Una Selva Oscura: Alex Wood

Let us not talk falsely now: Most of us Fantasy geeks know baseball stats better than we know baseball. We understand stats from the inside, but baseball incompletely and from the outside. And since everyone’s got full access to the same full set of stats and the predictions based thereon, we all know or think we know exactly the same things. There’s too much confusion; we can’t get no relief.

But what about the guys who are stat geeks, but also know baseball? Do their direct observations of the game itself, unmediated by statistics, offer a way out of the inferno of stat-geek parity? Do they have an edge over us, or would they have one, if they weren’t generously sharing with us what they see?

To take an example not at random: Alex Wood, as you probably know, is a left-handed starting pitcher. He’s owned in roughly half of all ESPN and Yahoo leagues. Wood was outstanding in 2014 and extremely disappointing in 2015. He attributed this to faulty pitching mechanics, and sure enough, as sharp-eyed Jeff Zimmerman of Fangraphs noted during Spring Training, Wood’s arm slot has changed and, apparently, improved. Beloved Fangraphs editor Eno Sarris made the same observation about Wood’s first start of the regular season.

So let’s all grab or trade for Alex Wood, right? Not so fast. We don’t dispute for a second that Wood’s arm slot is indeed different. Though we’re not perceptive or knowledgeable enough to have spotted it ourselves, or even to have noticed it if we’d gone looking for it, Eno and Zimmerman are, and with them as guides you’ll see it too if you look at their before-and-after videos. All respect to them.

But we’re not ready to acknowledge the usefulness of this information as a predictor. First of all, just because Wood’s arm slot changes for one pitch or one inning or one game or a couple of games, it won’t necessarily stay changed as the season goes on. Maybe he starts hurting, or his concentration fails, or his muscle memory isn’t what it used to be, or he has an inexplicably rough outing, and he lapses into his unsuccessful arm-slot ways. More importantly, as far as we know there’s no research suggesting that this kind of information is predictive. It may be, it makes sense that it would be, and we hope it is, but nobody’s sat down after a season, let alone several seasons, and said: Here’s what the baseball cognoscenti observed in March and April about changes in arm slot or release point or whatever. Did the guys they liked outperform or underperform their stat projections? Did the pundits do any better than the guys with Ouija Boards? If so, or if not, what explains this outcome?

Pending the answers to these questions, and continuing to recognize that everyone’s got the same stats and that there’s precious little edge to be found in purely statistical analysis, we wonder whether the direction to go for bankable Fantasy insights is towards the anecdotal or even the impressionistic. Obviously, you can’t ignore the statistics you’ve got. But you can use the anecdotal and impressionistic to interpret them.

Which brings us back to Alex Wood. The Alex Wood of 2015 was, indisputably, a 5-inning pitcher. This part isn’t impressionistic: In innings 1 through 5, his ERA was 3.52, and his WHIP was 1.31—dismaying to those of us who drafted him early, but still serviceable. In the later innings, the ERA was 5.12 and the WHIP was 1.53. Nor was this a function of a couple of disastrous outings. In seven of his 32 starts, his pitching in the 6th or 7th converted a win or a tie into a loss, or a close game into a tie (if he was ahead) or a rout (if he was behind). That seems like a lot to us. This wasn’t all that was wrong with his season: he had some first-inning woes, and he didn’t get much run support. But it looks like most of what was wrong.

So the question is: will Wood’s mechanical adjustment change this? Even if it constitutes an improvement, will it enable him to pitch well beyond five or six innings? If so, by virtue of what? Merely having to throw fewer pitches earlier, or something else? Until someone (maybe even us, if we have a chance) looks more closely and systematically at this, we’re taking the position that the adjustment won’t change things, and that Wood’s a five-inning pitcher until he’s proven otherwise. And then the question becomes: is he someplace—that is, on a team and with a manager—where a five-inning pitcher can prosper?

It seems to us that the teams on which such a pitcher can thrive are those with (1) a deep and capable bullpen, and (2) a manager who’s willing to yank a starting pitcher who’s doing well before he starts not doing well, even at the risk of disgruntling the pitcher. On both counts, early returns aren’t encouraging. Wood is on the Dodgers, whose new manager, Dave Roberts, has let Wood get overripe in both his starts. On April 7th, Wood carried a 4-0 lead into the 5th inning. He gave up 3 runs in the 5th, and Roberts let him pitch into the 6th, during which he gave up another 4 runs. Then, on April 13th, Wood carried a 3-1 lead into the 8th inning. Roberts let Wood, who’d already thrown 100 pitches, start the 8th. He gave up a hit, Pedro Baez gave up a walk, and only a 5-out save by Kenley Jansen (longer, outswise, than any of his 54 appearances last season) pulled the Dodgers’ chestnuts out of the fire.

Anything that makes Don Mattingly, whom Roberts replaced, look like a master tactician bodes ill for the Dodgers. But Roberts’s reliance on Jansen is the result of his not (or not yet—see below) having a reliable bullpen to get him from Wood to Jansen. For Roberts, too, there’s too much confusion; he can’t get no relief. His designated set-up guys, Baez and Chris Hatcher, haven’t been up to the job, and the other bullpen guys are looking old, mediocre, or both, prompting the ire, perplexity, and despair of those to whom the Dodgers’ fortunes matter.

So shun Wood, correct? Maybe not. It’s not clear yet whether Roberts is new-wave or old-school. His tactics and pronuciamentos so far suggest a little of both. He seems somewhat receptive to analytics, and he hasn’t said anything to indicate that he thinks that real men throw 120 pitches every game they start. He’s shown, with his other starting pitchers, a refreshing readiness to remove them from well-pitched games while the going’s still good. He’s already notorious for yanking Ross Stripling 7 1/3 innings into a no-hitter, and he’s taken Scott Kazmir and Kenta Maeda out of close games early with shutouts and lowish pitch counts. So maybe he’ll eventually do the same with Wood.

And the bullpen, we think, will come around. Yimi Garcia looks like a better pitcher than either Hatcher or Baez has ever been. Joe Blanton, apparently, can still pitch at 35, and might be wasted as a mop-up guy. Yaisel Sierra, a 25-year-old Cuban at whom the Dodgers threw about $30 million this winter, is supposed to be MLB-ready, and Frankie Montas, the prospect who was probably the key, from the Dodgers’ standpoint, to the Todd Frazier trade last December, could be back from rib surgery as soon as June. So Roberts won’t have to turn to Jansen in the 6th inning if he wants to preserve a Wood-created lead.

What, then, to do about Wood? Get him, we say, if he’s available in your league, or if someone’s offering him in barter at the equivalent of the price ($2 or $3 auction, Average Draft Position 277th overall, 74th starting pitcher) he commanded in the pre-season. Roberts is hard-working and ambitious, undoubtedly wants to do well in his first managerial job, especially since his team’s fans drove his rather successful predecessor out of town for failing to make it to the World Series, and—on the very impressionistic basis of a game we happened to hear him call on the New England Sports Network in 2009—seems sensible and smart. Joe Morgan he ain’t. We think he figures things out, so we wind up in the same pro-Wood camp as the direct-observation party on this one. We’ll check back in a few months to see who, if anyone, was right.