42 45 47 41 49 43 year old former MLB pitcher Orlando Hernandez was activated yesterday by the Oklahoma City RedHawks, a minor league affiliate of the Texas Rangers. Hernandez last pitched in 2007, when he went 9-5 with a 3.72 ERA for the Fluke York Mets. He tried to give it a go last year in the Mets minor league system but was forced to shut his season down after surgery on his toe. Now that he’s back and pitching, does this guy have anything left to contribute to a Major League team?
As mentioned above, he had a 3.72 ERA in 2007, which is pretty nice. However, if we look at his FIP of 4.93 (which strips out a pitcher’s good or bad luck), we see that Hernandez wasn’t really that special. The widely accepted replacement level FIP for a starting big league pitcher is 5.50. So El Duque was better than replacement level…but barely so. Given that Hernandez is now two years older, how should we expect him to perform going forward? Checking out CHONE’s player page for El Duque here, we see a 4.26 ERA projection. That’s pretty good, and El Duque could be very valuable down the stretch to just about any team. But if we take a closer look at CHONE’s projection, the model “thinks” Hernandez is 39 years old, which we know to be wrong because his real age has since been revealed. If CHONE “knew” that Hernandez was actually 43 years old, his projected ERA would go up by a non-trivial amount. It’s very rare for a 43 year old player to have success in the bigs, and his projection would reflect that.
So let’s conservatively (and extremely unscientifically) regress his projected ERA to 5.00 (which I would guess is being very unkind). A 5.00 ERA isn’t great, of course, but could he still be useful for the Rangers? Well, take a look here at the Rangers current starting pitchers, sorted by FIP. A 5.00 FIP would place Orlando as the 4th best pitcher on the staff! The Rangers pitching staff is so terrible that a 43 year old journeyman would constitute an upgrade. That the Rangers are somehow still in 1st place in the AL West despite such a dogshit staff is an outright miracle.
The moral of the story: Orlando, you’re not very good, but you wisely chose which team to sign with. Hope to see you in the bigs soon.
what’s FIP?
Defensively independent pitching statistic. It looks at how well a pitcher pitches regardless of how shitty his defense is.
The Rangers are in first because of Kevin Millwood.
Thought I explained it decently, but basically FIP = ERA if you assume an average defense (read: average BABIP). I’ll link to a glossary entry on fangraphs going forward.
This was not my best work. I didn’t even consider ballpark effects.
/hangs head in shame
//puts on scarlet S shirt
///runs away crying
I thought that was the part of the body that hangs over Charlie Weis’ belt. Oh, nevermind. That’s FUPA. As you were.
GOD nick…what’s wrong with you?
fucking sinner.