It's often said that pitching wins championships. In some ways that's very true but pitching is volatile to say the least. Clayton Kershaw and David Price have never been great playoff pitchers and yet you'd want either one leading you into the playoffs. Kansas City won the WS last year with mediocre starters and a great bullpen. Madison Bumgarner stood on his head (all due respects to hockey) and won the WS single handedly for SF in 2014. We've seen mediocre starters become great in the playoffs and entire staffs of good, but not remarkable pitchers look like the best in the game to win it it all as exampled by the 2005 White Sox. Pitching is important but undpredictable.
As we close in on the quarter way mark in 2016 the Mets have, as expected, the best overall staff in baseball by WAR, FIP and xFIP while the Cubs are second in those categories and first in ERA. If you look at individuals, particularly starters around the league, you get some odd numbers. Matt Harvey's K/9 is the lowest of his career while his other numbers are right in line with his career numbers and yet he doesn't look quite right. His ERA seems to indicate that at 4.93 and yet his FIP and xFIP are still quite good at 3.35 and 3.77 respectively. Chances are he'll find his groove and get back to being their staff ace but in the meantime that's Noah Syndergaard who's putting up Cy Young type numbers. Shelby Miller was traded to Arizona for one of the biggest hauls in history and is putting up awful numbers across the board, 6.64 ERA, 6.56 FIP and 5.62 xFIP with terrible peripherals and the lowest K/9 of his career after breaking out as a TOR starter with the Braves in 2015. David Price has struggled, the Dodgers who were thought to have awful pitching behind Kershaw with no bullpen are 4th in baseball bunched up with the Cubs and Nationals. Oh and the White Sox and Phillies aren't far behind and while there were signs that the Sox had that kind of talent the young Philly starters are a huge surprise. The Cubs have only 1 pitcher in Jake Arrieta in teh top 10 but all 5 starters in the top 35. The Phillies have 2 in the top 35 and 3 in the top 50. In other randomness Dallas Kuechel, the reigning AL CY young winner, is absolutely awful while Rich Hill, out of baseball for a few years, is 16th in the game with better than respectable numbers. Tim Sale is predictably on his way to a Cy Young type year, but if you close Jose Quintana, always extremely underrated, is actually better. Go figure.
My point in all of this is that you really never know how pitching is going to shake out so the only thing organizations can do is put together the best collection of arms they can, build the best depth they can, rely on their coaching and training staffs and trust that they made the right decisions. Every day I hear people say that the Mets are going to the World Series because they have the best staff since the 90's Braves. Washington had one of those last year and won nothing, lost Jordan Zimmerman and now have a better staff. When we talk pitching we have to realize we're talking about the most difficult thing to predict in the game. Hitters slump and have outlier years good and bad, but they're more predictable and with less injury and attrition rates than pitchers. That rarely gets talked about, well Theo Epstein talks about it and a few others, but fans, including myself, usually concentrate on pitching. We're not wrong but my whole point here is pitching isn't easy and it defies expectations more often than not.
