Paul Maholm has been one of the Pirates best pitchers since he began starting consistently in 2006. When he is on his game, he is one of the top left handed pitchers in the National League in terms of getting hitters out. Maholm isn't going to strike out 10 batters a game or be on Baseball Tonight's "That's Nasty", but he is still a very capable big league pitcher. Let's take a look at the numbers.
Maholm's 2009 was a valley year. He started and ended the year well, but pitched pretty poorly at times in the middle of it. His June-July ERA was well over 5. There were a couple really bad starts in there that he could never really overcome, and his final 2009 statistics reflected it. His ERA for the year was 4.44, which isn't terrible, but when taking a deeper look, you see that he actually pitched much better than that.
Maholm pitched 194.2 innings in '09, which is right about what you want to see from your top guys. However, his strikeouts went down. In 2008 he struck out just over 6 batters per nine, and for whatever reason, that number fell to 5 and a half in 2009. The positives were that he kept his walks down (2.78 per nine) and really kept his HR rate down (.65 per nine, tied with Charlie Morton for the best on the staff). Maholm has always been a great groundball pitcher, and he kept that reputation up last year as well with a 52% ground ball rate.
Now those are all just numbers that don't really predict anything about this upcoming season. The things that do predict what kind of 2010 season he will have come when we look at the BABIP and FIP numbers.
Maholm's BABIP in 2009 was .325, which is incredibly high. That's a lot of bad luck there, which he almost become used to. In 3 of his 4 full seasons as a Pirates starter he has had a BABIP over .310. The law of averages suggests that eventually he is going to have to have a couple seasons under the league average. If that happens in 2010, which is mathematically more than likely will, he is due for a career year.
That last sentence is supported by Maholm's 2009 FIP (fielding independent pitching ERA). His FIP was a very nice looking 3.83. Ignoring BABIP, if Maholm's ERA would have been 3.83 in 2009, he would have been in the top 20 in the NL. If Maholm's BABIP would have been closer to the league average in 2009 and his ERA would have better reflected his FIP, he would be near the top 10 in the NL. That's a confusing sentence. Basically what I'm saying is that if you turn some of Paul Maholm's 2009 bad luck into good luck, he would have had a seriously fantastic statistical year.
So what does this all mean for 2010? It means this:
If Paul Maholm has better luck in 2010, which is mathematically VERY likely, and repeats his performance from 2009, he will be one of the best starting pitchers in the National League.
I'm not predicting that Maholm is going to be in the top 10 in ERA this year or win 20 games, but I am expecting big things out of him in 2010. I believe that he will be the Pirates ace and really turn some heads in the National League.
Check back tomorrow to see what the FIP stats have to say about Ross Ohlendorf.
2 comments:
Just a short comment about "law of averages" and marh/statistics. I do not believe in stats there is such a thing as law of averages ie if you flip a coin 99 times and it comes up tails the chance it comes up heads the 100 hundredth time is......50/50 ie previous outcomes have no effect on the current/next event. If indeed babip is a random factor previous years outcomes should have no effect on this years outcome.
I completely agree with you on that, I guess I wasn't thinking when I was writing those sentences. The main point I wanted to get out was that Paul Maholm is a better pitcher than what his numbers showed last year, because of the bad luck factor.
You are correct, Maholm has the same chance of being unlucky again in 2010 as he has does at getting lucky. However, the point still remains that Paul Maholm is much more likely to have better numbers in 2010 than he did in 2009.
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