2007 Cardinals Rotation - Experience Wanted

The St. Louis Cardinals' projected 2007 rotation lacks the starting experience of nine of the last ten World Series winners. Given a winter of free agent near-misses, that includes their own club from 2006 to no one's surprise!

Experience matters. Intuitively, we probably all accept that without argument.

For any Major League club to secure each season’s ultimate prize, a win in the World Series, just how much of that experience does a pitching staff need? A definitive answer to that question is bound to raise a debate on any street corner or message board around the baseball world.

I decided to look at this from a historical perspective, rather than try to make projections. Given the desired role is performing as a member of a major league starting rotation, that is the metric I chose to measure.

For the last ten World Series winners, I have listed below the number of career regular season major league starts the primary five rotation members had at the conclusion of their World Championship regular season.

For example, while Pedro Martinez currently has 375 career starts, he had “just” 321 at the end of the 2004 campaign. So, the latter number is what is listed for him for the 2004 Red Sox.

I then totaled the number of regular-season starts for each championship starting five at the time their World Series was earned.

	Total	Starter	Starter	Starter	Starter	Starter
	Starts
Ten -year average	927
2007 Cards		Carpenter	Wells	Reyes	Wainwright	Looper/
						Thompson
Career starts*	574	258	207	48	30	31
2006 Cards		Carpenter	Mulder	Suppan	Marquis	Weaver
Career starts	1105	228	199	301	137	240
2005 White Sox		Buehrle	Garcia	Contreras	Garland	Hernandez
Career starts	779	172	218	72	159	158
2004 Red Sox		Lowe	Martinez	Schilling	Wakefield	Arroyo
Career starts	1152	120	321	370	283	58
2003 Marlins		Pavano	Penny	Redman	Willis	Beckett
Career starts	397	118	109	95	27	48
2002 Angels		Appier	Ra. Ortiz	Washburn	Sele	Lackey
Career starts	851	377	91	98	267	18
2001 Diamondbacks		Schilling	Johnson	Anderson	Ellis	Lopez
Career starts	933	279	391	158	17	88
2000 Yankees		Clemens	Pettitte	Cone	Hernandez	Neagle
Career starts	1386	512	190	380	83	221
1999 Yankees		Hernandez	Cone	Pettitte	Clemens	Irabu
Career starts	1107	54	351	158	480	64
1998 Yankees		Pettitte	Cone	Wells	Irabu	Hernandez
Career starts	779	127	320	274	37	21
1997 Marlins		Brown	Fernandez	Leiter	Saunders	Rapp
Career starts	783	277	229	143	21	113
* assumes 30 starts each

Not surprisingly, experience does matter.

With the lone exception of the 2003 Florida Marlins, every World Series champ since at least 1997 sported a starting five with a combined 779 career starts or more.

The most experienced quintet was the 2000 New York Yankees led by Roger Clemens and David Cone with almost 1400 career starts among the five. The ten-year average winning staff had 927 starts worth of experience.

The 2006 Cardinals, with Mark Mulder counted among the top five, came in at 1105 starts, considerably above the average. Substituting Anthony Reyes for Mulder (each had 17 starts last season) would drop the total to 924, almost right on top of the average over the last ten seasons.

Extending this analysis to 2007 paints a fairly bleak picture for the Cardinals, though. Whether Braden Looper or Brad Thompson is the fifth starter doesn’t matter here, as the two have just one MLB start between them.

Even when generously projecting that every one of the 2007 Cardinals five will get 30 starts, their total MLB starting experience level at the end of next season would be just 574 games.

In totality, the Cardinals crew lacks the major league starting experience of nine of the last ten champions and its total is barely half of the previous year’s club.

Unless anyone sees a 2003 Marlins-kind of potential here – the likes of Dontrelle Willis, A.J. Burnett, Josh Beckett and the others – one could draw the conclusion the 2007 Cardinals rotation is simply too short on experience to make the grade.

Yet, the 2006-2007 off-season is not over. Simply re-adding Jeff Weaver to the mix would push the Cardinals’ starting experience level to well over 900 games, which would closely approach the ten-year championship average.

Not to harp on what might have been, but here are the career start counts for four former free-agent pitchers the Cardinals pursued but lost this off-season.

	Seasons	Career Starts
Jason Schmidt	12	304
Randy Wolf	8	190
Miguel Batista	12	185
Vicente Padilla	8	144

Clearly, any single statistic should not be used alone to draw specific conclusions, but this data likely does nothing to ease anyone’s concern over the tenuous state of the 2007 Cardinals rotation.

On a related topic, over on our Message Board, posters “mikdo” and “Jmodene1” led a recent thread considering the number of innings-pitched, ERA and health expected from the top starters during a World Series-winning season.

The theory presented, while still under discussion, is that the 2007 Cardinals rotation as constructed lacks the necessary depth to lead the club to a repeat World Championship. A by-product of the depth problem is that the bullpen will become overtaxed and significantly negatively impact the team’s overall record.

While not identical to this analysis, as its focus is depth, rather than experience, the subjects are clearly related. Make sure you stop by the Message Board to join in the discussion.



Brian Walton can be reached via email at [e-mail].

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