Twins sign Livan Hernadez 1 year 5 million

[zurch1818]

Twins sign Hernandez

 

Interesting signing........IMO Hernandez seems like he has pitched out his arm over the years. In the past he has been an inning eater and I think now there is nothing left.

 

With no relation to being an inning eater, I can see this turn into the Sidney Ponson signing the Twins did last year. It goes nowhere.

[trwi7]

I don't really get this move for them. Why not just go with the young guys?

[Leinie Lodge]

Lose Johan, Add Livan... major stat-enhancer for AL sluggers

[DrWood]

hernandez will still be an innings-eater, imo.

I'm surprised he lasted this long. He was one of the TWO B-type free agent starting pitchers; Glavine was the A.

[endaround]

I really don't know if I could stand being a Twins fan. They seem to win despite their best efforts to put roadblocks in their way. They make their living off of drafting well but have a major league manager who hates playing young players. So they sign a bunch of crappy veterans to bad contracts and end up having to dump them. This should be a rebuilding year, so why waste $5 million on a pitcher who most think is much older than his reported age and has been going downhill for the last three seasons?

[jjfanec]

This was why I thought the Twins would have been a good trade partner for us. It was talked about in the rumors section. It looked obvious to me the Twins needed a veteren pitcher. In my opinion we could have offered something to them that was substantially better than a 32 year year old coming off a season where his ERA was just under 5, his WHIP was 1.6, and his BAA was .308. Sure he is an innings eater but those numbers were in the NL and a light hitting division. This is the kind of odd signing the Twins seem to make once an off-season. They made it last year with Ramon Ortiz and now this year with Hernadez.

[JoeHova]

To be fair, Livan is significantly better than Ramon Ortiz. He had a better ERA+ last year than Bush, Capuano or Vargas. He had a season that was basically identical to Suppan's, which makes him pretty useful, albeit underwhelming.

[Ennder]

ERA+ is a very shaky stat over a single year so I don't think you can draw any conclusions from it for comparing pitchers. It suffers every flaw that ERA does and then adds shady park factors to the mix. If you swap Livan and Bush you would have easily seen a 5+ ERA out of Livan last year without a single doubt in mind. Having said that the Twins have a pretty good defense and they always seem to have success with pitchers (other than the Liriano injury of course) so I bet this works out ok for them.

[Brian the Automator]

Livan will give them some flexibility with how they use their younger pitchers, and will maybe be attractive to a contender who needs a bottom-of-the-rotation starter at the deadline. Your basic "sign him to trade him" deal.

[endaround]

Except there is no reason to expect him to bounce back. His FIP the past three seasons: 4.51, 4.90, 5.73(!). His K/BB ratio: 1.75, 1.64, 1.14.

[JoeHova]

ERA+ is a very shaky stat over a single year so I don't think you can draw any conclusions from it for comparing pitchers. It suffers every flaw that ERA does and then adds shady park factors to the mix. If you swap Livan and Bush you would have easily seen a 5+ ERA out of Livan last year without a single doubt in mind. Having said that the Twins have a pretty good defense and they always seem to have success with pitchers (other than the Liriano injury of course) so I bet this works out ok for them.

 

Ok, but Livan and Suppan are the same age, have both thrown over 2000 career innings and their career ERA+s are within 1 point of each other. You aren't going to convince me that they haven't been similarly effective over their careers.

 

Also, if you're basing your argument solely on DIPS/FIP, hasn't that been discredited as being the end-all of pitching stats? I'll take 10+ years of track record over theoretical results any day. Theoreticals are interesting, but at some point they have to become reality and so far the theoretical idea that Suppan is better than Livan has not come to pass. I learned this lesson with my repeated championing of Dan Gadzuric based on what he could theoretically do given enough PT. It's been many years now and it hasn't happened, thus the fact that a case could be made for it happening is pretty irrelevant.

[Ennder]

No I'm just saying ERA+ isn't something I'd use over a single season. If you want to look at say 3 year averages and use ERA I'm a bit more ok with it. When you say Livan was better than Bush or Capuano last year because of ERA+ it is on very shaky ground.

 

Also my argument has absolutely nothing to do with DIPS or FIP and even if it were FIP shows a better correlation year to year than ERA so I'd still side with it if all I had was a single season of information.

[JoeHova]

ok, but if you aren't using ERA or FIP, what are you using? I inferred that you were using FIP based on your denigration of ERA. Are you using k/bb ratio? because that's a key component of FIP. I realize Livan's was bad last year but he usually gets an ok amount of Ks.

 

Also, my main point wasn't that I'd rather have Livan than Bush, just that Livan has some value and is not total garbage like Ponson or R. Ortiz. He's still a legit major leaguer despite my lingering antipathy toward him for blowing Game 7 in 2002.

[jjfanec]

You may think Hernadez was a lot better than Ortiz before the Twins signed him but the number beg to differ. Outside of ERA their WHIPS and BAA were similar. Ortiz actually had more K's in less innings. To me they are actually quite similar signings. I would rather have Hernadez but he isnt that much of an upgrade. The Twins could have gotten more but I think they wanted an innings eater without having to trade and give up prospects.

