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1. Chris Needham Posted: May 27, 2009 at 12:25 PM (#3195208)It makes for good copy, and we were all tired of watching Cabrera, but shitting on the players on the way out probably isn't something a GM should do.
His strike out rate has cratered (from 9.5 per 9 IP to 3.6), his walk rate has spiked (from "high" to "trout-esque"), and his velocity has apparently dropped to fairly pedestrian levels. I'm not sure how much there is left to reclaim.
(At least he'd get better defensive support there)
Yeah, it's probably fine to say that you want your best 25 players on the roster, and that Cabrera wasn't it. But "tired of watching him?"
So I take it that Cabrera's going to refuse his assignment?
Can't say I'm surprised by this. Cabrera looked absolutely horrible by the end of last season -- no velocity and no control is not a good combo.
The other half of that was when he released Steven Shell -- a perfectly mediocre, generic middle reliever -- he complained about how he looked out there, and how he didn't give off the "aura" of a pitcher.
I can't say I've been overly excited with Rizzo so far.
Cabrera looks to me like a guy who threw too many innings too young and has lost velocity, movement, stuff. If he can still throw 96, then no radar gun has picked it up in a year. And he never had command. So now he's washed up at 28.
The question is why Bowden handed him 2.5 mil in the first place. Put it with Dmitri Young and Paul Lo Duca as evidence that Bowden wouldn't have been able to build a winner even if he did have money to spend. What money he had, he wasted.
While it seems silly to pay that much to someone at the back of the pen, he has a track record of success in that role: 180 innings or so of 90 ERA+ ball.
His role was to eat innings, saving us from having to call up mediocrities like Craig Stammen up before they were really ready.
Now he's failed in that role a bit, but the idea made sense. What didn't make sense, though, was the idea of him as a reclamation project -- as if St. Claire were going to be able to turn him into a #3 starter.
I agree with this, and it's pretty much what I wrote at the time of the signing, which I didn't bash. People harp on Cabrera's "potential," and it's a critique that's 4 years out of date.
But he isn't even a fifth starter anymore. Bowden thought he was, and he was wrong. Yeah, that's 20/20 hindsight, but there were other cheap-ish arms out there that JimBo could have signed. He picked the wrong one. My point is that you can have all the money in the world, and you still have to pick the right players to spend it on.
I'm not as sanguine. Unless Detwiler, Strasburg, and Detwiler all maximize their potential, you don't have the makings of a contending rotation there. Lannan could be the 5 on a contender. Martis and Balester probably aren't good enough to be 5s for a contender unless your 1-4 are really, really good. Detwiler not long ago was looking like he might not pan out at all. I want to see him do it against a team that can hit.
BTW, anyone know where we can find a decent defense? Zimmerman and Johnson are the only fielders on the team that even qualify as average, forget good.
I'm not altogether sold on the idea he'd failed in the fifth starter role. The problem, rather, is that the Nationals' firemen aren't good enough to put a halt to the fires D-Cab starts. But fifth starters are inherently arsonists.
I don't agree with this. I think I'm going to write a post about what's a fifth starter. On one hand, you can say a fifth starter is someone who's the 120th to 150th best starting pitcher in baseball. On the other hand, you could look at the fifth starters on contenders, and usually those guys are no worse than average.
Either way, they aren't arsonists. But if you're building a rotation to contend, your 5th starter has to be around average, unless your 1-4 are really special.
Chris Jaffe/Dag Nabbit did a lot of work on this topic a few years ago for THT, I believe. Maybe he can chime in on this subject if he's around.
EDIT: Looks like it might've been Jeff Sackmann actually. Here's the article I recalled him doing. Looking at the average performance of all five "rotation slots" was sort of a popular subject at the time. I recall a few threads here on that topic in 2006-07.
I don't know what the movement numbers mean here. What's considered average?
Dave Cameron had a post on Cabrera's velocity drop.
Very quick and dirty search, 148 starters 2008, by team
best 5th starters:
TBR Edwin Jackson 101CHW Javier Vazquez 98
TOR Dustin McGowan 98
LAA Jon Garland 91
some teams didn't have even a "5th" starter per se,
The Phillies $4 was at 80, their #5 at 75
and they won everything
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