How long before Jeff Weaver makes a start for the Brewers?

[southpaw121505]

Id swap Weaver and Defelice for Parra and Villanueva right now. Our rotation is pathetic and is going to destroy the bullpen eventually. This team is pretty embarassing right now. Good teams don't play this piss poor and just sit back and watch it, our offense and starting pitching has been a joke all year, except for Sheets. I don't care if you think our current options are slightly better, something needs to be done now if for no other reason to send a message to some guys to get their act together.

[JoeHova]

There is no reason to believe that Parra, Villy, and Bush are actually as bad as they've pitched this year. Taking them out of the rotation now would be shortsighted, imo. Just like Cliff Lee and Edison Volquez aren't really 1.0 ERA guys, the Brewers guys are not 6-7 ERA guys. Removing them now would mean missing out on their regression to the mean.

[pete]

Bush is bad. It was foolish to include him at the start of the season. He's not going to win games because of "regression to the mean" which makes no sense in that context.

 

And yes, he is a 6-7 ERA guy.

[TooLiveBrew]

No, he's not. That is, unless your player evaluations are confined to only the bad stretches of a player's career.

[MickeyDavis]

I don't know how anyone can argue that Bush should stay in the rotation and that we shouldn't at least try some other guys in his spot. It's not like he's 22 or 23 and has potential. Maybe you saw him in the dugout tonight with his hand grips and were impressed. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/laugh.gif

[rluzinski]

He's not going to win games because of "regression to the mean" which makes no sense in that context.

 

It makes complete sense.

 

And yes, he is a 6-7 ERA guy.

 

It's ironic that a person trying to pretend that he knows what the meaning of "regression to the mean" is, is saying that Bush is a legitimate 6-7 ERA pitcher. I appreciate that statistical analysis is completely boring to the majority of the population and don't blame ANY baseball fan for ignoring it altogether. People watch baseball for entertainment, so if that stuff doesn't add enjoyment, be gone! Just don't ignore it AND argue against it, please.

[MickeyDavis]

I find the argument that he can't possibly stay this bad the whole season less than a compelling reason to keep him in the rotation. I'll have to look at the old threads but I guess all of you Bush fans were blasting Melvin for sending him down to Nashville when it was obvious we should have kept him in the rotation due to inevitable "regression to the mean". After all his ERA was only 6.75 when he was sent down. And you must have been livid about Turnbow. There was a whole lot of regression waiting to happen with him.

 

Maybe Bush is the best we have for that spot in the rotation. I'm willing to look at other guys. Some of you aren't. I guess if we all have the same opinion there would be no need for this board. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif

[Jopal78]

Jeff Weaver is just one man, at this point it is 30 games and counting since a Brewer starter not named Sheets has picked up a win. Weaver could replace any one of the other 4 starters and pitch like he did early in his career, it won't matter since the other three arms in the Brewer rotation have essentially pitched like crap this year with no signs of being effective.

[MickeyDavis]

You are absolutely right. It's not just Bush. But he's the worst of the worst. You have to start somewhere.

[bball123h2]

Removing them now would mean missing out on their regression to the mean.

Not to go all math-nerd and derail the thread, but wouldn't each outing be considered an independent event and, thusly, not guarantee a regression to the mean? Also, we don't really know what the mean is from year to year, as a myriad of non-mathematical things (like tipping pitches, injuries, loss of control/confidence) can have a negative effect on what "should" be the mean. Just because a player is having a rougher season than normal does not necessarily imply that he will have moments of greatness to make up for it. Derrick Turnbow and Dan Kolb would be two recent Brewer examples that come to mind.

Of course, it is only early May. 6-game losing streaks do weird things to the mind.

[TuesdaysWithRillo]

I have no problem bringing up Weaver for a few starts and seeing what the guy has for Dave Bush. True, Bush isn't a 7 ERA pitcher, but he's not getting the job done right now so let him go figure out what is wrong in AAA and give Weaver 2-3 starts. Weaver has a better and longer track record than Bush does for all you projectors out there despite a horrible year last year for Seattle.

 

I also would have no problem bringing up Weaver for Manny Parra. Parra needs to limit his innings and 2-3 starts by Weaver would buy Parra some innings for later in the year and he can also figure out why the hell he can't go more than 5 innings in a game like the rest of the staff.

 

Does anyone have the details on the incentives of Weaver's contract? I don't think it will kill our payroll that much to give the guy a shot.

[pete]

He's not going to win games because of "regression to the mean" which makes no sense in that context.

 

 

 

It makes complete sense.

