On Leiter

I want to preface by saying that I don't like Leiter, and I was not in favor of signing him at the beginning of the year. BUT everyone - except a very small majority - is overreacting. There are two main reasons for this.

1. There was a specific reason we signed Leiter, and it has nothing to do with his "mentoring" of our young pitchers - which I think is a joke. Leiter was the only guy available for us to sign. Because of our financial situation (I hope I don't need to explain), we could only sign a player for a one year deal; therefore, that took us out of the running for guys like Odalis Perez, Clement, Wright, Milton, etc. Also, the management needed to save face with a dwindling, fickle fan base by bringing in a pseudo big name player that made it seem like losing Penny and Pavano were "baseball" and not financial moves. Leiter fits that description; plus he is well liked in South Florida because of his previous service. Finally, Leiter was the only starting pitcher of any ability willing to accept deferred money w/o interest. We are not paying him 8 million. 1 million of that is being paid to his charity, which is a tax write off and thus essentially not being paid. We are paying him 4 million this year and 3 million next year. In today's age with high average market returns, deferring 3 million dollars is sacrificing a significant amount of money. In summary, Leiter was signed out of necessity, and NOT a choice among a number of talented pitchers.

2. Leiter has not been as horrible as everyone is making it sound. Leiter has made 9 starts. In six of those starts, he has kept the Marlins in games. In fact, in those six starts he has an ERA of 3.21 and averaged 5.61 innings per start. Now, the innings per start is not good, but we knew going into this year that Leiter throws a ton of pitches and will not go deep into games. Also, with those numbers Leiter deserved to win more than 2 of those starts, but the Marlins didn't score runs for him. If he had won 4 of those 6, I don't think everyone would be bitching as much, but that's what you get for considering a worthless stat like record.

He has had 3 horrendous starts. This last one can be ignored somewhat, at least I feel, because of the long rain delay. The other two were terrible with no excuses. But that will happen. His ERA has been drastically inflated by those two starts in which he gave up 16 runs in 7 innings. But overall he has been much better than his current ERA.

There are two problems with perception on this board. One is with expectations. Leiter will not and was not signed to replace Pavano. He is not an ace and will only be an adequate middle-of-the-rotation kind of guy. In 6 of 9 starts he has been that. He needs to keep his bad starts to a minimum, which I think he will do.

That leads into the second problem with perception on this board. People overreact to a small sample size and underreact to a large sample size. Leiter is a proven veteran who has not seen a deterioration of his abilities since last year. He has not lost velocity or movement; he is struggling with control, which all pitchers regardless of age will struggle with from time to time. Therefore, there is reason to believe that he will stop having these horrendous starts and return to last year?s form. Actually, he will return to the form of his other 6 starts, which is eerily similar to his numbers last year. I would worry more about Moehler. Someone who hasn?t started consistently for 3 years and even when he was starting had an average ERA of about 4.50. He is much more likely to decline than for Leiter to continue pitching inconsistently and having poor starts. Moehler is a case of underreacting to a large sample size of mediocrity. Rob Neyer wrote a nice article about this problem on ESPN.com.

http://insider.espn.go.com/mlb/columns/sto..._rob&id=2066419

In conclusion, everyone should ease up on trashing Leiter.