – that’s the takeaway from 2009. Kuroda can still be an effective pitcher in 2010, but he has much to prove in terms of staying healthy as he heads into the final year of his contract at age 35.

Eric Stults (C-)
(4-3, 4.86, 1.540 WHIP)

“one of these things is not like the others…”

Believe it or not, future Washington National Eric Stults rounds out our starting 5 by virtue of squeaking out 10 starts this year – probably the last starts he’ll have as a Dodger.

Stults’ 2009 was more or less like his 2008 – several mediocre-to-decent starts with a seemingly out of nowhere dominating shutout in between. In 2008, he shut down the White Sox; this year it was a four-hit masterpiece against the Giants.

It seems so long ago now, but Stults actually ended up being part of the rotation as soon as Hiroki Kuroda hurt himself on Opening Day. He lasted nine starts in that role before injuring his thumb diving for a bunt, and that was the last you’d see of him until one final start in August. Look, Stults is what he is, and that’s a marginally useful fringy lefty 7th starter type with declining strikeout rates and increasing walk rates, who generally won’t kill you and somehow manages to pull that rabbit out of his hat once a year. In the past, we’ve argued for him to get more of an opportunity, as Joe Torre always seemed to have no patience with him whatsoever. But he’ll be 30 next year and (I believe) out of options, so he’s either got to be part of the Opening Day roster or shown the door. With younger, more talented pitchers like Scott Elbert and James McDonald coming up behind him, and with other guys I’d prefer to champion for the 5th starter role (Charlie Haeger!), Stults’ days seem numbered. Enjoy Kansas City, Houston, or whatever lousy team you end up on, Eric. We’ll miss your yearly bursts of glory.

Next! The other guys who started this year, except for James McDonald and Jeff Weaver, who we count as relievers! Charlie Haeger’s knuckleball! Eric Milton’s last shot! Vicente Padilla’s hilarious year! Jon Garland’s unnecessary acquisition! And holy hell, is that a Jason Schmidt sighting? It’s starting pitchers, the sequel!

But none of that happens until Monday, because I’m off to a wedding. You’re in good hands with Vin this weekend.