Our Seattle Mariners blog, Lookout Landing, is obviously still sore over the Carlos Silva Era in Seattle. If you’ll recall, Silva signed a ludicrous 4-year, $48 million contract with the Mariners before the 2008 season, only to go 5-18 in two years in Seattle. That’s nearly $5 million per win, if you’re keeping track at home. His peripheral stats were scarcely better, if at all: 6.81 ERA, 1.617 WHIP, 12.14 H/9 IP.
Mariners Blog: Where Has This Carlos Silva Been?
But since going to the Cubs, Silva has been resurgent. He won his first eight decisions of the season, and even in defeat yesterday, he was valiant: 7 IP, 7 H, 2 BB, 2 ER, 6 K. That’s a winning line most days.
So with Silva on pace to go 22-3 (that won’t keep up) with a 2.89 ERA, 1.09 WHIP, and 145 Ks--all of which would be career bests by considerable margins--Lookout Landing wondered how, precisely, Silva could have improved this much in one season. The answer, surprisingly, is pitch selection:
The NL switch helps, of course, but this is pretty much all happening because Silva has dropped his fastball usage from a steady ~75% all the way down to 56%. He’s throwing way more sliders and changeups, and batters are having way more trouble hitting them. And he’s sacrificed nothing in the way of strikes or groundballs.
Carlos Silva is 31 years old. How did he go this long without somebody telling him, “hey, if you didn’t throw your sinker so much, you might do better”?
It’s also worth pointing out that Silva’s success may be little more than a reflection of that giant disparity between his body of work and his current performance; if hitters have studied Silva enough to expect nothing but sinkers and fastballs, then the Silva they’re actually facing will confound them. Once scouting catches up to this trend, Silva’s stats will probably regress to the mean.
Still, that’s little consolation to Mariners fans who watched two seasons of utter garbage on the mound from Silva.
See More:
