Baseball Primer Newsblog— The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand
Saturday, January 07, 2023
The Philadelphia Phillies have acquired hard-throwing lefty reliever Gregory Soto and infielder Kody Clemens from the Detroit Tigers, the team announced Saturday.
In return, Detroit received infielder Nick Maton, outfielder Matt Vierling and catcher Donny Sands.
Soto, 27, was an All-Star the past two seasons, including 2022, when he went 2-11 for the fourth-place Tigers. Despite that record, he had a respectable 3.28 ERA, although his command has been an issue the past couple of seasons. He walked 34 batters in 60⅓ innings last season while producing a career-high 14.5% walk percentage in 2021.
|
Reader Comments and Retorts
Go to end of page
Statements posted here are those of our readers and do not represent the BaseballThinkFactory. Names are provided by the poster and are not verified. We ask that posters follow our submission policy. Please report any inappropriate comments.
1. John Northey Posted: January 07, 2023 at 10:55 PM (#6112389)Funny, Soto's bWAR for 2022 was -0.1 but he was 30-3 in save situations, 0.6 fWAR. His 12.9% BB% is scary bad (5+ BB/9 ever season of his ML career) - basically the Philly fans are about to witness Wild Thing v2. As a Jays fan I approve of course and hope to see him in game 6 of the WS.
So, they traded him for 3 interesting pieces who are probably better than what they were going to run out instead.
If one of Vierling or Maton lives up to their potential, they probably win the trade. Sands isn't a bad 3rd piece either.
Philly obviously thinks they can reduce those BB/9 without ruining what makes Soto actually get outs. Half a generation ago, they cast a similar-looking Diekman off themselves because they couldn't fix him. Maybe they've improved their system in between?
That looks weird but is probably just random noise. I suspect he's not nearly that reliable with a 1-run save, nor so unreliable with a tie game. It is funny looking for sure though. I didn't drill down. Are some of those losses from phantom runners in extras?
*Taking a closer look: the man 11 blown saves. Ouch.
Knowles in blown saves and losses: 17 ER in 29.2 IP = 5.16 ERA
Knowles in all other games: 10 ER in 89.2 ER = 1.01 ERA.
Again, ouch.
Interestingly enough, Knowles was 9-2 the season before for the Sens.
Are some of those losses from phantom runners in extras?
That's a good question. He did give up 5 Manfred Man runs in losses but in three of those he gave up at least one other run. So that's 6 "legit" losses in normal tie games and 3 "theoretically legit" losses in extra-inning games.
I mainly asked because I've always thought a high-K, high-BB reliever is ideal for the Manfred Man situations since they reduce hits and at the first walk is not really that terrible in those situations.
Or to put it differently, there were 1821 UER total ... so 21% of all UER were scored in extras (1.2% of all innings). In the first 9 innings, there were 0.30 UER/9 ... in extras, it was 6.58 UER/9. The RA9 in extras is well over 9. There are more runs scored in extras than there are hits. So Manfred Men must score about 2/3 of the time.
But it is not just MMs. BABIP goes through the roof in extras (320) (but small sample), ROE rate is at least a bit higher, IBB rate of course through the roof, HR rate down a fair bit though.
You must be Registered and Logged In to post comments.
<< Back to main