Ranking the Texas Rangers Rotation
Heading into 2012, the Texas Rangers starting rotation can be seen as either a strength, or a question mark for this team, depending on the perspective from which it is viewed.
The starting rotation is the cornerstone to the foundation of a winning baseball team. Many teams in history have achieved wild success solely based on the strength of a starting rotation (see: 2001 Arizona Diamondbacks), and conversely, many otherwise talented teams have been doomed to failure due to a weakness in their front five (see: 2001 Texas Rangers).
Below are the questions that will need to be answered for the Rangers in 2012:
- Will Yu Darvish be able to successfully adapt to facing major league quality hitting in his first year since coming to the MLB from Japan?
- Will Neftali Feliz make the jump from closer to starter seamlessly, or will the softness in his secondary and tertiary pitches be too great an obstacle to overcome?
- Did Matt Harrison and Derek Holland over-perform in 2011, or are they truly young left-handed starters on their way to bigger and better things in 2012?
- Was the ballooned ERA and HR/9 in 2011 for Colby Lewis an anomaly, the symptoms of an injured hip he was battling, or the early stages of a regression in production for the now 32 year old?
Today on Baseball Prospectus, Jay Jaffe attempted to answer these and many more questions. Jaffe ranks all of the AL starting rotations, predominantly using PECOTA, which is Baseball Prospectus’s projection tool.
PECOTA ranks the Rangers starters based on WARP (Wins Above Replacement Player) as such – Neftali Feliz (3.2), Yu Darvish (3.1), Colby Lewis (2.9), Derek Holland (1.4), Matt Harrison (0.6), and Alexi Ogando (2.3). (Ogando is included because Jaffe ranked the top 6 starters for each AL team. The breakdown of Ogando’s WARP is 1.3 as a starter, and 1.0 as a reliever.)
That would give the Rangers a total of 11.2 WARP from their top 5 starting pitchers, and a total of 13.5 WARP from their top 6 starting pitchers. In 2011, the Ranger 5 starting pitchers (Lewis, Harrison, Holland, Ogando, and C.J. Wilson) combined to total 13.4 WARP. The results for the top 6 starting pitchers was only 13.7 WARP, as the Rangers starting rotation experienced incredible health, and only 5 starts were made outside of the five Opening Day starters. By comparison, PECOTA expects the 2012 group of Rangers starters to be slightly worse than the 2011 version.
However, in comparison to the rest of the American League, PECOTA ranks the Rangers second only to the Los Angeles Angels in terms of WARP by the top 5 team starters, and that only by 0.5 WARP. The Rangers are best in the AL for their top 6 starting pitchers, and trail only the Philadelphia Phillies for all of MLB. This is an upgrade from the rankings completed earlier this offseason by ESPN’s Buster Olney, who ranked the Rangers as the sixth-best rotation in baseball.
Based on the projections from PECOTA, we can answer the questions posed above as such:
- Yu Darvish will have a successful first year.
- Neftali Feliz will be the Rangers best starting pitcher.
- 2011 was just a flash in the pan for Matt Harrison and Derek Holland.
- Colby Lewis will return to his effective 2010 form.
In my personal opinion, I disagree with PECOTA on its projections for Feliz (I would grade him to struggle more as a starting pitcher), Harrison (0.6 WARP is miniscule for a pitcher who posted 3.1 WARP in 2011 and has continued to improve), and Holland (1.4 WARP is modest production, but Holland really seemed to find a new gear in 2011, and almost the entirety of his 2.2 WARP was earned in just the 2nd half of last season).
PECOTA and I can agree on one thing: backed with quality replacements like Ogando and Scott Feldman, the Rangers have the deepest starting rotation in the American League.
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