Kevin Slowey

In my A.L. FAAB review on June 4, I wrote about Kevin Slowey. As a result, I received more comments about any other player than I ever have.

rodger wrote:

I only bid $10 on Slowey and do not expect to win the auction. Frankly, some of his minor league numbers are a lot like Sonnanstine's (k/bb and k/ip). Slowey is a fly ball pitcher and could have HR problems in the majors too.

Allen said:

I watched the first few innings of Slowey's start on Friday, and I wasn't all that impressed. He was topping out at 88-89 mph, and the A's kept fouling off pitches that probably would strike out minor leaguers. His control is good, so he shouldn't kill anybody's staff, but $10 was the most I was willing to pay for him too.

This is what I wrote that generated such a negative response:

If you're reading this blog, you probably know who Slowey is, how good he might be (he was the #71 prospect in Baseball America's 2007 list), and what his ceiling is. My feeling is that he slots in as either a #2 or a #3, that he'll do very well the first time around and then struggle a little as hitters make the adjustments, but then have a successful if not stellar career.

As those of you who read this blog regularly know, I generally write more about theory and less about individual players. When I do write about players in the FAAB logs, most of them are scrubs or marginal minor leaguers. In these cases, I'm writing more about the opportunity the player might have and I'm not commenting on the player's skill set. In the rare event I write about a Roger Clemens, I don't waste too much space writing about how wonderful Roger Clemens is.

It's the players like Slowey who generate the most interest. Guessing what prospects will do - particularly blue-chippers or borderline blue-chippers like Slowey - is where a lot of the variability in this game comes from. Young pitchers, in particular, are most controversial, because they have a very wide range of possibilities. Furthermore, anyone who has played Rotisserie baseball for any appreciable length of time has been burned by at least one "can't miss" rookie pitcher who not only missed, but also took down an entire staff along with him.

I'm glad that rodger and Allen took two separate approaches on this. rodger looked at Slowey's minor league ratios (an approach I generally agree with), while Allen went by what he saw in Slowey's first major league outing (one outing can be misleading, but you have to trust your eyes).

When looking at minor league pitching ratios, I incorporate a lot of Ron Shandler's LIMA theory into my data analysis. I like to see:

• At least 9 K/9 IP. That's higher than the typical LIMA standard, but that's perhaps the most important number for me. A pitcher who isn't dominating minor league hitters will struggle against major leaguers.
• Less than 1 HR/9 IP. John Sickels doesn't look at this number as much as H/IP, but I feel that a pitcher who is serving up more than a gopher ball a game is going to get pounded his first time around the league.
• Less than 3 BB/9 IP. I don't necessarily need to see an absolute control artist, but the last thing I want on my staff is a rookie pitcher who can't find the plate. He's either going to walk the park or start throwing meatballs down the middle so he doesn't get sent back down to Triple-A. Either way, it's not a good scenario.
• I also prefer looking at numbers from Double-A ball and above. A lot of pitchers dominate Single-A ball and then get pounded in Double-A.

Since Slowey was promoted to Double-A in 2006, he logged 123 2/3 IP. He's struck out 116, given up 18 walks, and served up 9 HR. The ratios on those numbers are 8.44 K/9, 1.31 BB/9, and 0.65 HR/9. The K/9 is a little low for my liking, but overall the data are to my liking. Slowey might be a flyball pitcher, but the only stop in the minors where he had problems with the gopher ball was in Double-A in 2006. Since G/F numbers are hard to come by for minor leaguers and often inconsistent from one source to the next, I have no choice but to trust the HR/9 rate.

Unlike Allen, I didn't see Slowey's outing against the A's, so I can't speak to what Allen saw. I do agree that a pitcher who is topping out in the high 80s is right on the razor's edge of major league success, and will probably take his lumps at some point, unless he's Greg Maddux-like (in Maddux's prime) with his control.

There's no doubt that rookie pitchers are as high risk as you're going to get in Roto. This winter, I reviewed all of the blue-chip pitching prospects going back to 2001, and concluded that they are not good bets generally speaking. Nothing has changed. I still believe that rookie pitchers are high risk and, frankly, Slowey isn't as highly regarded as almost all of these pitchers were at the time.

So why do I seem so high on Slowey?

First, there is a difference between spending $19 in your auction on Kevin Slowey and spending $19 FAAB on him. As we all know, FAAB money is mad money, and spending $100 on Slowey won't destroy your team. If Slowey tanks and you waive him, you won't feel as bad as if you would have if you spent $18 on Jeremy Sowers (as one owner did in my league this year) and waive him in late May (as that same owner did as well). True, bad innings, from any source, hurt just as badly. But spending $18 for negative stats will hurt you far more than FAABing the same negative stats.

Second, I'm not necessarily "high" on Slowey in the context of every pitching prospect or pitcher in the major league universe. The context here is the population of available free agents. Chances are, the "A" and "A-" pitchers in John Sickels' book (they're typically the more highly rated Baseball America prospects as well) have been snatched up in the farm draft. Sickels gave out only six "As" or "A-s" to American League pitching prospects this year. Five of those six pitchers - Phil Hughes, Matt Garza, Andrew Miller, Adam Miller, and Luke Hochevar - were drafted or kept as farm players. In Sickels' ratings, Eric Hurley is the only A- pitcher available, and he almost definitely won't be up with the Rangers this year.

Kevin Slowey, then, represents more of an opportunity than a sure thing. Spending 1/5th of your FAAB budget for even the potential of $10+ earnings is worth it, especially since Slowey is one of the best of what's available in what quickly becomes a thin pitching market in an A.L.-only universe.