SSI's Bullpen - on Jamey Wright

Choosing between, say, Jamey Wright and Tom Wilhelmsen is an inkblot test.

Suppose we're cutting the deck for $10,000.  One pass.  You come up with a 5 and I offer to let you draw again if you want?

Do you?  Sure -- if it's a fair deck.  But what if somebody pulled all the face cards?

The Mariners can draw 5's with Wright, Ring and Chris Ray.  Do they want to draw again?  That's their dilemma with French, Wilhelmsen etc.

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Jamey Wright, if cutting cards against Mike Scioscia for $100,000, would give you a 5.

Wright is this year's Sean Green or Sean White:  he is an extreme groundball pitcher with a terrible K/BB ratio.  

Right now it's part of the MLB trend to give significant jobs to pitchers who can do nothing other than avoid the HR ball.  We predict that this trend will wash away with the morning tide, but right now it's keeping some sinkerballers in bidness.

In this outstanding article by Dave Allen, he assesses the 8 most groundballin' fools in ML bullpens.   Here is the money chart:

The typical ML fastball "rises" 10 inches (compared to vacuum).  The above pitchers throw fastballs that rise less -- so appear to "sink" to batters.

Sean Green's fastball actually sinks 2-3 inches compared to vacuum -- meaning that, compared to other pitchers', Green's fastball drops a good foot, right at the plate.

Notice whose graph is rightward-shifted?  Jamey Wright's.  Wright's "sinking" fastball sinks only about 4 inches compared to the average -- and yet this is his only skill.

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Wright is not nervous in front of 35,000 people and he can get three outs for you.  He maintains real good GB rates -- how, we're not sure, but he does.

But you understand why SSI hot-brands the skillset "Fringe." With a capital F.  If you have to go with Wright, it's because you don't like your alternatives.  Sean Green was Much better, and nobody named a street after him.

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