Cubs’ Wood Can’t Open the Door, but He Can Probably Close It

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

If you were to set out to design the perfect pitcher from scratch, you’d probably end up with Kerry Wood. He’s listed at 6-foot-5, 225 pounds and has the wide shoulders and thick legs of a classic power pitcher. He’s one of two or three pitchers in the game who can legitimately throw 100 mph, and his regular fastball comes in at around 95 with heavy movement; he complements it with a devastating breaking ball.


Wood is as competitive a player as there is in the majors – he threw 129 pitches in a complete game victory in Florida two years ago, despite a field temperature somewhere around 130 degrees, then blacked out from dehydration right after the game. He has also dominated opponents in the postseason.


There is, of course, just one problem with Kerry Wood – he can’t stay healthy. This is his eighth year in the majors, and he’s had just two seasons in which he didn’t miss significant time with injuries. Some blame Wood’s high school coaches for overusing him – he once pitched both ends of a doubleheader after he’d already been drafted, for instance. Some blame his major league managers for overworking him – in 2003, when he threw 122 or more pitches in nine different starts, he was one of only four pitchers to do so in more than five starts.


Some blame Wood, who has proved unwilling or unable to change a pitching motion that puts tremendous stress on his shoulder and is quite unlike the classic Seaver/Clemens motion that generates force from the legs and hips.


Probably all of these factors have affected him, but the upshot is that the Cubs simply can’t count on Wood to be a 33-start, 220-inning horse. This year, he was felled by a new affliction, a bout of shoulder soreness that only crops up after he’s thrown about 50 or 60 pitches. It cost him all of May and June, and after a flare-up shut him down for the second half of July, the Cubs simply stuck him in the bullpen, hoping he could contribute some thing to their wild-card chances, which have since gone up in smoke.


Then the oddest thing happened – Wood became completely unhittable. In six appearances as a reliever, Wood has faced 26 batters and struck out 12 of them while giving up four walks and just one hit.


Somewhat unbelievably, his pitches have also gotten nastier – he’s now consistently hitting 99 mph on the radar gun, and his breaking pitch is hitting 90. Given his effectiveness, his health issues, and his disposition, which makes one tend to think he’s well-suited for the pressures of the ninth inning, it would seem a natural fit to make Wood the team’s permanent closer. General Manager Jim Hendry, though, seems to want Wood in the rotation, figuring closers are a dime a dozen, whereas top starters aren’t.

In Wood, though, we wouldn’t be talking about just any ordinary closer. While Hendry is right that generic closers like the Mets’ Braden Looper or his own Ryan Dempster aren’t all that valuable, someone like Mariano Rivera or Eric Gagne is. Wood certainly seems to have the potential to be that sort of closer – the question is whether he’d be more valuable in that role than as a starter.


The real way to get at the answer to this question is through what baseball analysts call “leverage.”


At Web sites like BaseballProspectus.com and TangoTiger.net, you can read about this in a lot more detail, but the basic issue is that comparing starters to closers is not a straight comparison of apples to apples.


Randy Johnson pitching the bottom of the first inning with two outs, none on and a six run lead is not the same as Rivera coming on in the bottom of the eighth with none out, the bases loaded and a two-run lead.


By using play-by-play data and assigning a specific run value to the various situations in which a reliever might find himself when he enters a game, analysts can weigh a reliever’s appearances on the same scale as a starter’s.


Starting pitchers, by definition, have neutral leverage, relievers can have negative leverage if they come into a lot of blowouts, or positive leverage if they come into a lot of important situations. For instance, Washington’s Chad Cordero tends to be used in more tight games than other closers, and Baseball Prospectus rates his leverage this year as 2.00, meaning that his 63 innings of 1.03 ERA pitching have had about the same impact that 126 innings of 1.03 ERA ball would have had from a starter.


By this measure, Anaheim’s Francisco Rodriguez has come into the most important situations, as his 2.43 leverage tops the game; as an example of the opposite end of the spectrum, the Yankees’ Tanyon Sturtze’s leverage is .95, which makes sense given that he mainly pitches mop-up innings.


To bring this back to Wood, the answer to our question of whether he’d be as valuable to the Cubs as a closer as he is starting is almost certainly yes. I say that not because of any leverage issue, but because a healthy 90 innings is better than 140 injury-plagued ones.


Taking health out of the equation, the answer is probably still yes. Cubs manager Dusty Baker isn’t the most imaginative sort, and his closer, Dempster, has a 1.41 leverage mark, which is mediocre at best for a closer and reflects his being used in a lot of phony save situations, coming in up by three runs in the ninth inning and the like. Figure that Wood would be used that way, and would be good for a 2.00 ERA for 90 innings as a closer and a 3.20 ERA in 210 innings as a starter, which is what he did in his best season, 2003.


The hypothetical closer season actually matches what Boston’s Keith Foulke did last year, almost exactly: He pitched 83 innings with a 2.17 ERA and a leverage of 1.46.


After adjusting for the fact that those innings were more important than a starter’s, Foulke allowed about 30 runs less than an average pitcher. In 2003, Wood allowed, interestingly, about 30 runs less than an average pitcher. So from that perspective, things are a wash.


Given the health issues involved, for my two cents, the Cubs would be nuts to do anything other than just give Wood the ball in the ninth; these being the Cubs, though, I wouldn’t count on them doing it.


The New York Sun

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