Orioles Acquire Unexciting, Generic Innings Sponge
The Marlins had to pay a decently high price for Andrew Cashner. Jon Morosi is unironically tweeting about the ongoing Jeremy Hellickson sweepstakes. It’s important to establish the market context in which the Orioles have now traded for Wade Miley. It’s been obvious for months the Orioles could use some help in the rotation. The farm system didn’t make it realistically possible for them to look at higher-level solutions. They’d have to settle for what they could afford. Wade Miley is what they could afford, with the Mariners getting Ariel Miranda in exchange. There’s no money changing hands. This is about as uncomplicated as a move can get, with Miley being tremendously dull and still presumably helpful.
That’s the thing about the Orioles. Even though they’re a first-place team, it’s a team that had issues. Recent results be damned, the Orioles, in theory, can hit. We all know they can relieve. The rotation has been bad behind Chris Tillman — so bad that Wade Miley is an improvement. There aren’t many contending teams that Miley would make meaningfully better, but that’s the Orioles’ burden and blessing.
Wade Miley allows runs. This would be his third consecutive year with a worse-than-average ERA-, and his results are mostly supported by the other stuff. There’s no one area where he’s terrible, but there’s also no one area where he excels, and when you put it all together, you have something like a No. 4 starter, who looks like a No. 3 on his better days. Miley doesn’t not get strikeouts, and he doesn’t walk too many batters, but he operates without particular precision, and home runs have been flying. I’ve been describing Wade Miley, but I could be describing a lot of guys. From a baseball perspective, he’s not a special asset.
There’s something in his favor, though. Between 2012 – 2015, he threw about 800 innings, and this year he should finish with around 30 starts. Miley is, at least, rubber-armed, and that has some value provided the pitcher in question isn’t awful on a per-inning basis. The Orioles need some earlier-inning consistency. Miley’s better than a lot of what they’ve had.
Tillman, the Orioles like. Kevin Gausman still has that upside, and Dylan Bundy has shown signs of delivering. Yet there’s no way to know how many innings Bundy will be able to handle down the stretch, and after him, you have a mess in Ubaldo Jimenez, and another mess in Yovani Gallardo. Vance Worley isn’t an attractive option. Neither are Mike Wright or Tyler Wilson. It’s difficult to convey just how unreliable the rest of the Orioles rotation has been, beyond the front, so while Miley isn’t a sexy pick-up, he really ought to be a boost. The whole idea is to outscore your opponent. Miley should make it a little easier for the Orioles to outscore whoever they’re playing.
Unlike Cashner, Miley’s not a rental. He’s under contract next year for a hair under $9 million, and if that were to go swimmingly, there’s also a $12-million club option for 2018. Miley, then, is of some additional future use, even if $9 million might be about his market value. He checks a box for next year’s Orioles, and that’s important since Gallardo has gone off the rails. Mostly, they’re thinking about this year, but this could make the offseason a little more simple. It’s one less thing to do.
Ariel Miranda? The Mariners’ return is sort of a prospect, but he’s also just two years younger than Miley is. The Orioles signed him out of Cuba, and he’s spent almost this entire season starting in Triple-A, where he’s been right around league-average. Miranda is a lefty who works with his fastball in the low 90s, but he has a full repertoire, which has allowed him to be better against righties than lefties on the year. Frequently, that’s the sign of having a good offspeed weapon and a less-reliable breaking ball. For whatever it’s worth, in Miranda’s one big-league appearance, he showed better-than-average spin on his heater. Miranda feels like someone who’s one tweak away from being a big-league starter.
Certainly not an elite big-league starter, but if you want to speak generally, the Mariners gave up the actual Wade Miley, and they received someone who might well become about as valuable as Wade Miley. The value to the Orioles of having Miley v1.0 is the certainty aspect — they don’t want to mess around with an unknown like Miranda in a pennant race. But I bet Miranda will get some starts for Seattle, and he has a chance to be toward the back of the 2017 rotation. From the Mariners’ perspective, Miley is better than Miranda today, but the gap could grow slim, and the cost difference is substantial. Having Miley for next season was unnecessary.
