If the Phillies had their lives to live over I’m hoping there’s at least one thing that they would have done differently about the 2007 season. They just let Adam Eaton pitch and pitch and he wound up with a line that was ridiculous. He went into the All-Star break with a 5.69 ERA and just got worse in the second half, making 12 second-half starts in which he threw to a 7.38 ERA. He ended the season with a 6.29 ERA in, amazingly, 30 starts. Over the past seven seasons only one other NL player has thrown to a worse ERA in a year he got at least 30 starts. Eric Milton threw to a 6.47 ERA with the Reds in 34 starts in 2005. The Reds, you may remember, didn’t win their division in 2005. They finished fifth, 27 games out of first place in the NL Central.
I’m working towards a couple of points and it’s going to take a while to get there, so I’ll just tell you what they are:
1) The thing that’s worse for a team than having a pitcher having a terrible season is having a pitcher having a terrible season who pitches a lot.
2) The Phillies off-season has been pretty unexciting. But the biggest problem the Phillies has doesn’t require a bold off-season move as a remedy. Thirty starts from Adam Eaton with a 6.29 ERA is the biggest problem the Phillies have to solve for 2008, and the solution for that may even be Adam Eaton. And if it’s not, it’s hard to believe that improving on that is going to require a move that knocks anybody’s socks off.
The Phillies used 28 pitchers in 2007. As a group they got 4,375 outs and were charged with 821 runs.
Obviously, some pitchers pitched more than others and some allowed more runs than others. Here’s how many outs each of the 28 pitchers got (the column to the far right is outs by that pitcher over outs by the team (4,375)):
| outs | outs/team outs | |
| Moyer | 598 | 0.13669 |
| Hamels | 550 | 0.12571 |
| Eaton | 485 | 0.11086 |
| Kendrick | 363 | 0.08297 |
| Lieber | 234 | 0.05349 |
| Myers | 206 | 0.04709 |
| Geary | 202 | 0.04617 |
| Durbin | 194 | 0.04434 |
| Lohse | 183 | 0.04183 |
| F Garcia | 174 | 0.03977 |
| Madson | 168 | 0.03840 |
| Condrey | 150 | 0.03429 |
| Alfonseca | 149 | 0.03406 |
| Gordon | 120 | 0.02743 |
| Mesa | 117 | 0.02674 |
| Romero | 109 | 0.02491 |
| Rosario | 79 | 0.01806 |
| Zagurski | 64 | 0.01463 |
| Hernandez | 46 | 0.01051 |
| Sanches | 44 | 0.01006 |
| Castro | 36 | 0.00823 |
| Davis | 34 | 0.00777 |
| Ennis | 23 | 0.00526 |
| Segovia | 15 | 0.00343 |
| Happ | 12 | 0.00274 |
| Smith | 12 | 0.00274 |
| Bisenius | 6 | 0.00137 |
| A Garcia | 2 | 0.00046 |
| Total | 4375 |
So Jamie Moyer, at the top of the list, got 598 outs. 598/4,375 is .13669, which also means that Moyer got about 13.7% of the outs recorded by Phillies’ hurlers. The numbers in the far right column add up to one.
And here’s how many runs each of the pitchers allowed (the number on the far right is runs allowed by that pitcher over the total runs allowed by the team (821)):
