And I Don’t Break ‘Em for Nobody

After swapping out Silva for Liriano, it got into my head that Radke and Lohse must be in a bit of trouble as well. Silva’s struggles were so profound that they made Lohse’s terrible start look a little less terrible, but consider that his two best starts of the season were both six inning outings with ten base-runners. Like most baseball fans, I follow Major League stats more closely than Minor League ones, but I had to check out the Rochester updates every few days this season just to catch a glimpse of a sub-8.00 ERA. Boof Bonser jumped off the page by separating himself from the rest of the AAA pitching staff with a strikeout per inning pitched, long and effective starts and a microscopic ERA compared to his big league counterparts.

Perhaps the most intriguing storyline here is the demotion of a starting pitcher making nearly $4 million this season and with 152 career starts. During Monday’s getaway match-up with the White Sox, Jack Morris joined Dick Bremer in the booth, commenting that the Twins starters all have too much service time to be optioned to the minor leagues. Since Lohse has been in the majors and with the Twins for the entire run of winning seasons (a distinction he shares with Santana, Rincon, Hunter and Radke), it seemed logical that he could not be sent to the minors without his consent. If you are unfamiliar with the option rule, think of it this way: once a player joins the 40-man roster, the team can assign him to the minor leagues and recall him to the major leagues without going through waivers for three seasons. There are limitations to when and how the player can be recalled, but if the team does not burn up options before five years of Major League service time, the options vanish. Major League Baseball defines a season as 90 days for the purpose of counting towards an option year, specifically in the instance where a player signs a major league contract (thus joining the 40 man roster) and spends less than 90 days playing that season (as in the short season rookie leagues). I, like Jack Morris, was under the impression that Lohse fulfilled his fifth year of Major League service at the end of the 2005 season after spending more than 90 days on the roster in 2001 (June 20 until the end of the season). Apparently, the definition of an option year is different than a year of service time, giving the Twins until June 20 of this year to option Lohse to AAA for the first time since his original recall. Therefore, the Twins can keep Lohse in the minors for as long as they see fit (which might not be long at $4 million), but lose the ability to option him after about one more month of Major League service, after which they can outright him to the minors which requires his approval. The more likely scenario is that Ryan has already started actively shopping Lohse so the team can get something out of him while forcing someone else to pay his salary.

In terms of performance, I previously alluded to the fact that Silva was unique from the rest of the staff in that he was not struggling with bad luck to go with his bad pitching in terms of batting average on balls in play (BABIP). Lohse is a member of the opposite group, suffering from a .370 BABIP so far this year, which inflates his ERA artificially. On the other hand, a .370 BABIP is not a death sentence. Juan Rincon has pitched around his .373 BABIP with a 9.82 K/9 and no HR surrendered so far, leaving him with a sub-3.00 ERA. Lohse, though, has always struggled with a poor K/BB ratio and lots of HR. Small problems in both categories combined with bad luck to doom the start of his 2006 campaign. Other than ERA, most of Lohse’s stats are not out of line with his career numbers, but any reasonable team would be more inclined to work through struggles with a 24-25 year old than a 27 year old with nearly five seasons under his belt. Sometimes a pitcher in this mold will reward a GM’s patience, as in the case of Jon Garland, but more often than not, several years of struggles do not predict success. Still, Lohse has eaten enough innings in his career and won enough games that some over-eager GM will throw away a couple of B or C prospects for the privileging of watching him pitch every fifth day. As I have mentioned before, I will side with Terry Ryan in that sort of deal.

Speaking of Ryan’s penchant for fleecing teams out of their pitching prospects, replacing Lohse with Bonser refers back to two of those trades. Lohse came over from the Cubs for a washed up Rick Aguilera in 1999, at least gobbling up some league average innings at a cost efficient rate during 2001-2005. Bonser, of course, joins Liriano and Nathan as crucial elements of the Twins staff for this season and likely for several seasons to come. Not to rub salt in the wound, but the Giants could really use some help preventing runs as they languish in last place. Of course, the help is not lost on the Minnesota rotation, fresh off a sweep at the hands of the division-leading Tigers. Bonser should provide some help toward that end, even though PECOTA only sees him as a 5.04 ERA. Part of the problem that PECOTA saw was that his strikeout rate had never been strong enough to compensate for a fairly high walk rate until last season. Even though a 23 year-old pitcher can make real improvements, especially when joining a new team and working with a new coaching staff, PECOTA does not weigh the organizational change and sees translation trouble in going from AAA in SF to a full season of AA after joining the Twins. Since he has made real improvements every year since joining the Minnesota organization, his numbers this year do not seem so out of line. He has posted a strikeout per inning while continuing to walk about 3.5 per nine, differentiating himself from the rest of Minnesota’s control freak staff. Unlike Baker and Liriano, Bonser does not have the pedigree to contend for the Rookie of the Year, but he will certainly perform at a higher level than Lohse’s 2006, and probably a higher level than Lohse’s best seasons.

Before 2006, Terry Ryan vowed that he was not afraid of using two rookie starters in his starting rotation. He started the season with the more established players getting the most playing time, but lived up to the management axiom that the first 40-50 games are spent learning what the team most needs and the next 40-50 are spent fulfilling those needs. After the first 40-odd games demonstrated a prominent need for improving the pitching staff, Ryan stayed true to his earlier statement, boldly putting faith in young talent. Nobody is about to mistake Ryan for a Cuban gangster. Nonetheless, these moves echo Tony Montana’s proudest attributes: his balls and his word.