Its all good, fellow owners of James Shields, so don’t worry.
With three straight losses, and a ballooning ERA, Shields’ owners may be starting to get nervous. Lenny Melnick on his podcast with Paul Greco, addressed Shields as a sell high candidate. I agree with this, if you can get full value, but if you are trading him because you are worried about him, then let me assuage your fears.

Arguably his best performances have come during this losing streak. Though he has seen a bit of a correction in his hit rate, which is to be expected, here are his key indicators for the three game losing streak:

6-20 5IP 4K 0BB
6-26 7IP 11K 0BB
7-1 6.1IP 10K 0BB

You can’t do too much better than this in the skill department, 25 Ks and NO walks. The 7-1 game was against an excellent and hot Cleveland lineup. Homeruns killed him in these three games, he let up 5 HR.

Granted, he has a bit of trouble with the home run ball; his flyball rate is a bit high at 42%. However his groundball rate is 41%. His HR per flyball rate is a high 15.8%, in line with his numbers last year. This is a cause for some concern; but as long as his skills are fine the HR shouldn’t be too much of a problem.

So how do the skills look?? As good as ever. His key stats:

8.1 K/9IP
1.4 BB/9IP
5.8 K/BB ratio
1.03 WHIP
xERA 3.33 (or if you prefer the Hardball Times xFIP that is 3.69)

These are simply the skills of an Ace quality pitcher, or at least a number two if your standards are high. His numbers are just a slight notch below C.C. Sabathia,who may be the best pitcher in baseball right now.

Don’t worry and don’t panic; it’s all good from here on out. Maybe it is wishful thinking on my part since he is on my high stakes team and because I have written about him approximately 100 times on the blog, but his skills remain top notch. The only concern here is his IP total, since he is a young pitcher. He is already at 122 IP, virtually the same number as last year.

However, a review of his pitch counts shows that he has only exceeded 110 pitches three times; all of them in the past 30 days. His pitch counts:

6-4 102 pitches
6-9 111 pitches
6-15 86 pitches
6-20 80 pitches
6-26 110 pitches
7-1 114 pitches.

This does not look like abuse, and appears manageable. Baseball Prospectus has a statistic called Pitcher Abuse Points, or PAP. It purports to measure whether an dhow much a pitcher has been overworked. Shields ranks 55th in baseball in PAP, again a manageable workload. His “stress” score, which is PAP/pitches thrown is only 4, not a bad number. Take a look at their site for more info on this metric.

Overall, it appears that though his IP total will greatly increase over last year, he hasn’t been overworked, so this situation should be monitored by his owners. Other than that, he appears to be on the top of his game.