Demoted to the minors?? Not a pleasing development for his career. Has he really been that bad?
Though I traded him for Stephen Drew in the offseason in my high stakes league, I still loved Ervin and tried to get him in two of my other leagues. Sometimes what you think is bad luck turns out to be good luck; he has legitimately performed poorly. But there are significant elements of bad luck in his performance to date.

He has a high 34% hit rate and a 66% strand rate. These are both very unfortunate results; the norms are 30% and 70% respectively. He pitched 100 innings, so this has been a sustained series of unfortunate results. It is often said that sometimes a whole season isn’t enough to tell us about a player; so he may just be a guy who will not improve to the norms this year, there isn’t a whole lot of time left. Only Scott Kazmir and Odalis Perez have hit rates that high among pitchers with 100 IP, and both are at 34%.

His command appears to be in line with career norms, and he has seen his K rate increase over the last two years. He has a 7.1 K rate and 3.4 BB rate, for a ratio of 2.1; all solid. His BB rate in his first two years was 3.2 and 3.1, so in 2007 he is only slightly higher. However his K rate was 6.7 and 6.2; so he has seen an increase in K rate!!

The various expected ERA metrics bear out his bad luck; his xERA (expected ERA) is 4.76, his FIP (fielding independent ERA) is 4.40 and his xFIP (expected FIP) is 4.98. These are all at least one run lower than his actual ERA of 6.28.

But bad luck doesn’t explain it all; his expected ERA metrics all point to a below average pitcher anyway. But why?? It could just be regression to the mean over his career in the hit rate department; last year his hit rate was a lucky 27%, so this year he reverts to the norm of 30%.

Here we see the beginnings of an explanation: he is letting up a ton of flyballs–his rate is 45% of batted balls. Only Johan Santana and Daisuke Matsuzaka are at that level among pitchers with 100 IP. However, Ervin’s HR rate is an abnormally high 16.3. His career rates are 8.8% in 2007 and 10.9% So not only has he let up an unusual amount of hits, he also has let up an abnormally large number of HR coupled with an abnormal amount of fly balls. More fly balls, plus more going out of the yard, and more hits. He has possibly had a “perfect storm” of factors against him.

So what does this mean? Well, sadly it probably means that he will be a bargain next year, but there is only a limited amount of time left in this year to turn it around, so unless he comes back and goes on a Zambrano-like run, it is unlikely that there is hope for this year. But file his name away for next March.

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