Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
March 08, 2008
Rotation Evaluation, Chicago White Sox

The series looking at team pitching rotations using the Marcel the Monkey projections continues with the Chicago White Sox. Their starters posted a 4.47 ERA in 2007, seventh in the American League.

Note that in figuring ERAs, I'm using Marcel's mIP and mER columns. The ERA listed in the spreadsheet uses the average of mER and bsrER. I wanted to avoid posting 1/2 runs in the table. Pitcher order is taken from the CBSSportsline depth chart.

John Danks

John Danks
Photo: Icon SMI

Marcel predictions for the Chicago White Sox top five starters for 2008.
StarterInningsERERA
Javier Vazquez188904.31
Mark Buehrle181824.08
Jose Contreras190934.84
John Danks129714.95
Gavin Floyd91555.44
Totals7623914.62

In 2007, the White Sox were only one of two teams to receive 1000 innings from their starters, the other being the Cleveland Indians. With the departure of Jon Garland (who projects to about 100 more innings than Floyd with a much better ERA), that appears unlikely this season. That trade, as far as the pitching is concerned, hurts the White Sox in two dimensions.

But John Danks holds the potential to make up for the loss of Garland. He showed in the minors the ability to be a high strikeout, low walk pitcher. With a year of big league experience under his belt, we could see an improvement even greater than what Marcel predicts. Given that the White Sox play in the second best ballpark for scoring over the last three years, just getting the staff's ERA below 4.50 should give them a good chance of winning.

Previous posts in this series:

The Baseball Musings pledge drive continues through March. Please consider making a donation.


Posted by David Pinto at 10:04 AM | Team Evaluation | TrackBack (0)
Comments
Post a comment









Remember personal info?