Angels Big Two

For years, the Angels have had a couple of all-stars at the front of their rotation, anchoring their team and leading them to playoff contention. With John Lackey and Kelvim Escobar starting the year on the disabled list, however, it looked like 2008 would be the year where the Angels had to win by scoring runs and getting consistent pitching every five days, rather than being carried by a couple of Cy Young candidates.

Well, apparently, traditions are harder to break than expected, because once again, the Angels have a couple of guys pitching like aces at the front of their rotation. Joe Saunders and Ervin Santana are reasons 1A and 1B for why Los Angeles is 21-13 to start the year, ranking 2nd and 4th respectively in the American League in WPA among starting pitchers. Santana was brilliant again last night, throwing a complete game shutout against the Royals to lower his ERA to 2.02.

While these two have provided a big April lift for the Angels, the question of whether they’ve actually reached a new level of performance is unanswered. For that, let’s take a look at their relevant peripherals.

Santana: 6.98 K/9, 1.65 BB/9, 34.5% GB%
Saunders: 3.91 K/9, 1.86 BB/9, 46.5% GB%

Both of them are pounding the strike zone like never before, significantly reducing their walk rates from their major league career averages. That command improvement could certainly be legitimate. However, neither of them are striking out more batters than usual, and Saunders has actually seen his strikeout rate nosedive so far this year. Additionally, neither of them are getting any more groundballs than usual, so they’re not trading strikeouts for weak grounders. Those peripherals simply don’t match what you’d look for in a guy getting ready to contend for a Cy Young award. In fact, if we look at the numbers that affect run prevention and have very little predictive value, we see that both Saunders and Santana are leaning heavily on factors that are mostly beyond their control.

Santana: .236 BABIP, 4.7% HR/FB, 80.4% LOB%
Saunders: .253 BABIP, 6.3% HR/FB, 82.3% LOB%

All of those numbers are jumping and down, volunteering to regress to the mean. Those performances aren’t indicative of a true change in skill for either of these guys, and as those numbers shift back towards their career averages, both Santana and Saunders are going to give back a lot of the gains they’ve appeared to make early on.

If you’re an Angels fan, you have to be thrilled with what those guys have given you in the first month of the season, but you also shouldn’t expect it to continue for much longer. They’re both capable major league starters, but neither one is an all-star, and their early performances are built on a house of cards.