Should the Cubs keep Jeff Baker?

“OK on the the numbers that help get that result.”

K/9, BB/9, H/9, and HR/9 are the best predictive stats, and Marshall stacks with Adams in all of them. Not only that, but he’s younger, left handed, and didn’t have the advantage of the biggest park in the big leagues as a home field.

You look at WHIP but then determine if his WHIP is high because of a high H/9. If his H/9 is high, look at his BABIP to see if he’s getting unlucky on balls that batters make contact on. Look at his K/9 and see how much of his stuff misses bats, look at the swing and miss %, look at ANYTHING but just ERA.

I know you’re locked into these stats as being useful and important, but it’s the numbers behind them that are useful and important that tell a MUCH better story regarding the quality of the player.

I know you’ll absolutely never want to get fully behind stats, and that’s fine, but don’t try and claim that these don’t have significant importance. You can’t discount that baseball executives use advanced metrics and not stats like ERA. There’s a reason for that.

I’m sure you’ll have some other retort about WHIP or ERA, so let’s just say agree to disagree…

Doesn’t mean he’s better every single day. That’s pretty common sense.

BR is only better suited to your reality – Fangraphs is much more widely accepted across stat circles.

And you’re not even addressing my actual point, which is that WAR is not even a small part of my argument. I’m clearly using DOZENS of stats to prove my point and you cling to ERA and only ERA. Guess what, baseball stats are about much more than that. It’s not as bad as using W-L record for pitchers, but it’s close – it simply ignores ALL other factors involved and all other peripherals for that pitcher.

and it’s certainly not the stat that defines a pitcher’s success. I’m not sure there’s a stat that does that, but if there was it’d be WAR.

K/9 tells you how many bats they miss, K/BB ratio tells you how many more strikeouts than walks they give, GB% gives you an idea of how good a pitcher is at keeping his pitches down with more of a chance to make plays on them, BABIP tells you if the pitcher is unlucky due to a lot of balls finding holes.

These are things ERA will NEVER show you and it leaves a gaping hole in the stats. ERA should be a team stat and should never be tied to a pitcher alone – it’s insulting to their abilities.

2009’s 5.3 WAR season….which was promptly followed by last year’s -.1.

The guy’s a very good pitcher, but I’m not sure he’s established himself as much more than that so far. For instance, even this year where he brings his control to ace levels (2.3 BB/9), his K rate drops from maybe league average to slightly below (5.9 K/9).