I didn't say that there weren't a few pitchers who performed well for stretches of time. Of course there were. What I pointed out was that those guys didn't pitch MUCH. Yeah, Bedard was great, for 83 innings. RRS looked good, but only threw 96 frames. Washburn is a big regression candidate, but he was ditched with a full third of the season left so he contributed only 133 innings. As I said in my original comment (in the portion you left out) this team had to turn to a whole bunch of junk in order to get through games. That means bringing in even decent pitchers can make a big improvement.
And as Matt made clear, pointing out that Morrow and Snell were terrible isn't a counter to my arguement that the staff as a whole didn't pitch well. That's exactly the sort of thing that I had in mind. Those guys have a great chance to do better. So I don't see how my arguement is refuted. This team is still perfectly poised to get better performances from it's pitchers which would offset any decline in defense or synergy or whatever. It is perfectly reasonable to expect another league leading ERA.
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