Monday, February 5, 2007

Trever Miller

Why am I choosing to write my first player profile on Trever Miller? Well for one thing, I'm pretty confident that he'll spend the whole season below 50% ownership in Yahoo Public Leagues...making him a candidate for selection as a daily or weekly pick on this blog. And also, his 2006 numbers looked pretty good when I was looking through a list of stats. But also, his stats over the past three years raise an interesting question. Here are the stats I care most about:

Year Team IP BB K
2004 TB 49.0 15 43
2005 TB 44.1 29 35
2006 HOU 50.2 13 56

What the heck happened in 2005? It certainly looks like he may have had some health problems that were fixed in 2006. That's not really the question I'm interested in, although I'd be happy to hear if anyone can confirm it. The really interesting question to me is whether players abilities change more during the offseason than they do during the season...whether due to injury, again, increase maturity, playing around with new pitches, or whatever. In other words, if I look at the stats for a group of pitchers, will each pitcher's September 2005 correlate as well with April 2006 as April 2006 will correlate with May 2006? I have no idea of the answer (although I suspect the differences between seasons will be greater), but I'd sure like to know. It would help me know whether a formerly mediocre player starting off the new season with a great K/BB ratio is likely to have really improved or is just on a hot streak. If I have the time, I'll do a quick study on this sometime.

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