I assume the Ouija board drank the wine, too. But that's for another conversation.
I know. This is odd, isn't it? But I'm like that sometimes. Time just kind of snaps. For example, one Saturday I asked myself whether I thought coaches made a difference in some strange baseball simulation, and next thing you know it was Monday morning and I had to go to work. Totally sucked.
Anyway, since I don't have anything else to do with it, I figured I would put it up here.
-------- In 2055, Valencia's pitching staff tossed a 3.54 ERA. This kind of performance had not been seen in Valencia for 25 years (they registered 3.53 on the ERA-omatic in 1998). Only California (3.13) and Omaha (3.25) were better. Ultimately this means the staff gave up only 620 runs against a league average 679--let's call it an even 680 so the difference is 60 runs. This will become important later (he says in a shifty and subtle form of foreshadowing that will serve to make him look Stephen Hawking-brilliant to the unwashed unaware...or is that Stephen King-brilliant...or Stephen A. Smith brilliant...wait a minute, we don't like the direction this is going...all right, never mind).
Given that the Star's offense was essentially average (they scored 680 runs), it's not going too far to say that the pitching staff is the reason they won the Johnson Pacific last season. They did, however, win the division by only a single game over California before racing through the playoffs and finally stumbling in the Cartwight Cup, losing to Huntsville 2 games to 4.
Close, yes, but still no banana. No joy in Starville. The Thrill has left the building.
You can see why the team's fans wanted to see something big happen in the off season, though. They were close enough to smell Disneyland, and they wanted a definitive move, a step from their front office that said (in the immortal words of Randy "The Big Dog" Jackson) "we'reinittowinit."
Despite this desire of the fans, the front office looked at the dealer and, rather than draw two pair, said: "we're good." *
* Oh, sure, the team picked up 24-year-old Luis Morales in the Rule-5 draft, and re-signed/extended pitchers Pennington Leftwich and José León, but to do that they had to trade away pricey veteran hitter in 1B Gary Knowles (who they shipped to Louisville for a kid reliever)...not the kind of deals that are designed to get fans of division leading teams too hopped up. The Stars, for all intents and purposes, stood pat.
The exercise of looking at the Valencia Stars, then, becomes one of deciding whether to predict growth or regression to mean. In this light, we note that Valencia won only 73 games in 2022, so their 90-win 2023 reversal of fortunes represented a worst-to-first turnaround. Knowing nothing else about the Stars, we're already feeling the need to go all gloom and doom on the fans' parade.
Anyway, before we do that, let's look at the team role by role and ask ourselves if last season's production can happen again. We'll start at a place that baseball guys say is 90% of the game ...
PITCHING:
Here's how the starting rotation has fared each of the past two years. Looking at this, ask yourself if you think these guys are growing, or are candidates for regression.
Interestingly, there's some good news here for Stars fans. León seems to be the only reasonably safe guarantee to regress a little, though Mariotto is an interesting case at age 22: He's been below league BABIP each year, and he made a major jump from 2022->2023. The $64M question is how much of that improvement was due to true development or the luck of good BABIP shift. He could be just fine. In fact, we're thinking he should be okay--a reasonable bet to hold serve at least.Tony Suárez - 28 yo
2022: 8-14, 3.57 ERA, 2.99 FIP (.325 BABIP) LGAVG =.300
2023: 3-3, 4.12 ERA, 3.81 FIP (.317 BABIP) LGAVG = .296
José León - 28 yo
2022: 11-13, 3.46 ERA, 3,37 FIP (.284 BABIP)
2023: 11-11, 3.26 ERA, 3.89 FIP (.265 BABIP)
Pacio Bidet - 26 yo
2022: Minor Leagues
2023: 10-3, 2.71 ERA, 3.60 FIP (.274 BABIP)
Ezechiele Mariotto - 22 yo
2022: 3-5, 4.83 ERA, 5.09 FIP (.295 BABIP)
2023: 10.7, 3.28 ERA, 3.91 FIP (.276 BABIP)
Pennington Leftwich - 30 yo
2022: 6-11, 4.33 ERA, 3.87 FIP (.303 BABIP)
2023: 5-8, 4.06 ERA, 4.82 FIP (.296 BABIP)
Bidet is a wild card, seeing that he's a bit of a late bloomer and that he sprung upon the scene quite boldly. We're going to guess he'll take a step back, but how far back is anyone's guess. Leftwich and Suárez appear to be who they are.
Of real concern, though, is that you don't really see a major guy in that rotation. There's not a 15-game winner on the slate, and in fact the only 15-game winner on the team last year was closer Skip Glendenning (17-2. 38 saves, 1.19 ERA in 85 innings). This is weird. And it's worrisome because while León and Suárez have those kinds of seasons in their history, none of these guys have done it in the semi-recent past. We're guessing they won't do it in 2024, either.
