Waiver Wire Offseason: NL - 棒球

僅貼與王相關部分


Waiver Wire Offseason: NL
Posted by Michael Street at 2:00am


Chien-Ming Wang | Washington | SP
2009 Final Stats: 6.2 K/9, 1.5 K/BB, 9.64 ERA

表格：http://tinyurl.com/yd9dsqj

A season and a half lost to injury can make you forget how incredible Wang
was in his first three Yankee seasons. He won 50 games in 85 starts, the
fastest Yankee ever to that mark, and recorded the first back-to-back 19-win
seasons since Tommy John in 1979-80. Then he hurt his foot running the bases
in interleague play, demonstrating one good baseball reason to nix the
popular scheduling twist: AL pitchers aren't used to running the bases. He
rushed his rehab, screwed up his mechanics, and spent 2009 stinking it up
on the mound before going under the knife for shoulder surgery.

Teams were interested in signing Wang, however, even though he still hasn't
thrown off a mound, and won't do so until April or May. When he does, the
Nats (and everyone else) will see if Wang can return to the form he showed in
New York, as a devastating sinkerballer who could keep the ball in the yard
better than any pitcher in baseball. As you see in his mini-browser, he's got
unimpressive K and BB rates, but those groundball rates are amazing. When you
combine that with HR/9 rates that were the best in MLB in 2006 and the best
in the AL in 2007, you get the kind of seasons Wang had with the Yankees.

Sinkerballers manage to succeed despite those low ratios and other warning
signs—his elevated LOB% rates would suggest regression, but when you induce
as many ground balls as Wang, you can escape more situations with men on
base. With all the balls that get pounded into the ground when he's on the
mound, he can maintain that 4.4 HR/FB% he had before the injury. It's also
hard to predict someone with these kind of peripherals, which is why GP and
other projection systems are so pessimistic about him; from a statistical
perspective, everything screams "regression," but I don't think most systems
correct for extreme groundballers like Wang.

The truth is, his skills and his injuries make him difficult for anyone to
get a handle on how he might do after nearly 18 months of being off his game.
The Nationals did about as well as can be expected, given the circumstances,
as they paid just $2M to find out what he'll do. The story about his signing
indicates there's "no timetable for his return," which is never a good sign,
and all the more reason why you should take extreme care with Wang. He's
moving to a new town, a new league, and a new ballpark, an awful lot of
variables to throw on top of a guy who's also coming back from injury.

The ballpark may not be too important, given Wang's ability to hold down the
home run, and the league is also less important when you're looking at a guy
who throws his sinker 75% of the time ("Scouting report? We don't need no
stinkin' scouting reports!"). What's more important is the defense behind
him. New York's defensive efficiency in 2006-7 (when Wang was with them) was
among the best in the league, while Washington's was third-worst in the NL
in 2009. The UZR/150 of the 2006 Yankees (-10.9, worst in baseball) was
significantly lower, but their 2007 rating at least got them into positive
territory (1.1)—the 2009 Nats (-3.2) fell somewhere in between.

It's hard to compare the 2009 and 2010 Nats, as the 2009 version had 115
different lineups, but looking only at his future infield, so important
to a sinkerballer, Dunn-Kennedy-Guzman-Zimmerman comes out to a career
9.5 UZR/150, largely on the shoulders of Zimmerman's 12.0 rating (Dunn is
an unsurprising -17.9). And it should be noted that Kennedy's rating over
the last four years at 2B was 1.8; he gets a big boost from his younger
years.

That's not too bad and could help Wang overcome some of the other changes
he'll be facing in 2010. The injury recovery is clearly the biggest issue,
and his late start will also detract from his value. His history makes him
a great late-round pick or low-dollar gamble, but let other owners throw
more than a buck or two away on him. If you're in a straight draft league,
Wang is one of those shrewd DL picks you can grab at the end of the draft
or early in the season to stash until you see whether he returns to his old
ways.

http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/fantasy/article/waiver-wire-offseason-nl-0219/

--