Weekend Mug - Bring back the Soup!

Bush, Parra, Narveson, and Suppan are all out of options. We can’t stash any of these guys in AAA. As I see it we have two spots in the rotation open, and one spot in the bull pen open, 3 spots for 4 guys. One of them has to go, and I think the consensus around here is Suppan needs to go.

try to make a reasonable argument for keeping Suppan. Just let me hate on him like he is a yankee or cub

1) You challenge anyone who still feels “good about how Manny Parra has pitched the last couple of years.” For one, I would respond that Parra was extremely solid prior to 2009 – In the 192 IP between ‘07 and ’08 he had a combined ERA just above 4 and an outstanding FIP (3.35 in ’07, 4.16 in ’08). 2009 was the aberration year, in which he only pitched 140 IP, and before which everyone was set on him being a future #2. I don’t think 140 extraordinarily unlucky innings should sink him from a future #2 to out of the rotation; if his ERA had been closer to his much lower (though still not very good) FIP of 4.88 would we even be having this conversation, or would it perhaps rightly be written off as an aberration?

2) You have Suppan as the 55th worst starter in the NL by ERA, which is bad enough, but if you look at FIP he moves up to being the 32nd worst in the NL among anybody who threw a single pitch as a starter, and up to 20th for pitchers who pitched >10 IP (i.e. pitchers who were relied on to make at least a handful of starts). Yes, there are pitchers worse than Suppan (and we had one of them on our team as a regular starter in Braden Looper), but I don’t think it’s hard to find a guy better than the 20th worst in the league. That is really bad for someone you want making multiple starts, and if we don’t want Suppan making multiple starts than he is just cluttering the roster and we could just as easily go with internal options (even if guys like Loe probably aren’t much better than Suppan).

3) I wouldn’t mind stashing Suppan if we could keep him in AAA or something – though I don’t know if we can option him or if he would accept – but if your argument is that we should keep him on the major league roster, that’s only compounding the problem. You mentioned in a post above that Suppan wouldn’t be much worse than Villanueva, which I have to strongly disagree with, since I think Villanueva is one of the most underrated players on the team. Suppan would be useless in the bullpen and would be wasting a major league roster spot as well as hurting the team in any relief innings he’s given. I’m all for rotation depth, but if it comes at the cost of damaging the team, there are enough internal and free agent options that it wouldn’t make much sense.

The ‘66 Dodgers had Sutton go 12- 12 with a 2.99 ERA as a fifth starter. A closer look at his stat line of 225.2 IP, 209 K’s, and a 1.08 WHIP indicate just how valuable he was as a 5th starter. I think he was ROY that year as well. The rotation was incredible using only 5 starters, let alone 3 of them that were future HOFs.

I don’t see much harm in stashing Suppan as the long man in the bullpen and letting him be the injury fill-in. It’s probably a wise decision. He’s worth nothing really as a reliever, and he’s pretty much the definition of a replacement-level starter right now.

FtJ, you make good points but the one thing I want to say is that you’re influenced by just how bad the Brewer replacement starters were last year. The replacement starters managed to be well below replacement level. That could be chance— a 5.50 ERA pitcher can have a 6+ ERA easily over a few starters, or a 4 ERA over a few starts. There’s also a possibility that the Brewers were bad at picking up the best available free starters last year. Either way, keeping Suppan in the pen or dumping Suppan isn’t going to make or break the season. Giving him a spot in the rotation could.

Well, I see the point because I know that we will need more than 5 starters. But by keeping Suppan for depth, you will sacrifice depth because you would lose Bush or Narveson.

You could send Villa down to AAA to make room for all of Suppan, Bush and Narveson, but I don’t imagine Soup being more valuable than Villa.

and I know that you’re not defending Suppan as a passable pitcher - and that it’s more an indictment on DM that we don’t have better options to replace Suppan.

Plus, I sort of agree on Parra: although I understand the call for patience with him, I’m not convinced he’ll be even an average ML starter (though I hope I’m wrong).

I guess:

• we need to start the best 5 pitchers we have. Right now, that means two of Parra, Bush, and Narveson - probably Parra and Bush. (We could release Bush and save a few million, but I agree, that doesn’t seem wise.)

• conventional wisdom has it that we have room for either Narveson or Suppan, but not both. This was the crux of my post before: Narveson, though mostly an unknown, has shown enough to (for now) be a better option than Suppan, who is known (to suck).

• if we can keep Suppan on the team as a 7th starter, I guess I’m more or less OK with that - but not if it deprives the team of a reliever that we’d otherwise need.

I see the value of Suppan in light of who else we’d use. I’m not convinced that he is that irreplaceable, even in that role: although last year’s replacement starters were lousy, and truly worse than Suppan, I don’t know if that means that we’re similarly doomed this season.

This has been covered in depth, but it can’t be said enough: we’re going to lose one of them in any case. One of Bush, Suppan, and Narveson will be gone. To say you need to keep Suppan because you’ll need more than 5 pitchers ignores that fact. So, the real question is this: do you want to keep the guy who has performed terribly and shown no signs of improvement in the spring, or keep the players who have shown both promise and improvement?

I know a lot of people have already given up on the team and don’t think it matters, but the people who haven’t given up on the team (namely, Mark Attanasio, Doug Melvin, Ken Macha, and Rick Peterson) need to make the best baseball decision, and the money will have to be ignored.

It makes me wonder why people don’t plan for 6-7 starters. No staff stays healthy the whole year. The problem is (1) we have many more healthy arms right now than we had last May giving us less appreciation for innings-fillers, (2) Suppan is a poor starter but survivable as a #5, but (3) not at the price we paid for him. It puts us in a situation where we hate his guts, but he’s not worth cutting as long as we’re going to pay his salary anyway. Keep both he and Narveson around for long relief and spot starts – God knows with Bush and Parra in the rotation there will be opportunities aplenty and innings to soak.

A couple of things…

1.) I wanted to present an argument to keeping Suppan around at least as the team breaks camp. I have no idea what is going to happen this season (other than we will use more than 5 starters), and at some point later in the season it may make all the sense in the world to release Suppan — I am really only arguing against the “cut Suppan in camp argument”

2.) I don’t think cutting Suppan in or after ST would be wise, but I don’t think all the bunnies in the world will die either. I would be more upset about cutting (especially Bush) Bush or Narveson than I would be about cutting Suppan.

3.) I also wanted to hopefully show that the argument “It doesn’t get any worse than Suppan” doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny. There are a lot of worse pitchers out there in our and every team’s system.

4.) I like Narveson a lot, but the dude has only made a handful of starts. Seth McClung had some good starts in 2008, but then was ineffective in 2009. Hopefully that won’t happen with Narveson — but I would err on the side of caution.