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Wednesday, June 02, 2010
Verlander or Strasburg, part 2
Last year, I ran a poll on June 16, 2009, asking which pitcher the fans would pay the most for a six-year deal, had the deal been made on that day. While the fans overwhelmingly chose Strasburg over Jurggens, they picked Verlander over Strasburg by a wide margin.
Since then, Strasburg has been tested in the minor leagues and looked awesome. Verlander has had 33 MLB starts since that date, pitching 226 innings, with 230 K and 62 walks, with 20 HR on 205 hits. That’s a FIP of around 3.10 or 3.20. Indeed, that line likely represents Strasburg’s somewhat optimistic mean forecast for his first year, and likely a reasonable forecast for his second year.
Therefore, we would expect, given more information since last year, that Verlander has actually pitched, since then, better than expected, and Strasburg has likely pitched probably as expected in the minors, if not somewhat better; that our expectations of Verlander and Strasburg should have stayed the same.
But, oh no. That’s not what happened. Verlander was knocked out Survivor-Island style before Strasburg was.
What other information would the voters have processed that would have caused Verlander’s fortunes to drop and/or Strasburg’s fortunes to increase substantially enough to overtake Verlander’s new information of 223 IP of MLB performance?
Well, it’s possible that Strasburg was being undervalued last year. Or that this year, the hype is overtaking any risk aversity that should exist.
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