In the comments of yesterday’s post about the bullishness of the ZiPS for the the Cardinals’ offense, reader Liam expressed his reticence about reading our writeup on the pitching side. Fear not, Liam: ZiPS are just about as kind to the Cardinal pitchers as to their batters.

THT’s Dave Gassko isn’t quite as high on Carpenter, deeming him one of the luckiest pitchers in 2006, but we’re not going to let that bring us down: ZiPS tells us that we’ve got three starters projected to have sub-4.00 ERAs (last year, the team had only two starters with sub-5.00 ERAs). The rotation is of course far from set, and quite possibly won’t even be until Opening Day (if not later). But given what we know — or we should say, what we know from Dan Szymborski — the starting rotation should actually be an improvement over last year’s.

But the Cardinals don’t even have a full rotation, right? A couple reasons why the team may not even need to sign another starter — are you ready for this? — are that Braden Looper and Brad Thompson may not be as bad at starting as we might’ve first thought. While it remains a distinct probability that neither Looper nor Thompson will start any games in 2007, given that the Cardinals are still pondering what to with Weaver and other free agent options, ZiPS informs us that they wouldn’t be bad fallback options, after all.

Here are several possible rotation scenarios that the team could have when they break camp:

• Scenario 1: Weaver, no Mulder
• Scenario 2a: Mulder, no Weaver (w/Narveson)
• Scenario 2b: Mulder, no Weaver (w/Thompson)
• Scenario 2c: Mulder, no Weaver (w/Looper)
• Scenario 3a: No Weaver or Mulder (w/Narveson and Thompson)
• Scenario 3b: No Weaver or Mulder (w/Looper and Thompson)

Dan was kind enough to provide his projections for Wainwright, Looper and Thompson as starters, so we’ll use those (check out his latest tool, by the way — hat tip: RedbirdRay). Also, we took the liberty of cutting Mulder’s projection in half, since from all we’ve heard, he will be fortunate to be able to pitch come July. In the Mulder scenarios, then, we used half a Mulder combined with one of either Narveson, Looper or Thompson. We also translated the “counting” stats Dan used in ZiPS into rate stats, such as K/BB, K/9 and HR/9. Totals are shaded:

Whatever combination you prefer, even in the worst-case scenario (no Weaver or Mulder and Narveson and Thompson pick up the slack), the starting rotation’s composite ERA may actually be among the best in the league, at least compared with last year’s NL teams, and unquestionably an upgrade from the Cardinals’ 2006 bunch, though we realize that’s not saying much.

So without considering the bullpen, the ZiPS projections give Cardinal fans good reason to get excited about the pitching staff this year, regardless of whom the team signs (or doesn’t). Liam, it’s safe to come out now.

This entry was posted by Pip on Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 at 9:29 am and is filed under analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.