Cahill, Trevor

If you listened to me last season, you took Brett Anderson instead of Trevor Cahill. I surmised that Anderson's superior control would translate more easily to the major leagues straight from double-A ball than Cahill's supposedly superior stuff. That proved out and Cahill had a workman like, but disappointing year of serving up the long ball and not striking people out.

The usual thing to say about Cahill here is that despite his worse than average performance, he was "lucky" because of his in-play results (a .276 BABIP). And most fielding independent rates show him with an ERA of a half run worse than his 4.76. I sound like a broken record on this, but Cahill's in-play hits were 7.96/9IP. That's a terrible number, In 2007 when he was in A-ball, he gave up 7.00/9IP. Yet his BABIP in 2009 was a "great" .276 and his BABIP in 2007 was a "terrible ".313. Again, as in so many cases, BABIP is an artifact of K-rate (too much math to go into here).

I love Cahill, because despite jumping all the way to the bigs from double-A at the age of 21, he had given up 8 home runs in 238+ innings in the minors and gave up 27 in 178+ major league innings with a 13.4% HR/FB. Cahill struck out a reasonable number of folks in August and September (until his collapse at the end of the month which is typical for a young pitcher).

It's not clear he'll even win a job with the signing of Jason Jennings and Brett Tomko. But there's nothing wrong with his game that would make a marked improvement unlikely. 12-0-4.05-1.35-135.200IP