Joel Pineiro ----> Angels

I’m no expert but it didn’t look like he had a change in stuff.

You are quite wrong.

He’s what people thought Carlos Silva was.

…but this article helped me get a little more excited about the signing:

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/free-agent-joel-pineiro

As noted in the comments, that new pitch in 2009 is generally mis-identified as a two-seam fastball, but is actually a one-seam sinker, which helps explain the increase in his average 48% ground ball rate to a whopping nearly 61% last year.

Bottom line: he’s unlikely to repeat that 3.49 ERA in 2010. But he’s also not the same crappy pitcher from 2008 and the five awful years before that.

I do not care how many rational reasons there are for signing Joel Pineiro. If I had to watch him go into the tank twice in his career I am pretty sure jail time would be in my future.

and I’m a little surprised the Mets didn’t outbid them unless there’s a third year hidden in the deal.

So he’s got a killer new sinker, and he’s got pinpoint control of it. Fine. But a 1.14BB rate, 0.46HR rate, and 60%GB rate all require some adjustment before you project him. Particularly if he’s moving to the AL.

Pineiro is definitely a different pitcher than he was when he was with the M’s. His “fastball” (as it is classified, anyway) was getting far more GB outs — more than any other pitcher in baseball, and it wasn’t even close — and he was throwing it far more. That could be a fluke (some of it certainly is) but there’s a whole year of data that is radically different from the data that accumulated while he was with the M’s. And it’s the most recent data. We can’t just throw an entire year into the “fluke” category. Whatever memories we might have are obsolete, and we shouldn’t rely on them.

Nevertheless, it is just one year. Signing Pineiro is a gamble — that his new pitching ability is real, that it translates to the AL, and that he can maintain it without the help of Dave Duncan. So it’s a risk, but it’s a risk with a decent upside. The Angels aren’t a stupid organization (alas) and they have never seemed to suffer from poor coaching with their pitchers (they made Washburn and the Weavers look pretty good). There’s a good chance they’ll get their money’s worth on this deal. The Angels may be weaker with Pineiro this year than they were with Lackey last year, but not by as much as we might like to think.

I wasn’t really enthusiastic about the M’s signing Pineiro, but I certainly didn’t want the Angels to do so. He may be a risk, and not one I’d want my team betting on, but I’m not looking forward to betting against him either.

Depending on if Joel Pinero’s reinvention is indeed for real, he could be annoying enough to rain in on our parade or hilarious enough to be a disaster to the Angels. I’ll be keeping an eye on him, that’s for sure.

He was able to go 0-1 on 451 of 865 batters faced, and while I don’t know how many of those were swinging and all that, I do know that 125 more made contact on the first pitch for a .352/.351/.540 line. I don’t know how repeatable that’s going to be, but I’m leaning toward not very. Carlos Silva had comparable first pitch strike (or batted ball) numbers in ‘05 (his 9BB year), but not quite as good. Halladay also had very similar numbers last year, but he’s Halladay.

20 of Joel’s 105 strikeouts came against pitchers, who as a group account for 7.4% of his batters faced and put up a .228 OPS. Everyone else put up a .706 OPS. Also, he saw more RHB than lefties, who hit him a bit better. I expect that in the AL you can pretty much plug in a competent LH bat for every pitcher Joel faced.

Joel still sucks at the beginning of games. Lead off batters had a .775 OPS against him, probably on account of speed, and all hitters compiled a .775 and .804 OPS against him in the 1st and 2nd innings, respectively. 9 of his 27 walks came in the first inning. In his first 25 pitches opponents posted a .862 OPS and drew 14 walks. He’s got a new pitch but he’s not a new pitcher.

Not much to conclude beyond the obvious. It seems like his success was largely linked to his first pitch strike rate which doesn’t seem highly sustainable, particularly in a DH league. One other item which I didn’t list yet is the incredibly low SLG on ground balls that batters posted against him. I don’t know what the expected rate is, but of the 428 grounders that stayed fair, 95 went for hits and only six wound up as doubles. I don’t have an idea of what the average XBH% is on grounders, but this seems extraordinarily low.

Welcome back to the ALW Pineiro, I hope you are now in a better position to crush the hopes and dreams of the Angel fanbase than you were three years ago.