Choosing among three walk-heavy lefties

If you go to our pitcher leader boards and sort by BB/9, you’ll see a trio of lefties on top. Jonathan Sanchez, Gio Gonzalez, and C.J. Wilson pitched effectively in 2010 despite being the only three qualified pitchers in baseball to walk more than four per nine. Yet all of them out-performed all of their peripherals, in some cases to a considerable degree. It made me wonder who is the best bet in the long-term. In other words, if you got to pluck one of these guys from his current team, under his current circumstances, whom would you choose? The case for Sanchez In terms of results Sanchez put together the best year of these three. His strikeout rate was about two per nine better than the others, and his ERA was the lowest. While we can find encouragement in the former, especially since it was right around his career mark, we know the perils of relying on ERA as a predictor. In terms of his more predictive peripheral ERAs, it’s tough to be high on Sanchez heading into 20...