A.  This neat little article by David Golebiewski sync's up well with the Mainframe's intuition on the question.  We know he's gleeful to get our signoff.

 

Golebiewski finds that hyped ML-ready SP's are, as a group, in their rookie seasons --- > average-solid ML starters.

 

::shrug:: sounds obvious to me.  Suppose you gave me 50 average ML starters with 7 strikeouts and 4 walks, and suppose you put them down into the minors under assumed nicknames like "Tom Petty" and "J. Edgar," and people are going to be very excited about those fifty guys.  They would wipe out the minors, and then they'd come up to the majors and be 50 Charlie Furbushes.

 

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A.  Let's see ... he's got Prior, Felix, Lincecum, Strasburg, Kazmir, Liriano, and Joba Chamberlain as the rookies who did a 10-9 repeat on batters' faces, starting in their Game Ones.

 

You tell me whether those guys were Hultzen-type thinkers, or Pineda-, Paxton-type swamp things, who were able to get people out from day one...

 

It ain't rocket science.  Mike Tyson was a little more scary, at age 21, than Muhammad Ali was.  A guy like Clayton Kershaw, or James Paxton, or Michael Pineda, has the kind of game that doesn't need to be hair-fine.  But if you're going to try to pitch like Jamie Moyer or Cliff Lee, then expect a learning curve.

 

Cliff Lee, by the way, was running 6.29 ERA's all the way up to age 28.

 

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A.  Of course not.

 

It strongly suggests that the rational expectation for this year's top 10-15 Baseball America SP's, as a group, is for them to post a group ERA around the league average.  That's all.  

 

And it's more a comment on Baseball America's ability to identify "toolsy" pitchers than it is a "ceiling" on rookie SP's.  SSI did not project Michael Pineda to be a league-average SP and, in fact, was one of the league's 10 best starting pitchers.

 

James Paxton also projects to be far, far more effective than the "average" Baseball America "toolsy" pitcher.  (BA, absurdly, placed Taijuan Walker #1 in the same league in which it put Paxton #8.  It's a tools magazine.)

 

Paxton is 10 times the Year-2012 bet that Danny Hultzen is, and a considerably better bet than Taijuan is.  That would still be true even if Hultzen had already pitched in the high minors, which I'm not sure he has yet....

 

Long term, that is another discussion.  But Danny Hultzen's got a whale of a job, trying to compete with James Paxton this year.

 

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