Baltimore Orioles: Two Free Agent Pitchers To Avoid

The Baltimore Orioles starting rotation has been a major talking point about the team. Here are two free agent pitchers the team should avoid at all costs.

As Spring Training gets nearer and nearer, one of the main talking points, and concerns, about the Orioles has been their starting rotation. They recently acquired Odrisamer Despaigne, but he’s not exactly expected to be an impact player in their rotation. At best, maybe an end-of-the-rotation kind of guy.

Because there has been a lot of talk about the starting rotation, there has also been a lot of speculation as to whether or not the Orioles will sign a free agent pitcher, and two names have been linked repeatedly to the team. They are Yovani Gallardo and Tim Lincecum, and the Orioles should stay as far away from the two of them as humanly possible.

Let’s start with Gallardo. First, to get it out of the way, probably the number one reason the Orioles shouldn’t (and likely won’t) sign Gallardo is because they’ll have to give up their draft pick to sign him, and Duquette isn’t too interested in that. But aside from that, Gallardo out-pitched his stats by a lot last year. So let’s geek it up and dive into the numbers (note: for what many of these sabermetric terms mean, click here and use that glossary).

Last year, Gallardo went 13-11 and had a 3.42 ERA. At first glance, that sounds pretty good, especially considering he was with the Rangers in the AL, a traditionally hitter-friendly league. But if you look a bit deeper into his stats, you’ll notice a lot of outliers.

First of all, the most obvious one, his FIP was 4.00 and his xFIP was 4.31, way off from his 3.42 ERA (a career best by the way), suggesting a fair share of good luck for Gallardo. Also, Gallardo’s K/9 was a paltry 5.91, which is pretty average (and below his career average of 8.23), and when you look at that compared to his left on base (LOB) percentage of 77.2%, that suggests a regression. Typically, the league average of LOB% is around 70%, and if you’re a high-strikeout pitcher, you’ll likely have an above-average LOB%, but Gallardo isn’t at all.

There’s also the issue of his control, specifically his 3.32 BB/9 and 1.42 WHIP. He walks people a lot. All of this suggests, strongly, that Gallardo is not what he was last year, and that he’s due for a pretty serious regression, something the Orioles cannot afford.

Then there’s Big Time Timmy Jim. Everyone remembers Lincecum when he was a perennial Cy Young contender, but he has suffered from the same thing that Ubaldo Jimenez has suffered from, which is a seriously diminished velocity on his fastball.

In 2011, Lincecum had a 2.74 ERA and a 9.12 K/9. In 2012, he maintained his K/9 for the most part, but his ERA shot up to 5.18, which begs the question, what happened? The answer is his fastball, specifically that it went from an average of 92 mph to 90 mph. And then by 2014, it was at 89 mph, and last year it was at 87 mph. On top of all that, Lincecum started walking people a lot more. His WHIP went up to 1.47 in 2012 from a 1.21 in 2011, and its hovered around the mid-ones since then.

Lincecum, like Jimenez, was a fastball pitcher with decent off-speed stuff and a crazy windup that fooled a lot of batters. But once his fastball lost velocity and became exceptionally average, he couldn’t adjust and completely lost his step. On top of that, his windup has caused a lot of control issues, so now he’s only easier to hit, but he’s wild. Plus, he just had hip surgery, so health is a concern on all of that.

Now, perhaps Duquette is able to sign Lincecum for virtually nothing and we give it a shot, if that’s the case, maybe that would be alright, but he should have an exceptionally short leash. Take his last name off of his jersey and who is he? A bottom-tier starting pitcher.

So who should the Orioles sign? The answer to that is Mat Latos. Latos had a rough year last year, pitching to a 4.95 ERA, but a look at his 3.72 FIP and 63.8% LOB rate (he’s an above average strikeout pitcher at 7.74 K/9 so it shouldn’t be that low) suggests that he had some bad luck. Not only that, but his HR/FB rate was 11.6%, which is exceptionally high for him being that his career average is around 8.8%.

All of his skill stats look the same, he’s still striking guys out at the same rate, his fastball hasn’t changed, he’s not walking batters that much more than normal (his BB/9 was 2.48 last year compared to a career 2.65), so everything should be roughly the same. Will he be an ace? No. But could he pitch to a mid-threes ERA with around seven K/9? Absolutely. And that’s something the Orioles rotation could definitely use.