The Braves signed former Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Arizona pitcher Rodrigo Lopez to a minor league contract today. Lopez, 35, will immediately jump in as a fifth starter candidate for the Braves, according to MLBTR.
I’m just shaking my head at Atlanta’s bringing Lopez in. Why?
According to MLBTR, to “presumably battle with Mike Minor for a rotation spot and Kenshin Kawakami and Brandon Beachy provide Atlanta with even more options.”
How is Rodrigo Lopez even remotely as good as any of the other three pitchers listed?
Yes, he takes the ball. He threw 200 innings for Arizona last year. Still, he posted a 5.00 ERA and 5.21 FIP and allowed a whopping 37 home runs. That’s not someone you want in your rotation, if you can help it. An emergency starter? Fine. A swingman? Okay, if you’re pressed. Someone to soak up innings to buy your youngsters time if you’re going nowhere? Sure, why not?
But a fifth starter on a contending team in a difficult, cutthroat divsion? Rodrigo Lopez? Really?
Unless you’re really confronted with no other good options, it just makes no sense to even bring Lopez in. Why cloud the picture further with a clearly inferior pitcher?
And if you’re wondering how inferior Lopez is, let’s look at this statistically:
Lopez: 5.21 MLB FIP in 2010.
Mike Minor: 3.77 MLB FIP in 2010, plus incredible minor league numbers.
That’s the end of the story right there. Minor’s way better than Lopez, and while the 23-year-old lefty will continue to improve, Lopez will continue to slide as he enters his late 30′s.
But, just to drive the point home even further:
Brandon Beachy: 2.48 FIP in three MLB starts, plus awesome minor league numbers (sub-2.20 FIPs at both AA and AAA last year).
Kenshin Kawakami: 4.35 FIP last year in MLB.
If the Braves really wanted to go with the proven thirtysomething arm over the two promising rookies, they could turn to an in-house candidate with, you know, a FIP nearly a full run lower.
Not that FIP is the end-all, be-all here, but you’d be hard-pressed to find any evidence that Rodrigo Lopez is as good or better as any of the other three rotation options MLBTR mentions. However, he does have the longest MLB career, and it’s not that hard to see the crafty vet catching his manager’s eye due to his “guts” or some such reason, wrangling the fifth starter’s job from candidates far more deserving.
With every game set to count a whole lot in a tight NL East, the Braves can’t afford to ever run out Lopez instead of Minor, Beachy, or even Kawakami. Over the course of a year, there could be a three-win difference between Lopez and the better options, so even running him out there for a month or so could knock a game out of the win column.
Braves fans better hope they don’t make that mistake.
Original Story:
http://fansided.com/baseball/2011/02/...