 

 

No it doesn't. We're not talking about flipping coins or the height of offspring. We're talking about pitching performance. If you, in your devotion to him, or anyone else wants to make the argument that Bush is unlucky, go for it. Unfortunately, Brewers games are televised and people watch Bush do things like throw his twisty 85 mph fastball over the middle of the plate.

 

 

And yes, he is a 6-7 ERA guy.

 

 

 

It's ironic that a person trying to pretend that he knows what the meaning of "regression to the mean" is, is saying that Bush is a legitimate

6-7 ERA pitcher. I appreciate that statistical analysis is completely boring to the majority of the population and don't blame ANY baseball fan for

ignoring it altogether. People watch baseball for entertainment, so if that stuff doesn't add enjoyment, be gone! Just don't ignore it AND argue

against it, please.

 

 

I don't think you know what regression to the mean is despite your condescending, arrogant response. And the only irony around here is yours.

[TuesdaysWithRillo]

Rluz, can you give the math behind Bush having a 40% chance of winning when he pitches? What are you basing that on and what is the scale of ERA to chance of winning a game? What is Sheets chance of winning when he starts?

[rluzinski]

Turnbow had a Marcel projection of 4.39 ERA this year with a pretty big statistical uncertainty (all relievers do, since their IP per year are relatively limited). He was also completely destroyed in the 6 1/3 innings he pitched this year. The average NL reliever had a 4.06 ERA, putting the projections for Turnbow firmly in the below average category. The Brewers also only had the rights to Turnbow though this yeara anyway, so even if turnbow got his stuff together and surprised everyone by being average, you aren't talking about very many innings anyway. The Brewers have McClung to be below average anyway (yes, I hopehe proves me wrong), so no big loss anyway.

 

Bush had a Marcel projection of 4.55 ERA going into this year, with the average NL starter having a 4.65 ERA last year. Bush has also gotten off to a horrible start but with the injuries to Gallardo and Capuano and the dismissal of Vargas, there are no decent options (IMO) left to take over for him. Weaver has a Marcel projection of a 5.33 ERA, so a couple nice AAA starts is not going to convince me that he's gotten control of whatever troubles he's had over the last few years.

 

Bush is by no means an option to get excited over (or Villy, Parra or Suppan right now). I just don't see any option better and I'm not compelled by the theory that if something isn't working, you just try random things until it does! In baseball, a couple starts tells you next to nothing with regard to expected future performance. As a result, you HAVE to rely heavily on past performance when making your best guess of future performance.

 

but wouldn't each outing be considered an independent event and, thusly, not guarantee a regression to the mean?

 

Nothing guarantees regression to the mean. It's only a "best guess". For a person with 0 IP, the best guess is league a league average player, so we regress him all the way to the mean. For a player with a lot of innings, while we still don't know his actual skill level with 100% certainty (we only would with an infinitely large sample) but we have a much more confident view of his true talent. As a result, we still regress his expected future performance towards the mean 9average pitcher), but to a much less amount than a player we know nothing about.

 

That's all just performance analysis, though. If a pitcher all of sudden starts throwing 5 MPH slower, we'd be foolish to assume he has the same underlying skill. Same goes for a young pitcher who starts having a lot of success with a new pitch. True talent isn't necessarily static but we have to have a good reason to assume that it isn't.

 

When Bush started the season with bad velocity and terrible command, I was concerned that he was injured, which would throw out all the previous performance expectations I had for him. While I haven't studied him too closely, he seems to be the "same old Bush" (for better or worse). As a result, I am forced to rely on his projection as a best guess of future performance. That's probably somewhere around a 4.6-4.7 ERA. While that's nothing to get excited about, I'm not sure if that even makes him the worst pitcher in the rotation right now.

Rluz, can you give the math behind Bush having a 40% chance of winning when he pitches? What are you basing that on and what is the scale of ERA to chance of winning a game? What is Sheets chance of winning when he starts?

I'm not sure if it's completely right but I'm simply plugging in a league average offense and bullpen into the Pythagorean equation. A 6 ERA pitcher has about a 40% chance of winning with that approach. That passes the smell test, since a a team with an average offense and bullpen have to have very bad starting pitching to still lose 60% of their games. What some don't seam to realize is that a team having a 40% chance to winning IS already very low. An entire team comprised of AAA players would still win something like 30% of their games.

 

Here's a link to the Marcel projections with a brief description:

 

http://www.tangotiger.net/marcel/

[JoeHova]

I find the argument that he can't possibly stay this bad the whole season less than a compelling reason to keep him in the rotation. I'll have to look at the old threads but I guess all of you Bush fans were blasting Melvin for sending him down to Nashville when it was obvious we should have kept him in the rotation due to inevitable "regression to the mean". After all his ERA was only 6.75 when he was sent down. And you must have been livid about Turnbow. There was a whole lot of regression waiting to happen with him.

