Wolf Hunting

For all the talk about how large of an impact Orlando Hudson has had on the Dodgers (and he has, with a +2.5 win season that has made him a great pickup for LA), it seems that one of the other bargain free agents signed by Ned Colletti last winter flies under the radar. Randy Wolf, who signed for $5 million in February (plus some performance incentives that he’s likely to reach), continues to give the Dodgers consistently steady work and is basically matching Hudson’s production with a +2.4 win season of his own.

Wolf isn’t a frontline starter by any stretch of the imagination. As a strike-throwing flyball lefty, his performance is heavily impacted by the variations of HR/FB and BABIP rates. In his last years in Philadelphia, these numbers were terrible and served to make him look like a batting practice pitcher. A little regression on his side has allowed him to slot in as a nifty mid-rotation starter the last few years, and some positive luck this season has made him appear even better than that.

Through it all, Wolf has basically the same guy all along. Other than a one season dip in 2006 (when he legitimately was awful), his BB/K rate has been basically steady for his entire career. In graph form, it looks like this:

Wolf strikes out more than twice as many guys as he walks, which is necessary to survive as a guy who puts the ball in the air a lot. He is the classic good-command-of-blah-stuff southpaw, though despite pitching well the last two years, he hasn’t been viweed as more than a fungible arm by most of baseball. Now that he’s got a sparkly 3.43 ERA (thanks to a .270 BABIP, of course), that should change this winter, as Wolf should be line for a pretty decent payday.

But for this year, at least, Wolf was a pretty big bargain, and signing him on the cheap is one of the reasons the Dodgers are on top of the NL West.