This isn’t a trade to talk yourself into. If you’re a Mariners fan, they didn’t rip the Orioles off. And if you’re an Orioles fan, they didn’t land an impact starting pitcher. The rotation is still going to feel shaky. But it should at least feel less shaky, which’ll help if and when the offense returns. Miley offers a little bit of help in 2016, and he’ll offer a little bit of help in 2017. And while Wade Miley might not be another Chris Sale, just yesterday Miley had one of the best starts against the Cubs that there’s been all season long. The Orioles just need to survive until the samples get small. At that point, all bets are off. Almost anyone can dominate for a day. Wade Miley did. That doesn’t mean nothing.
Jeff made Lookout Landing a thing, but he does not still write there about the Mariners. He does write here, sometimes about the Mariners, but usually not.
I cant imagine Orioles fans having a problem with this deal, getting anything more than a Miley type was not very realistic.
Seems pretty inoffensive for both sides. Another wrinkle to this is the O’s haven’t started a lefty all year and don’t have one close to the majors in the farm, which makes him slightly more useful to them I guess.
The orioles also recently added logan ondrusek(a few days ago and he did good in his first game in the nib since 2014.) to increase their bullpen depth.
Looks like Wade Miley is going to help the Red Sox win the East after all!
As a Blue Jays fan this Orioles acquisition made me very excited also.
This post hints at a broader point, which is whether WAR for starting pitchers undervalues the ability to provide bulk innings. Miley has reliably averaged 6 innings per start even if he’s doing it with a worse than league average ERA.
Getting innings from starting pitchers has benefits for the rest of the pitchers on the roster. There are constraints on how many relievers are available to bear the relief workload due to roster size and various transaction limits (only certain players have options, optioned players need to spend 10 days in the minors prior to being recalled). We know that the quality of pitching performance can be impacted by workload, whether that’s the times through the order penalty for starters in each start or the potential for overuse of relievers (or high pitch counts for starters) to result in less effectiveness and eventually injury.
So one of the problems with true replacement level (“AAAA”-type) starting pitchers isn’t just how many runs they allow but that quite often they simply can’t get very deep into a game due to elevated pitch counts. That in turn sometimes has compounding effects on availability and effectiveness of middle relievers for other games because of the innings that the bullpen needs to pick up. And there’s potentially something of a “portfolio” effect where that problem really mounts if a team has more than one of these replacement level starters, which really stresses the innings required of the bullpen.
Even thinking about great starting pitchers, I also wonder if WAR sells them short. Kershaw, for example, doesn’t just help the Dodgers by providing innings where he pitches really, really well. He also averages over 7 innings per start, which puts the team in a position to be better able to use middle relievers to support other starters (well-rested relievers allow for a quicker hook and deciding to mitigate the times through the order penalty for other starters).
TLDR version: this post hints at a broader point, which is whether pitcher WAR doesn’t fully reflect the value from a starting pitcher who can provide bulk innings. That’s the case even if those innings are mediocre, such as from Miley. The underlying rationale is that (i) roster size is a constraint, (ii) there are practical limits on how many innings a bullpen can pitch, and (iii) overusing relievers risks ineffectiveness and injury.
The total number of bullpen innings does not correlate positively with bullpen performance.
That’s what I’m saying. Or are you saying that total number of bullpen innings doesn’t correlate negatively with performance? That fewer innings isn’t better?
Yes, I meant that (typing at 4pm does not make for the clearest mind). Bullpens that throw fewer innings do NOT perform better than bullpens that throw more, and there’s kind of a chicken and egg thing going on here.
There is value in a guy who can soak up innings, this is true. But a player loses said value when he’s “soaking up innings” to the tune of a 122 ERA-. Or a FIP- of 115. There are many pitchers in AAA who could give you an ERA- of 122, which probably fewer who could do 115 ERA-, which is why Miley doesn’t have a high WAR value.
While Miley is helping the bullpen by eating innings, he’s not being remotely productive while doing so. He’s got the 8th worst ERA- in the majors among qualifying SP, and 12th worst FIP-. If you lower the bar to 70 innings, Miley is 21st worst by ERA- and 23rd worst by FIP-. There were 90 qualifying SPs, and 126 qualifying SP when dropped to 70 innings.