 

Maybe Bush is the best we have for that spot in the rotation. I'm willing to look at other guys. Some of you aren't. I guess if we all have the same opinion there would be no need for this board. http://forum.brewerfan.net/images/smilies/smile.gif

 

 

When Bush was sent down, it was because he was the team's 6th best starter at the time. Things have now changed due to Gallardo's injury. I'm not a huge Bush fan but to argue that Weaver is better than him is overly optimistic, imo.

 

and for everyone so in love with Weaver's 1 serviceable AAA start, Bush's AAA ERA this year is 1.50 and he has better than a K per inning and a 3.5/1 K/BB ratio.

[pete]

Relevant stats for Dave Bush this year:

 

April 03 - 5.1 innings - 6 earned

April 09 - 5.1 innings - 4 earned

April 15 - 6.0 innings - 3 earned

April 23 - 6.0 innings - 4 earned

May 07 - 6.0 innings - 5 earned

 

About the same as spring training when the reason/excuse was that he was working on new pitches.

 

Definition of Random: Made, done, happening, or chosen without method or conscious decision.

 

Marcel the Monkey's ability to forecast accurately: about 65 percent by most accounts versus about 70 percent of more complex competing systems. Of course, the definition of accuracy will bend greatly in order to sell the product.

[southpaw121505]

There is no reason to believe that Parra, Villy, and Bush are actually as bad as they've pitched this year. Taking them out of the rotation now would be shortsighted, imo. Just like Cliff Lee and Edison Volquez aren't really 1.0 ERA guys, the Brewers guys are not 6-7 ERA guys. Removing them now would mean missing out on their regression to the mean.

I agree that they aren't as bad as they are performing now. But, how long do we trot them out there and wait for it while were consistently getting short, poor starts? I have high hopes for Parra but maybe he just isn't ready to consistently give us 6 every 5th day. I don't know, I hate sitting on my hands while were getting abused and there are some guys who might give us a few good starts compared to the daily feeling that we aren't going to win unless Sheets is pitching.

[danzig6767]

That's all just performance analysis, though. If a pitcher all of sudden starts throwing 5 MPH slower, we'd be foolish to assume he has the same underlying skill. Same goes for a young pitcher who starts having a lot of success with a new pitch. True talent isn't necessarily static but we have to have a good reason to assume that it isn't.

 

When Bush started the season with bad velocity and terrible command, I was concerned that he was injured, which would throw out all the previous performance expectations I had for him. While I haven't studied him too closely, he seems to be the "same old Bush" (for better or worse). As a result, I am forced to rely on his projection as a best guess of future performance. That's probably somewhere around a 4.6-4.7 ERA. While that's nothing to get excited about, I'm not sure if that even makes him the worst pitcher in the rotation right now.

During his first year with us when he had his great secondary numbers, i remember Bush usually sitting around 88-90 with his fastball. Last year his numbers were much worse, but i forget if his fastball had lost any velocity. This year, more often than not his fastball is in the 84-86 range, he's not throwing as hard as his first year with us.

Now i don't claim to know if a few miles per hour would really matter all that much given a 88-90 mph fastball like his first year with us is hardly something that big league hitters struggle to catch up with. Hell, look at Turnbow, don't command the fastball and big league hitter will even rake a pitch coming at them in the 94-97 range.

All i know is my hopes that we'd see more of the 2006 Dave Bush instead of the 2007 Dave Bush isn't happening, were are seeing so far an even worse version of the 2007 Dave Bush. Walks are up, velocity down, and he's still prone to leaving tasty meatballs over the plate after he puts a runner or two on base.

For me, Bush has been painfully frustrating to watch since he's been here. Outside of Sheets/Gallardo the last two years and this season so far, no other starter seems able to just quickly cruise through stretches of most of their starts like Bush can without allowing many or any baserunners. Then he walks a guy, maybe hits a guy, gives up a bloop hit or two, or some combination of those. Unfortunately, then bam, Bush serves up a 85-86mph fastball right over the heart of the plate or badly hangs a curve to the next hitter or two and there goes what looked like a potential nice start.

I kept hoping that at some point in his career Bush could avoid being as helter skelter as he is, but i just don't see it happening. With that said, i have no confidence that Jeff Weaver will do any better. One of those situations of would you rather get stabbed in the eyeball with a fork or ice pick? To make matter even worse, Villanueva and Parra both deserve as much a boot from the rotation as Bush does.

 

[rluzinski]

Marcel the Monkey's ability to forecast accurately: about 65 percent by most accounts versus about 70 percent of more complex competing systems. Of course, the definition of accuracy will bend greatly in order to sell the product.

