Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Shell of a Pitcher

That's the best description for "pitcher" Carlos Silva right now, who in last night's game managed to give up an amazingly awful five home runs. It's hard to fathom, but Silva is once again the worst starting pitcher in the AL. He's a supposed groundball pitcher giving up loads of extra-base hits and home runs. Everytime he throws a fastball, he overthrows and seems to groove it right over the plate.

Take the hitters he gave up home runs to last night. Nick Markakis, who came into the game with eight home runs on the year, hit three off of Silva last night. Markakis has never hit more than 15 home runs in a professional season yet he managed to easily knock out three in his first three at-bats against Silva, along with the solo homers given up to Brian Roberts (don't let last year fool year, he isn't a home run hitter at all) and Corey Patterson.

Needless to say, in a bit of good luck for Silva, he was lucky enough not to have anyone on base when giving up those homers. His 6.45 ERA is beyond atrocious and it's depressing that the man is still a starting pitcher and one that the Twins are relying on heavily. But worse yet is allowing a OPS over .900 to opponents. At this point, I'd rather have Scott Baker and his homer-prone ways starting than Silva, since at least he has some potential and can strike people out.

Offensively, the game went just as poorly. Facing rookie pitcher Adam Loewen, who came into the game with a 6.12 ERA and 43 walks in 64.2 innings, the Twins looked pretty worthless. Loewen was a first-rounder in 2002 and has a good strikeout rate to go with some good outings, so it's not as bad as say failing against a guy like Scott Elarton, but no walks and seven strikeouts in eight innings with only four hits is pretty bad.

Only Justin Morneau and Joe Mauer managed to do anything offensively. The Twins seemed to come into the game with the notion of being very patient and taking a lot of pitches, which was a good strategy considering Loewen's high walk total on the season, but when Loewen continued to throw strike after strike without any change, the Twins were doomed. Also, sadly, Michael Cuddyer struck out swinging at a pitch that hit the dirt about five feet before the plate to begin a new strikeout streak just one game after ending his 12-gamer.

The good news is that Matt Garza's last start went fairly well, so he probably should give the Twins a much better chance tonight. The Twins offense cannot fail tonight though, as their mound "foe" is Rodrigo Lopez, who has a 6.03 ERA, a 1.55 WHIP, and has allowed 28 home runs. Sound familiar?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh, Eyre being the bright spot in this ugly game, lowering his ERA under 6!

Anonymous said...

Another good game from Lohse last night. We may have traded the wrong pitcher.

Nick M. said...

Probably did, Mike. But I'm still ok with it. You can't be too upset. Bronson Arroyo really isn't a great pitcher, but he had initially success simply because a) the NL doesn't know him and b) the NL lineups are a lot weaker and have a pitcher in them. Yea, we could use Lohse now, but I'm not surprised that the organization failed to see how bad Silva is.

Lohse only pitched so many innings for the Twins (63 2/3 to be exact) while Silva has thrown over twice as much at 135 1/3. Basically, the stats show him to be the worst pitcher in the AL, and therefore, the bigs right now, so we probably needed to get rid of him.

For reference, Silva currently has the worse ERA (6.45), has allowed the second most homers (30), has the second lowest amount of quality starts (7), has the worst K/9 rate (3.59), the worst opponent OPS (.921) and BAA (.337), and the second worst WHIP (1.60). To put it midly, in 135 1/3 innings, Silva has given up this line to hitters: 30 HRs, 91 RBI, 34 doubles (66 total XBH), and a .337/.362/.559. Sounds like a pretty good hitter.

Nick M. said...

Opps. Sorry, Wang of the Yankees actually has a worse (2.82) K/9 rate, but at least his sinker actually works.