Will The Real Oliver Perez Please Stand Up?

Oliver Perez has always been something of an enigma. A power throwing southpaw who got to the majors with San Diego at a young age and had some early success, he was sent to Pittsburgh along with Jason Bay in the ill fated Brian Giles deal and turned in an amazing 2004 season, striking out 239 batters in 198 innings on his way to posting a 2.98 ERA at age 22. At that point, he looked like one of the best young hurlers in baseball.

The wheels came off the bus quickly, though, as he lost his command of the strike zone and dealt with mechanical issues. In just a year and a half, he went from Pittsburgh ace to New York reclamation project, as the Mets picked him up and hoped to get his career back on track. It worked, too, as he threw 177 quality innings last year and helped add some firepower to the Mets rotation. However, while he has become an asset on the mound, you never really know what you’re going to get from Perez on any given day. Here are his starts from 2007 and 2008, broken down into groupings of Game Scores (where 50 represents an average start, 40 or less is lousy, and 60 or more is quite good).

20-29: 3
30-39: 7
40-49: 4
50-59: 8
60-69: 10
70:79: 5

While Perez’s personal average game score in 2007 and 2008 is 52.8, he’s been disastrously bad in 10 those 37 starts. In three of his first four starts this year, he didn’t give up a single run. In the other start, he gave up six runs in 4 1/3 innings. Perez is both occasionally great and occasionally awful. The end result is a pretty decent pitcher, but certainly not one you want to bet on.





Dave is the Managing Editor of FanGraphs.

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drew
15 years ago

Has anyone done a study of game scores and consistency? ie If player A and player B both put up an average game score of 50 over twenty starts… but pitcher A is all over the board where pitcher B scores are between 40-60, which pitcher has more value?