Written by Greg Fertel
|
23 February 2008
So, a question came up in the comments of the
Ian Kennedy profile. Isn't Ian Kennedy a Brad Radke type? Aren't I overrating the guy a little bit?
Absolutely not. First off, Brad Radke has a career 1.63 BB/9 and 5.39 K/9 (2.04 BB, 6.99 K in the minors) line as a starting pitcher. Ian Kennedy is a completely different pitcher. Ian Kennedy has a career minor league line of 9.97 K/9 and 3.14 BB/9. He's not nearly as hittable as Radke, who was 'wild within the zone', and Kennedy, who has to intentionally throw 3-2 pitches outside of the strike zone every once in awhile to keep hitters off balance.
But isn't Kennedy a soft-tosser, and therefore unlikely to be very good. Most really good pitchers in the majors have a plus fastball.
First off, I would disagree with the premise that Kennedy is a soft tosser. In 4 MLB starts, his fastball averaged 91 mph. That's faster than Joe Blanton, Jeff Francis, Adam Wainwright ad Aaron Harang, and not significantly slower than Dan Haren and Cole Hamels, Rich Hill, Phil Hughes or John Lackey. This isn't a velocity issue.
How about his secondary pitches? His changeup is a major strength. Few pitchers in the major leagues have a good enough changeup to get a lot of strikeouts on it, and Kennedy does. The fact that he has weapons against both right handers and left handers with the slider/curveball combination is also huge.
Can we really rely this much on minor league performance?
We have a saying in political science, "A theory that explains everything explains nothing." In the realist school of foreign policy, analysts look at states acting in the international world as "black boxes", meaning that they don't account for things like domestic politics or leadership personality when assessing international action. Obviously, they miss some things, like the explanation for the fall of the Soviet Union, but on the whole they can accurately predict state action.
I understand that no theory is perfect. However, I don't think that there is any better proxy for predicting future performance than past performance. Ian Kennedy has been a strikeout fiend across all levels of amateur and professional baseball. I strongly believe that Kennedy won't lose most of that strikeout prowess at the major league level, nor to I believe that his control will deviate much from his 3.14 BB/9 rate in the minors.
What does this mean? While a pitcher is not just the sum of his parts, pitching itself is made up of a few component parts. Basically, there are only a few things that a pitcher can do in a macro sense to prevent runs. These component parts are:
Not walking batters, striking batters out, preventing hard-hit fly balls, holding runners, and timeliness. There's no reason to believe that Kennedy has any weakness in any of these: the only real question right now is his ability to prevent hard-hits - with the thesis that Kennedy's stuff will hold him back at the major leagues in that respect.
8.00 K/9, 3.14 BB/9, 0.70 HR/9 - that adds up to Dan Haren or Justin Verlander. I'm not saying that he's guaranteed to be that good, but its unreasonable to suspect that its not possible, and at this point there is no reason to suspect that he's going to crash and burn.
Hearkening on Mussina's velocity is missing the point. The difference between Mussina and Kennedy is control. Mussina walks more than 1 per 9 fewer than Kennedy. The real point is: "Is Kennedy the next 'crafty righty' to find a lot of success." Of course he's not going to be Greg Maddux - Maddux has a case for best pitcher of all time. But Maddux does what a lot of lefties do - create a whole much greater than the sum of his parts. Kennedy can do that too.
