BTiA: Matschulat: On Kevin Millwood, Rich Harden And Loving The Strikeout Again

Loving the K! Time for The Lone-Star Twist!

For all of the confidence-infusing storylines which trailed Kevin Millwood during his four-year tenure in Texas (chiefly, the weight loss-intended kickboxing regimen and the Nolan Ryan-instilled conditioning program), the fact of the matter is that he was paid like a No. 1 starter and instead delivered exactly league-average performance over the life of his deal (100 ERA+), consuming approximately 190 innings per season but watching his peripherals erode in the process ... and yes, that includes his strikeout rate, which withered away to a career-worst mark of 14.5 percent.

And yet in spite of his peripheral struggles, Millwood, by virtue of his sub-4.00 ERA, became the media-anointed poster child for the purported success of the “pitch-to-contact” movement that was so readily espoused by the organization and vertically integrated throughout the system—all the while ignoring that such a philosophy (a) isn’t nearly as effective during the post-season, where you’re generally pitted against elite-level competition, and (b) is heavily reliant on the continued maintenance of a very gooddefense, as well as (c) that Millwood was the beneficiary of inordinately good fortune on several fronts, both defense-wise and timing-wise (strand rate).

Meanwhile, the Rangers’ team pitching strikeout rate landed with a thud in the league’s bottom-five pile for a third consecutive season. Millwood certainly wasn’t—and still isn’t—a valueless entity, but it also seems apparent that he was no longer a good fit for a team that desperately needed to find some way to pair its younger and more strikeout-inclined talent with a major strikeout-boosting weapon in the vein of Javier Vazquez, Ben Sheets ... or Rich Harden, whose nigh-unsurpassed ability to miss bats has springboarded him into baseball’s elite pitching fraternity alongside Tim Lincecum, Zach Greinke, Jon Lester and Justin Verlander.