FanPost

The Braves NEED (?) an ace!

Tis the season to rosterbate, and everyone has their wishlist of who they want Santa Anthopoulos to bring to the Braves this holiday season offseason. We also have our own set of opinions on how we would like to see said list satisfied, and that's great because no one is necessarily wrong about any of it (at least not right now), and there's more than one way to skin this particular cat (disclaimer: only Ivan's cat was harmed in the making of this post..he refused to do any of my research, so he had it coming). One thing that has been debated a few times is how to improve the pitching staff, which is logical because it could obviously be better. One thing I am personally at odds with is the notion that we need and ace pitcher to get the team to into and/or win the world series. I'm intentionally stressing the word "need" here; no one would complain about having an ace on the staff or argue that it won't help us win more games, just that it is not a requirement for doing so. Now this notion has been argued in the comments quite a bit, but I'd like to rehash one particular comment by Ivan in a different fanpost earlier this month (link):

Also, here’s the ranking of the past 10 World Series winners and the fWAR placement of their best pitcher that year:

2018 Red Sox: 4
2017 Astros: 14
2016 Cubs: 14
2015 Royals: 19
2014 Giants: 19
2013 Red Sox: 31
2012 Giants: 21
2011 Cardinals: 14
2010 Giants: 20
2009 Yankees: 8

Meanwhile, Mike Foltynewicz was 19th last year, which is the same or higher than five of these 10 teams. So…

as well as quote from today's article regarding Ender Inciarte (Is now the time to trade Ender Inciarte?).

I researched the OFF, DEF, and Pitching WAR team rankings for each LCS participant over the past ten years at Fangraphs leaderboard page. I did this to see how important it was for a team to have each measure as a strength to advance in the playoffs. Of the 40 participants over that time frame, 82.5% were Top 10 in the league in OFF for that specific season, 62.5% were Top 10 in Pitching WAR, and 42.5% were in the Top 10 in DEF. This shows that while all three aspects are needed to get to the playoffs, offense and pitching arguably carry a bit more value to advance.

GothamGrizzly was specifically arguing for offense and pitching over defense, but you can clearly see that his numbers specifically favor offense over pitching.

I'm mostly showing their statements as a way to consolidate the major points in a counter argument against needing an ace and to help springboard the conversation into the following paragraphs. We have two snapshots of previous MLB playoff/championship teams, one showing that overall offense is probably a little more important than overall pitching by a significant margin for playoff teams, and the other showing that several of these teams didn't actually have an ace at all. So what happens if/when the Braves do manage to bring in the proverbial ace? Well, looking above, it means that, more than likely, that doesn't get us over the hump by itself, because several teams are winning despite that lack, which furthermore emphasizes that the teams with the aces are not necessarily winning anything.

The next logical argument is that having an ace for multiple years would give us the greatest chance to overcome the crapshoot that is the MLB playoffs and get us to the top for as long as we have said ace in the fold, and it's this side of the coin I want to examine a little bit. We're going to take a short stroll down memory lane, because it turns out you don't have to go back very far to find a real-life sample that most here will be intimately familiar with; our very own Braves, right in the midst of our glory years where we were regularly rolling out an absolutely stacked starting rotation.

First, a few guidelines for how I'm looking at this. I'm using fWAR for all WAR statistics, in case I didn't specify somewhere. I set the boundary of "ace" as a top 15 pitcher per fWAR over an entire season; obviously, there are not necessarily 15 true ace-type performances every season, but this seems to be a generally accepted demising line to encompass all actual ace/#1 types plus probably a few really high-end #2s that you could probably at least reasonably argue could still be a #1 in a given year. We could try to hash that out a little more, but I doubt it would really affect much, if anything, and it would potentially start getting a little too subjective. I also avoided rating fWAR over innings pitched because I only wanted to look at what we were actually getting as an end result. Lastly, all listed rankings are for the entire MLB (includes top 15 parameter for "ace" designation).

I started by just looking at individual Braves pitcher performances during our run of league championships, and it's not surprising that they rank highly most years. Even with that expectation, we all know even the cream of the crop doesn't perform at that level every single year, year in and year out, with very few exceptions. We know Maddux, Glavine, and Smoltz were always good, but were they necessarily "ace" good every year? No, of course not (well, actually, in the narrowed sample that follows, Maddux was, but the other two didn't hit the mark every year). However, the Braves were still getting good if not elite production in their off years, and we also had the likes of Neagle, Millwood, etc. mixing in some really good seasons to further augment the rotation. Wanting to pin down just how much "ace" production we were getting, as well as examine overall pitching production, I went year by year looking at end-of-season Braves pitcher rankings. Perhaps not wholly unsurprisingly, but still pretty remarkably, the Braves had at least one ace per these parameters in every season from 1991-2002. Every single one. Even knowing who was on our roster, that's kind of crazy.

With that acknowledgement, we can still get even nuttier with this. Narrow our focus a little to the 1993-2001 seasons, and the Braves had at least two such ace pitchers in each of these 9 consecutive seasons, and as many as FOUR in 1999. Over this span, the Braves averaged 2.6 "ace" pitchers per season (that looks kinda funny, but let's be honest, we'd all take .6 of peak Maddux on any given gameday). Overall team starter fWAR rank was 1st in all of these seasons except 2001 (4th). The average season starter fWAR over the entire span was 21.6. That's an absurd number for this amount of time; only 2 teams exceeded this number in 2018, by a maximum of 1.3 fWAR, and the Braves averaged it over 9 seasons. In the years we were ranked first, the average season starter fWAR margin ahead of 2nd place was 4.2 (and incorporating distance behind 1st place in 2001 it was still +3.4).

So what does this mean? Well, the Braves had a ridiculously good starting rotation in the 90's and early 2000's, and it obviously helped them win a lot of baseball games. But in response to those who are saying we need a true ace to push us from playoff contender to world series contender and/or champs, we can see that our own experience contradicts this idea. The Braves managed only a single world series championship despite an almost laughable excess of pitching. What we need is more wins, however they may come, and preferably only good luck and good umpires once we're in the playoffs. Last year's 12th ranked starting rotation could certainly be an area to get some of those wins, but it doesn't have to be by adding an ace (and Folty's production last year isn't far off the mark anyway, as pointed out above). Improvement doesn't necessarily have to be in the rotation at all as long as they're improving the other facets of the team sufficiently. Most here would gladly welcome an ace onto the team at an appropriate acquisition cost, but it won't be all doom and gloom if that acquisition doesn't materialize.

I'll add one final note in case anyone wants to stretch the argument to include getting an ace and improving the bullpen. For the 9 years primarily being talked about, the Braves' relief fWAR ranks were 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 10, 11, 16, and 22; so averagey or better in all but one season, and firmly above average to elite in all but two.

This FanPost does not express the views or opinions of Battery Power.