Carlos Zambrano is underrated

Only if all you do is look at hitting stats.

Small detail. After you fix it, you can hide my post.

I noticed Zambrano’s hitting line when they posted the silver slugger awards a while back and I wondered how big of an impact it made.

On the topic of pitchers hitting though, how much was Sabathia’s bat worth in his (very) limited time with Milwaukee? I just remember seeing him hit a home run on a highlight reel and thinking that he had a pretty good swing for a pitcher.

A 5.000 OPS is pretty much unbeatable.

he was a pretty decent pitcher, anyone remember the game last year, where he came in to pinch hit, and hit a game-tying solo shot on the first pitch he faced? not too many pitcher come in to pinch hit, at least lately, don’t know about back in the day

Now that we’re establishing replacement level for pitchers, that means that all those accusations we made about Vidro and other bad DHs being barely better then pitchers hitting for themselves have instead become rationale for them being awesome.

or does anyone else have a problem with looking at past performance with tRA? I agree completely that it works better as a predictor of future performance, and maybe looking back at an individual year is ok but at some point don’t you have to give credit to how the person performed rather then the LD% or BB% that they gave up?

Just using an old fall back, look at Tom Glavine over the past few years. Since 2002 his ERA+ has been 106 (would prefer to use RA+ but have no idea where to locate it) while his tRA+ has been 93. With a sample size over 1000 innings it is pretty obvious to me that Glavine is beating the system.

I don’t mind using tRA or FIP for predicting future WAR, in fact i prefer it, but I feel uneasy about using it to assign values to past performance. tRA is still based on expected runs allowed and defense and park factors don’t always bridge the gap between how some pitchers performed.