What You Didn't Know About Steve Delabar

As Matthew has already noted below, the Seattle Mariners have promoted Blake Beavan and demoted Steve Delabar. Beavan is here to start until Erasmo Ramirez can start, and then maybe beyond that too depending on trades. Beavan has posted a 2.61 ERA with Tacoma, which is terrific! He's also struck out 15 of 159 batters, which is a lot less terrific, unless Beavan were a dog or a chair, in which case, wow, that's embarrassing on the hitters' part.

It's not real interesting that Beavan is up, and it's not real interesting that Delabar is down, since he's gone down before. The Mariners seem to really want Delabar to improve his slider, and they keep having to bring him back up before they intended. Delabar truly could use a better slider, although then every pitcher could use a better pitch. Delabar's splitter is pretty terrific. Remember when Brandon League had a terrific splitter? Now he's trying to improve his slider too. I'm getting off track so let's veer over to the point.

Stats! Steve Delabar's Major League career is not very long. He hasn't even thrown 40 innings, and he's barely faced 150 batters. What I'm about to show you, therefore, probably isn't real meaningful, but it's still insane. Remember when we looked at the Mariners' home/road splits early on and they were insane, and we also figured they'd regress over time? This is like that. These numbers will normalize, but for now, holy shit.

I present to you Steve Delabar's career home/road splits.

We know that Delabar has struggled with home runs. He's struggled with home runs exclusively away from Safeco, where he's been untouchable. Those splits read as if the home numbers were posted by Felix over three consecutive starts against Oakland, and the road numbers were posted by a position player pitching against Texas.

The samples are embarrassingly small, and when you're dealing with small samples, you end up with giant error bars. The split difference here is so great that the error bars might not even overlap, regardless of the small samples. Steve Delabar, assuming he ever returns to the Mariners, will presumably improve on the road and get worse at home. But right now, these splits are something else. I'm trying to come up with some witty conclusion but all I can think is "wow, those numbers are impossibly different." And also "chinchillas bathe themselves by rolling around in volcanic ash because that's what was readily available in their Andean homeland." When you put it that way, chinchillas are basically the best animal.