 

Ortiz's numbers

Team G GS W L SV CG SHO IP H R ER HR BB K ERA WHIP BAA

2006 WAS 33 33 11 16 0 0 0 190.2 230 127 118 31 64 104 5.57 1.54 .297

 

Hernadez's numbers

Team G GS W L SV CG SHO IP H R ER HR BB K ERA WHIP BAA

2007 ARI 33 33 11 11 0 1 0 204.1 247 116 112 34 79 90 4.93 1.60 .308

[Ennder]

Well if I were going to compare them I'd look at xERA and then the pitchers career trends compared to it and park he is in. xERA shows very strong correlation year to year and adjusts based on changes in skills not changes in things like strand rate and hit rate. It factors in BB's, K's and GB% which are the biggest keys to pitching. What xERA doesn't do is account for pitchers who don't fit the 'typical' mold so you have to look at a players career trends and modify xERA based on those to get a true skill level.

 

Livan has had a 4.04, 4.65, 5.13, 5.55 xERA the last four years a pretty clear downward trend. his BB/9 are going up, K/9 going down and FB% is going up which are all bad things. He has a pretty clear cut trend of beating his xERA mostly because he has above average strand rates and pitched in a park that suppresses his HR's so I'd say something around a 5 ERA is what he pitched like last year. Park adjust that and it looks even worse.

 

Bush has had a 4.23, 4.23, 3.49, 4.18 xERA the past four years which is a pretty steady skillset. He is the opposite of Livan showing a career long pattern of low strand rates and giving up too many HR's. I'd say he pitched something around a 4.55 ERA last year from a skills standpoint. Park adjust that and it looks a little bit better.

 

In this case the most likely culprit is team defense. Livan had the lowest hit rate of his last four years this season and Bush had his highest, which isn't surprising since Arizona was a strong defensive team and the Brewers one of the worst in baseball.

[Katuluu]

Livan will give them some flexibility with how they use their younger pitchers, and will maybe be attractive to a contender who needs a bottom-of-the-rotation starter at the deadline. Your basic "sign him to trade him" deal.

Brian nailed the reasons behind this. Livan allows them to take their time with their young pitchers, and keep Perkins in the bullpen. If Livan pitches badly they jettison him and give his spot to a youngster, and if he pitches decent they try and trade him for prospects.

[JoeHova]

once again, we're getting too far into theoretical happenings, imo. Livan has beaten his xERA each of the years you posted the numbers for, usually by quite a lot. Meanwhile, Bush has been significantly above his xERA the last 3 years. Both of them played for two franchises during that time span, so I'm not comfortable attributing all of the difference to defense. If you are, that's fine, but I don't believe things like xERA and FIP have been proven to be accurate enough to throw out all the actual data. Those things say Glendon Rusch should be a good pitcher and Tiger Wang should be terrible. I'm not that comfortable relying on something that sometimes misses reality that badly. Sure, sometimes ERA doesn't tell the whole story, but it does tell a story, unlike the other things. ERA measures how effective a pitcher and his defense were at keeping runs of the board that year.

 

I realize that I may be coming off as something of a Luddite, which is far from the case. I have plenty of books on sabermetrics. It's just that I have not been convinced that these fake ERA's are better than regular ERA's, at least over an extended period. I think they are just pieces of the puzzle and if a guy has a multi-year track record of them being horribly inaccurate, it's better to throw them out rather than keep clinging to them.

[Ennder]

I'm not attributing it to defense though, I modified the xERA because they showed said pattern already. Last year went above and beyond the pattern. ERA is horrible for judging a pitchers talent over a single year, it is the simple truth and there is no doubt about it. We are talking about a SINGLE year here. Now if you want to talk about their ERA over the last 3 years or something you start to have an argument as long as you are defense/park/bullpen adjusting it somewhere (and no ERA+ doesn't defense or bullpen adjust it).

 

You of course are more than welcome to your opinion but you are as likely to convince me that 1+1=3 as you are that ERA is how you should be judging a single year from a pitcher. There is so much variance and luck involved over 200 IP that the stat is just not very useful. Give me a 600 IP chunk of ERA and I'll buy into it some, 200 and it means almost nothing.

[rluzinski]

It's just that I have not been convinced that these fake ERA's are better than regular ERA's, at least over an extended period.

 

I think people who study such things would agree with that. I guess the question would be, what is a an acceptable sample size to balance out all the noise in ERA? Three seasons isn't necessarily going to cancel out fielding effects (the Brewers could easily have bad fielding for years to come) but you'd think everything else (LOB%, situational hitting, etc...) should even it self out much better over 550+ IP.

[JohnBriggs12]

Except there is no reason to expect him to bounce back. His FIP the past three seasons: 4.51, 4.90, 5.73(!). His K/BB ratio: 1.75, 1.64, 1.14.

What does he need to bounce back from? He's 39-34 over that 3 year span, half of which was spent with lowly Washington.

 

Hernandez has been declared dead by the statheads like endaround for years, but somehow still wins games proving time and again he knows how to win which is not a bad quality to have from your 5th starter (why I like Bush and Vargas over Capuano). He was masterful in beating the Cubs in the playoffs last fall, letting them get on base, then getting out of trouble with the key pitch when he needed it.

[homer]

"he knows how to win which is not a bad quality to have from your 5th starter (why I like Bush and Vargas over Capuano"

 

Capuano has more wins than Bush or Vargas the last three years. If you want to discount his one 18 year win as a fluke then you must discount Hernandez' 15 win year from Washington.

 

And if you want to talk wins you have to talk about run support. The two are very dependent on one another. Vargas was 2nd int he NL in runs per 9 innings last year and Capuano was 50th (difference of over two runs per 9 innings).