Thursday, April 08, 2010

Valverde is Notorious Slow Starter

It was a nice first start for Max Scherzer tonight.  And Miguel Cabrera's at bat in the ninth was amazing.  Other than that, it was a lackluster performance by the Tigers and a really tough loss to a weak team.  It's late so I won't talk much about it.  However, I do want to bring up one point about Jose Valverde's blown save.  I was looking at his career monthly splits just now and was reminded that he is a slow starter (See table below).

His lifetime ERA in March/April is 4.30 in 52 1/3 innings.  In May, it's 5.00 in 63 innings.  His ERA then gets dramatically better by month - 3.86 in June, 2.23 in July, 2.13 in August and 1.52 in September/October.  The reason is his tendency to give up the gopher ball early in the year (as we saw tonight).  He has allowed 2.1 homers per nine innings (HR/9) in April.  In May and June, he has surrendered 1.3 and 1.5 HR/9.  In the final three months of the year, his rates have been 0.5, 0.6 and 0.3. 

So, as painful as it was to watch the finish of tonight's game, we can take solace in fact that things will likely get better for Valverde as the year goes along.  On the downside, we'll probably see a couple of more gopher balls at bad times before he starts to get rolling. 


Month
IP
ERA
HR/9
March/April
52 1/3
4.30
2.1
May
63
5.00
1.3
June
77
3.86
1.5
July
49 1/3
2.37
0.5
August
80 1/3
2.13
0.6
Sept./Oct.
65
1.52
0.3

Source: Baseball-Reference.com

4 comments:

  1. How often has he given up a leadoff game-tying home run to a guy who'd been wearing an 0-4 collar up until that point?!?

    I was happy to see a 1-2-3 today, but when he does that in a save situation, I'll forgive him for last night's debacle!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'll take anybody over Rodney!!!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Valverde gave up a single today after striking out his first hitter, but that runner was erased on a game ending DP. Technically, that might not count as a 1-2-3 inning, but it's close enough.

    I will now forgive him for that snafu in KC.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ozz, I think that's what you'll see from Valverde more often than not. It just looks like he is a bit prone to gopher balls early in the season. Hopefully, most of them will be solo shots with a 2 or 3 run lead.

    Lee

    ReplyDelete

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