Hitting The Cutoff Man

Something about this blog post from the always interesting Rob Neyer struck a chord with me. In it, Neyer examines an article by David Murphy of Philly.com that discusses Phillies pitcher (and former Northwestern University star!) J.A. Happ. The gist is that Happ's great rookie season in 2009 has been deemed at least partially attributable to luck by sabermetric analysis that looks at Happ's FIP and another stats and sees a performance that likely is not sustainable in the long term.

Murphy asked Happ and the Phillies about it, and of course they disagree with that conclusion.

And the Neyer closes with this passage:

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What's Happ going to say? "Yeah, they're right. I'm not nearly as good as my ERA says. All that work I've been doing since I was 8 years old didn't have anything to do with it. And yeah, it's really easy to stand out there and stare at Albert Pujols from 60 feet away."

I don't think so.

The implication sometimes is that people like me don't respect the talents of people like J.A. Happ.

I don't suppose I should speak for my colleagues, so I'll just tell you this: J.A. Happ, lucky or not, awes me. He's one of the most brilliant athletes on the planet, doing something that's incredibly rare and difficult. And that's all true whether Happ is the new Mark Redman or the new Tom Glavine.
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This is exactly right, of course. In analyzing players, breaking down their faults and comparing them to each other, we tend to forget just how talented they are. Even if J.A. Happ "only" turns out to be a passable No. 4 starter rather than an ace, that still means he's better at throwing a baseball than 99.99 percent of people on Earth. If you or I stepped into the batters box against him, we probably wouldn't be able to even see the ball, let alone hit it. Few of us will be as good at any one thing as Happ is at pitching.

None of this makes Happ or any other Major Leaguer a great person -- we all have our talents and our faults -- but it's something to ponder.

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