 

That's why I say "best guess", not "great guess" or infallible guess". No one, not even Bush, knows how his performance will be for the rest of the year. I'm not sure if there's even a 5% difference between the most simple and complex projection systems, although it depends on how you define accuracy. Surprisingly, there isn't much difference between them:

 

http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/comments/community_forecast_2007_preliminary_results/

 

The fans actually did the best, since they can presumably combine performance analysis of with other, less quantifiable factors. There's a thread in the sabermetric forum at bf.net with an attempt to do the same for Brewers players:

 

http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pyk99ZuXWKqcy9elt0DYyJQ&hl=en&pli=1

 

Bush was projected to have a 4.39 ERA, which is probably a little low. There might be a "homer factor" to consider with them in general, though. We'll have to see. And some might think that since Bush has started off horribly, his projections should be thrown out completely. Not really:

 

http://www.insidethebook.com/ee/index.php/site/article/what_do_good_and_bad_starts_by_pitchers_tell_us/

 

He found that, unless you are a young starter (less than 27 years), as long as you throw the current season's sample back into the projection, it all adds up, whether that start was drastically good or bad. No dramatic change in expected future performance.

 

Unless we know something has specifically changed about Bush this year from previous years (injury being the big one) his projection still is our best guess going forward. Even then, it's just a guess.

During his first year with us when he had his great secondary numbers, i remember Bush usually sitting around 88-90 with his fastball. Last year his numbers were much worse, but i forget if his fastball had lost any velocity. This year, more often than not his fastball is in the 84-86 range, he's not throwing as hard as his first year with us.

 

Good call. His velocity was way down the first two starts but rebounded the next, so I stopped paying attention. His fastball averaged only 86.3 MPH:

 

http://gd2.mlb.com/components/game/mlb/year_2008/month_05/day_07/gid_2008_05_07_milmlb_flomlb_1/pbp/pitchers/433657.xml

 

That's way down from his average last year:

 

http://baseball.bornbybits.com/plots/Dave_Bush.html

 

I wonder what his average has been this year.

 

Now i don't claim to know if a few miles per hour would really matter all that much given a 88-90 mph fastball like his first year with us is hardly something that big league hitters struggle to catch up with.

 

I would think it matters to some degree, certainly. hardballtimes.com tried to take a look:

 

http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/how-fast-should-a-fastball-be/

Not sure if there's any conclusive evidence there.

[LouisEly]

Villy and Parra have options, so I'd prefer that they figure out how they can "regress back to the mean" in AAA than continue to struggle. I don't know about Weaver, but it is DiFelice time. His sample in AAA is getting awful big, and it is awful consistent. Time to see if he has it while they give Villy and/or Parra a chance to rebuild their confidence in AAA.

 

Also, Maddux doesn't get a pass here. I've heard before that it is frustrating for young players to work with him because he is constantly tinkering with them. No first-hand proof, just what I've heard second hand. But if you think about it, how many promising young pitchers have come up the last 4-5 years, and how many of them have panned out? Not many young pitchers have gotten better under his tutelage.

[jwill535]

"Bush had a Marcel projection of 4.55 ERA going into this year, with the average NL starter having a 4.65 ERA last year. Bush has also gotten off to a horrible start but with the injuries to Gallardo and Capuano and the dismissal of Vargas, there are no decent options (IMO) left to take over for him. Weaver has a Marcel projection of a 5.33 ERA, so a couple nice AAA starts is not going to convince me that he's gotten control of whatever troubles he's had over the last few years."

 

This is the one thing i hate about Baseball stats guys, you go with projections over production. There is no reason given his performance this year that Bush should be in the rotation, same could be said with Villy and Manny but at least they are young and could improve(see the whole Detroit Tigers staff).

[brewmann04]

I think Bush should go down and become Nashville Closer and move Weaver up to the big club.

[drezdn]

I'd much rather give DiFelice the shot than Weaver, but isn't DiFelice injured again (pulled after the 5th inning on Sunday)? His K/BB is sick, he has a decent WHIP, and just puts up decent numbers over all. He might do great in the majors or he might flounder, while with Weaver, we pretty much know exactly what he is.

[recte44]

I simply want guys who will give us 7 solid innings. The Blue Jays rotation has a bunch of complete games and their guys (Halladay, McGowan, Marcum) are consistently going into the 8th inning.

 

Stop babying these guys, already.

[Fear The Chorizo]

It's tough to say they're babying these starters when by the 5th inning they're at or above 100 pitches, and the opposition starts crushing them the 3rd and 4th times through the order.