Take Slow, Deep Breaths

[Guest]

1. It's mid-April. Your current ranking in your league is simply not important. Continually assessing your team's strengths and weakness is.

2. It's mid-April. The top three pitchers on most everyone's draft board, Unit, Curt and Pedro, have combined for zero wins and an ERA of over 6.00 or something. Relax. Breathe deeply. More than likely at least one of these pitchers will earn at least one win at some point in the season. More importantly, each of these players is maintaining a very high K/BB ratio, which should mean that they aren't done just yet.

3. It's mid-April. Players get hurt. If you spent a second round pick on Griffey, then you're only now reaping your just rewards, and have little to complain about. For everyone else, there has been NO disastrous, season-ending injuries. Giles being out for 3 weeks isn't the end of your season. Jeter being out for about 2 months sucks, but you will survive. You may have lost Nen for a while, but someone else has lost Rivera, another guy is annoyed at how long it's taking Isringhausen to come back, another guy is starting to hate Benitez, etc. etc.

4. It's mid-April. The season is approximately 7.5% completed, with approximately 92.5% of the way to go. You haven't won or lost anything yet. Assess your team's apparent strengths and weaknesses so far, start formulating solutions, wait a couple more weeks to see what changes, and then start manuevering around to fix any problems that appear to be systemic, rather than just the result of a couple of bad weeks.

[Amnorix]

Oops. The "guest" post was me. My bad.

[sinicalypse]

2. It's mid-April. The top three pitchers on most everyone's draft board, Unit, Curt and Pedro, have combined for zero wins and an ERA of over 6.00 or something. Relax. Breathe deeply. More than likely at least one of these pitchers will earn at least one win at some point in the season. More importantly, each of these players is maintaining a very high K/BB ratio, which should mean that they aren't done just yet.

stop lying to everyone. right now you know that both johnson and schilling are currently trying to contact the devil to inquire about selling their souls to him in exchange for being bestowed with some bonafide runlevys hernandez stuff.

[Mordraken]

Actually I agree with Amnorix... K:BB ratio is one of the critical ones... according to Rob Nyer anyway. IIRR it was Nyer that uses K:BB to predict the quality of pitchers. That said, any pitcher allowing more than 2 baserunners an inning is trouble....

The great thing about this is that if YOU think he's gonna be OK, you might be able to trade him. Especially for players like Mike Piazza who are sucking now... you might be able to get them cheap. Of course, they can always turn into Allomar-2002, but that's the risk you take...

[Arlo]

Agreed - looking at k/bb together with k/ip trends can be an invaluable tool when evaluating players.