Thursday, June 11, 2009

What if a team only drafted pitchers?

How important is pitching in this day in age? Well, it's probably not 90% of baseball, as I think Connie Mack once said, but it's pretty damn important. Good pitching is so rare in this day in age that the best available starting pitcher on the trade market come July might be Doug freaking Davis of the Arizona Diamondbacks. If you have two good starters, you probably have one of the top three rotations in your league. It's borderline insanity, but it's the truth.

So let's say that you're a first-time general manager, about to take over a small-market team with a low payroll that has been a perennial loser for years. Well, wouldn't "drafting young pitching" be your absolute #1 priority? Even if each young guy you get only has like a 20% chance of being a star, won't the odds be in your favor that you'll have a solid pitching staff before long? I believe so. And the best part about young pitching is, it's what other teams want more than anything, so you also have some very valuable trade chips to use in transactions to acquire other pieces of the puzzle without needing to spend lavishly on free agents.

Obviously, with this logic, pitching should be paramount for small-market teams. So I'm going to try a hypothetical situation here: what if one such team only took pitchers in their draft? What if the Nationals followed up their Stephen Strasburg and Drew Storen picks with 49 other pitchers? Would they be better off? About the same? Worse? What would happen? I'm opening this up to any and all discussion. Personally, I say yes, but there's a ton of room for debate, of course.

1 comment:

L.M. Lloyd said...

The Dodgers of the early 60's were practically devoid of offensive weaponry, and I think the old adage of 'good pitching beating good hitting' is sound.
I think Joe Torre has discovered the best way to win consistently...attack the weakest part of a MLB team...its middle relief. His philosophy is to instruct his batters to work up the opposing starters pitch count...and wreak havoc on the weaker relief pitchers. Its working pretty well.
So....your premise of drafting all pitchers, while probably tounge-in-cheek, may not be as incredible as it sounds. If you could sign 10-11 shut-down closers and 5-6 good starters, you might do even better than Torre is doing...and his team is leading MLB in wins.