The success stories of the 2002 amateur draft were mostly high-school draftees -- Cole Hamels, Matt Cain, Zack Greinke, and Prince Fielder were the biggest names of the first round. It’s a good thing no one wrote a book with a chapter on that draft, focusing on how silly it was to pick high-school players!
Kevin Correia, Pittsburgh Pirates A Perfect Match
But the first player from that draft to make the majors wasn’t Nick Swisher or Khalil Greene or any of those others; it was Kevin Correia, a fourth-round pick by the Giants out of Cal-Poly San Luis Obispo. He was drafted, played a bit in the Northwest League, and started his first full minor-league season in AA, a pretty aggressive promotion. He was never supposed to be a star, just a decent back-of-the-rotation guy.
Well, he showed those naysayers by becoming a decent back-of-the-rotation guy. He had his dalliances with relieving, sure, but his greatest successes -- and failures -- have come as a starter. In 2008, he was historically bad, being one of a select few to throw more than 100 innings as a starter with an ERA over 6.00. That’s a fun list, actually. Read through it and imagine someone on the Internet explaining how each of those pitchers was just about to turn the corner. Ryan Rupe was due!
But Correia recovered as a Padre, and he was a pretty good bargain this offseason. There are bargain free agents that make sense for a team like the Pirates, and there are those who just suck away money and time. Correia was most certainly the former -- a guy who wasn’t going to push a team towards a division title, but who would be decent enough to prevent a bullpen from coming into the fourth inning of every one of his starts.
One minor detail, though: After defeating the Cubs today, Kevin Correia leads the National League in wins.
Wins are a junk stat, you say? Well, that’s just ... entirely true. But his ERA is down to 3.44, so he must be doing something right. The problem is, it’s really, really hard to tell what he’s doing right. He has the worst strikeout rate in the National League, settling in at 3.98 strikeouts per nine innings pitched.
You’ve been to enough sites like this to know what’s coming: a sentence on how either the strikeout rate goes up or the ERA does. And, hey, there it was. But the weird thing about Correia’s inability to miss bats is that he can’t even do it when hitters swing at pitches out of the strike zone. Hitters have been able to make contact on 75% of the pitches they’ve chased against Correia in his 63 innings before today, which is about 10% higher than the league average, and 15% higher than his career average.
So, yes: Correia’s ERA is going to go up. And, no: He isn’t going to finish the season as the league leader in wins. But he’ll start missing bats at a similar rate to his career averages, and he won’t finish the season with the league’s worst strikeout rate. He was a good pickup by a team that needed him to chew innings, and if he keeps pitching well, he’ll be a decent chip at the trade deadline. And you never know what some GMs will give up for a half-serviceable starter at the deadline.
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