So to answer your question, I don’t think WAR underrates him. He’s been legitimately awful, and most of his WAR value likely comes from the fact he’s thrown so many innings. It certainly can’t be by his production, which is one of the worst among qualifying starters.
Yes, we often forget what WAR stands for Wins Above Replacement, Miley is better than a replacement level pitcher but not that much better the thing WAR doesn’t account for is what the guy has done in the past meaning I’d rather have a guy like him who you know what he can do than a guy who you really don’t know.
There is value in a guy who can soak up innings, this is true. But a player loses said value when he’s “soaking up innings” to the tune of a 122 ERA-. Or a FIP- of 115. There are many pitchers in AAA who could give you an ERA- of 122, which probably fewer who could do 115 ERA-, which is why Miley doesn’t have a high WAR value.
While Miley is helping the bullpen by eating innings, he’s not being remotely productive while doing so. He’s got the 8th worst ERA- in the majors among qualifying SP, and 12th worst FIP-. If you lower the bar to 70 innings, Miley is 21st worst by ERA- and 23rd worst by FIP-. There were 90 qualifying SPs, and 126 qualifying SP when dropped to 70 innings.
So to answer your question, I don’t think WAR underrates him. He’s been legitimately awful, and most of his WAR value likely comes from the fact he’s thrown so many innings. It certainly can’t be by his production, which is one of the worst among qualifying starters.
Very good reply. Thanks
It needs to be pointed out that Jeff Sullivan just wrote an entertaining, informative piece on a trade of a triple-A non-prospect and Wade Miley within a matter of hours of it taking place. He’s a national treasure.
Absolutely, though I don’t agree with his statement that after Tillman, the Orioles rotation is a mess. Gausman (2.36 ERA, .218 BA against) is a pretty good pitcher at home. Like last year, his problem is finding the same comfort zone on the road. If we see him maturing enough to the point that he handles road starts a little better—say he shaves a run and a half off his current road ERA—then with the Orioles offense he won’t be a detriment to the team when he toes the rubber on the road.
And road/away starts often aren’t symmetrical—because of rainouts or how the schedule lines up starts, he may end up having the majority of his starts at home the last two months.
Except that’s not what he wrote. His exact words were:
The mess starts after Gausman (and Bundy). So you’re disagreeing with something Sullivan never said.
Not entirely. He says in the beginning of the piece: “The rotation behind Chris Tillman has been bad—so bad that Wade Miley is an improvement.”
I’ll concede that I shouldn’t have used the word mess, since that causes confusion as to which part of the article I’m in disagreement with. And yes, he did say, as you point out, that Gausman “still has that upside.”
So to clear this up once and for all, I’m referring to the line, quoted above, that I feel is inaccurate. Gausman has pitched well at home.
And take away three starts on the road, one vs. Boston and one vs. Toronto—both very good hitting teams—and maybe the one vs. Houston, you’d have a pitcher who hasn’t been all that bad on the road either.
Are you saying the rotation after Tillman is good enough that Wade Miley is not an improvement? Remember, he only has to be better than the worst member of the rotation (ie not Gausman) for that to be true.
No, I’m not saying that at all. It’s just ignoring that Gausman hasn’t been all that bad that I have a minor quibble with.
Wade Miley should be (hopefully, based on how he’s pitched in July) an improvement over the likes of Gallardo, Jimenez, Wright and Wilson.
Btw: I love that line you made below. The opportunity for a Smyly-Miley matchup; it’s great!
Very good article.
Most importantly, with Miley finally in the same division as the Rays, we have many more opportunities for Miley-Smyly match-ups.
Semi-serious side-note: what’s the obsession Dipoto’s Mariners seem to have with acquiring Cubans?
Because Dominicans roll too tight.
Miley, most days, gives you 6 IP and 3 – 5 R. If the Orioles give up 5R/9I they have a real chance at winning that game. Miley’s numbers aren’t good and maybe that kid in AAA can do the same but they traded for a guy that, most days, will keep them in the game.