Re: Who has the best EOG team?
Gavin Floyd, SP, White Sox
Admit it: You cut Floyd when he had a 7.92 ERA after his first eight starts.
Yeah,
cut him: a 26-year-old coming off a 17-win season. For shame.
And how did that end? With you dropped to your knees, shaking your fist in the air and cursing the fates?
You might see Floyd's rebound -- a 1.82 ERA over his last four starts with 31 strikeouts in 29 2/3 innings -- as nothing more than bad timing on your part, but the truth is you shouldn't have doubted him at all.
And I know that's easy to say in retrospect, but you have to consider what makes Floyd so successful in the first place: his curveball.
Time and time again we've seen curveball pitchers struggle early in the season.
Brett Myers did last year.
Josh Beckett did this year.
A.J. Burnett did both last year and this year. They don't come into spring training throwing sweeping hooks, and sometimes they haven't quite found the pitch by the time the season starts.
If you've already cut Floyd, you might still have a chance to get him back. And you want to. He's much closer to the pitcher we saw over his last four starts than his first eight. He'll get blown out every now and then, on days when he can't get his curveball to break like it should, but not with even close to the frequency we saw over the first two months of the season.
who knew?