Much as I hate linking to CBSSports.com, which is a direct competitor of FanHouse, I’ve got to bring this quote to you, from my pal Scott Miller’s column. Miller asked a scout about Tim Lincecum, and here’s what he heard.
“Lincecum is done. I think he’s finished. He used to sit at 92, 93 [mph with his fastball] and then hop it up to 96, 97. Now, he sits at 89, 90 and when he reaches back, it’s 96, 97. And the problem is, his offspeed stuff isn’t effective enough to compensate.”
That’s pretty harsh. The people I talk to seem to have some concerns about Lincecum, but no one has gone that far. Anyway, there ya go.
I am still skeptical about all the fuss made over his velocity, because I think his velocity started dipping a few years ago, and that was by design. Look at his final game of 2009. His average fastball was 89 mph. He gave up two runs in seven innings.
I think, as Adam LaRoche said in my story, the problem is his command. He’s leaving balls all over the place. Why? I have no idea. If I did, I wouldn’t be working for FanHouse. I’d be working for the Giants.
(Ironic, if you recall a little spat between me and Cameron, or more specifically, between me and Cameron’s followers, from last year. Anyway, now I work at FanHouse and FanGraphs is one of our partners, so we’re all friends.)
Back to the point, I have often argued that FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching) got too much play when it came to Cy Young discussion. It was my reasoning for suggesting that Chris Carpenter deserved the Cy Young over Tim Lincecum last year, and I got into it a little more this year. Well, Trevor Cahill is shaping up to be this year’s Carpenter, a guy who gets a lot of outs, but gets no respect from the sabermetric community because he’s not racking up enough strikeouts. They say he’s just lucky.
A little more multimedia. For the past month or so, we’ve done a weekly show, the MLB Hour, and it’s getting better every week. I urge you to watch the whole episode, and to come back to watch it every week, but if you are just interested in me and the Giants-related stuff, about 9 minutes in, I file a report on Pat Burrell. That’s followed by a little discussion of the woes of Tim Lincecum. After that I get into a little chat about my story on young pitchers on contenders whose workloads bear watching (like Madison Bumgarner).
As I’m sure you’ve noticed by going to FanHouse every day, we’ve been doing more and more multimedia stuff. This week I did a few FanHouse TV items out at AT&T Park, including this interview with Aubrey Huff.
Bumgarner, who just turned 21, has never thrown more than 141 1/3 innings, and already he’s at 153, with more than five weeks to go. The industry standard is to prevent young pitchers from increasing their innings by more than 20 percent. In Bumgarner’s case, that would be 169 innings, which would give him about two more starts, or three short ones.
The good news is the Giants have several off days the rest of the way, so they could probably skip him once through the rotation, if they wanted. Problem with that is he’s been their best pitcher lately.
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