Liz Lives

As we talked about this morning, Carlos Zambrano had the best pitching performance of the day yesterday, throwing a no-hitter against the Astros. But it might not have been the most remarkable performance of the day – that award has to go to Radhames Liz, who tossed eight shutout innings at the Twins. He gave up five hits and walked a batter, so he clearly wasn’t as good as Zambrano, so why is this performance notable?

Because, before yesterday, Liz had been the biggest disaster of any starting pitcher in baseball this year. He entered the game with a 7.75 ERA in 65 innings, spanning 14 starts for the Orioles. He was averaging less than five innings per start on the season and had given up at least two runs in every single appearance on the year. His longest appearance, before yesterday, was 6 1/3 innings against the Pirates back on June 14th. He gave up four runs in that appearance.

His average game score for the season was 38. His FIP was a staggeringly horrible 6.88. He walked a bunch of guys, gave up a lot of home runs, and didn’t strike out that many batters. He also struggled to strand the runners he put on base. Even though he threw hard, he got hit harder. He wasn’t a major league quality pitcher.

And then, yesterday, facing a Twins team fighting for their playoff lives, he did the best impression of a major leaguer that we’ve ever seen him do. He threw strikes, got groundball outs, and managed to keep the ball in the yard. He got within three outs of a shutout – not bad for a guy who had never pitched into the 8th inning before.

Despite yesterday’s performance, Liz has still been a total disaster this year – he’s at -1.58 WPA/LI despite only getting 15 starts. Over a full season, this kind of performance would be about 3.5 wins below an average pitcher, or about a win and a half below replacement level. Liz’s ’08 season is truly one of the worst we’ve ever seen, but for one shining day, he actually showed some major league ability.

Congratulations to Liz – hopefully this isn’t the highlight of your career.