Glendenning is, however, Glendenning. Glendenning could save a drowning man after he was buried. He could save the the world from Miley Cyrus (but why would anyone want him to, eh? Miley is just Miley being Miley, and that's quite fun to watch in pretty much every way possible). If there's baseball money in the bank, Glendenning is it. So, can he do again what he did in 2023? Sure ... why the hell not?
Unfortunately, the rest of the returning bullpen has zero Glendennings in it. These guys stack up like this:
24 yo - Jon Martin: 2.49 ERA, 3.93 FIP, .266 BABIP (likely to regress)
22 yo - Andre Jacobs: 3.70 ERA, 4.85 FIP, .272 BABIP (who knows?)
32 yo - Sergio Galvez: 3.97 ERA, 4.12 FIP, .260 BABIP (likely to regress)
25 yo - Donnie Burke: 3.81 ERA, 4.42 FIP, .306 BABIP (neutral)
26 yo - Manny Vargas: 4.80 ERA, 5.11 FIP, .279 BABIP (neutral, but coming off injury)
Bottom line to me is that there's not a lot of rejoice happening here. If the rotation is a wash (at best), the bullpen is almost certain to take a step back.
All total I suspect that the performance of last year's pitching staff will fall from 60 runs above average to, let's say, 30 runs. Still good. Just not as good.
Will that be enough?
Well, let's take a look at the other side of the coin.
OFFENSE:
Okay...this group is even more interesting than the pitchers. Valencia is full of weird things. A division winning pitching staff with no 15-game winners? Sure, why not? And now this group. Strange.
First, though, let me pause to give you another Stephen King thing.
Back in 1979 King published a book titled The Dead Zone. I read it when it first appeared. It's really good. Pick it up if you haven't already read it (or seen the movie or the TV series or all the other things that the Dead Zone eventually became. Per Wikipedia: The Dead Zone is a supernatural thriller ... It concerns Johnny Smith, who is injured in an accident and enters a coma for nearly five years. When he emerges, he can see horrifying secrets but cannot identify all the details in his "dead zone", an area of his brain that suffered permanent damage as the result of his accident.
This is relevant because Valencia has a dead zone, too. A different kind of dead zone, but a dead zone nonetheless. And it's just as interesting. I mean, seriously. Everyone expected to see serious time is either older than 30 or younger than 24. Freaky, eh? (Freaky-deaky!) It's like the ages between 25 and 29 don't exist. Oh, sure, there's 3B Luis Alvarado (27), and OF Jayson Weber (who is 26). But those guys probably won't see 200 AB between them. It's like there's a sign over the Star clubhouse that reads "Turn back all ye who might be peaking!" I suppose that might totally mess with the Ken Kesey crew, but it seems to me that a contending offense usually has a few guys in that 27-30 range that wind up carrying the team. Or maybe it's just me who's peaking. Where the did that wine go, anyway?
Anyway, in the pastel-sweet zone of the ages of youth we see 1B Christian Scott (1.9 WAR), RF Felipe González (3.5 WAR), 2B Mario Murillo (3.4 WAR), CF Frank Thomas (2.2 WAR), and LF Ralph Fleming (essentially null). These guys are all 22-24 years old, and should logically grow--let's say .5 WAR apiece. The darkly graying group of 30+ year old fogies consist of guys like SS Kevin Minuso (who posted a 2.7 WAR that represented a drop in both offense and defense), C Jason Dunn (34 yo, and about two WAR down from his prime), and DH Drew Zod (who, at 31 is probably not going to do better than his 2.7 last year), and 30 yo Dexter Morgan, whose 1.5 WAR last year seems about right.
SUMMARY:
So, roll it all up, and we want to know ... can the Valencia Stars can score their second straight JL Pacific crown, and 6th in the last 8 years?
Our answer: Probably not.
Here's why.
Let's say the pastel hitters out-grows the graying gang's fade by a combined WAR combined. That's 10 runs more than they scored last year--so, ten runs better than the average team. Add that to the projection of 30 extra runs the pitching staff gives up, and we get a 20 run deficit. This translates to 2 wins worse than last season. Valencia won 90 games in 2023, so that suggests 88 in 2024.
88 wins has won the division before. In fact, Valencia itself has won the Johnson Pacific with 87 wins in 2018 and 85 in 2020. But that won't happen this year.
And even if 88 games wins the division this year, it won't matter for Valencia because Valencia will not win 88 games. The problem, you see, is that the Stars were 60 runs better than average last year, and at that rate they probably should have only won 87 games (rather than 90). This means they were lucky to win 90, you see? Three games lucky. So we don't start our assessment baseline at 90 wins. We start it at 87. Given that the team is two wins worse than last season, that means we end up with the 2024 Valencia Stars at:
85 wins
Perhaps good enough for second place. Perhaps.
------ Now, seriously, where did all that wine go?
