| Christopher Reina. 14th April, 2010 - 4:42 pm
 Brett Anderson came into 2010 with as much buzz as anybody in baseball and he hasn't disappointed with no earned runs through his first 12 innings of work, both coming against Seattle. He has a WHIP of 1.00, a K/9 rate of 7.5 and his BAbip has dropped to .274, which was one of the main reasons why he seemed destined to improve his 4.06 2009 ERA (3.69 FIP).
Anderson was acquired by the A's as part of the Dan Haren trade that also netted Carlos Gonzalez. The fact that Billy Beane turned an aging Mark Mulder into three years of Haren, a stud outfielder he flipped to Colorado in the Matt Holliday deal and a 22-year-old lefty starter already putting up impressive starts is nothing short of miraculous.
Dave Cameron of the excellent Seattle blog USS Mariner had this to say about Anderson following his start on Tuesday, which I included in my MLB scoop for Wednesday.
Brett Anderson is tremendous. If I had to start a franchise with any pitcher in baseball, Brett Anderson would be in the discussion for the guy I would take. I?d probably end up with Felix (Hernandez) or (Tim) Lincecum or (Zack) Greinke, but I?d seriously consider Anderson. He?s that good. For all the problems the offense has had, facing him twice in the last five days hasn?t helped.
Cameron also writes for FanGraphs and is one of the better baseball writers out there. He also has seen every pitch Anderson has thrown in 2010, as well as at least the five starts he had against the Mariners in 2009, which gave him a 3.41 ERA in 29 innings.
Last season, Anderson had a July streak of 21 scoreless innings when his velocity began to increase and his K/9 numbers began to climb over 8.00 and even 9.73 in September. All the while, he continued to have a BAbip that was unsustainable for hitters.
Anderson largely works off of a low to mid 90s fastball (occasionally hitting ab and an excellent slider that rests in the low to mid 80s. In 2009, most of Anderson's success was with the slider, but his fastball was very hittable. This season, Anderson has been far more successful with the fastball while relying a little more on the slider and a little less on the change, which he worked on heavily during the spring and has improved.
His ability to get outs at the MLB level is already indisputable and will not go away. My biggest concern with putting him in the category near the likes of Lincecum, Felix and Greinke is his very good, though not yet elite strikeout rate. His K/9 rate in the minors was consistently around 9.5 strikeouts per nine innings, but he had a mark of 7.7 in his first season and has been about the same this season through those first 12 innings.
But he has the kind of stuff where his strikeouts will nudge upwards in time, as it did for Steve Carlton, a Hall of Fame lefty who also had an excellent slider. Even though his K/9 rate doesn't approach or exceed 10.0, Anderson is still ranked 18th all-time in this category amongst starting lefties with at least 100 innings at 23 or younger. Number one and two on that list are Rick Ankiel and Oliver Perez and one is now an outfielder in Kansas City and the other is impossibly erratic.
Number five on the list is teammate Gio Gonzalez, who strikes out batters at a Cy Young pace and is only a reduction in his walk and homer rates away from being every bit as good as Anderson.
I'm not ready to put Anderson ahead of the three pitchers he mentioned, or ahead of Jon Lester, Josh Johnson, Clayton Kershaw and Ubaldo Jimenez, but he has officially joined that party of the game's best young pitchers.
Chris Reina is the executive editor of RealGM. Click here to follow his Twitter feed. |
