It gives me no particular pleasure to document it, but the performance of Mike DeJean thus far this season has been so spectacularly ineffective that it's impossible to ignore.  As this year's string of poor outings grew longer and longer I found myself thinking that I'd never seen anything like it.  I wondered if the Orioles franchise ever had.

I originally conceived of putting something together on this topic about 10 days ago, and since then the story has become increasingly gruesome.  It's fascinating, in a car wreck kind of a way, to see the numbers get worse and worse as time goes by, but, through the game of May 25th, Mike DeJean's stat line is as follows:

In may seem absurd, but let's put these numbers in some kind of context.  

• Nearly 54.1% of the batters DeJean is facing this year are reaching base safely; that is to say, more than half of the batters he faces can expect to reach base.

• 75%--that's three of every four for those of you didn't minor in mathematics--of the baserunners he's inherited this year have scored on his watch.

• DeJean has recorded, in one fashion or another, 47 outs this year (15.2 IP).  In that same span of time, he's allowed 53 batters to reach safely (30 hits, 19 walks, four hit batsmen)...yes, he's allowed more baserunners than he has recorded outs (as the .541 OBP against would suggest).

• His BR/9IP mark is presently 30.45

• His BB/9IP mark is presently 10.91

• His H/9IP mark is presently 17.23

• Somehow, throughout all of this, he's striking out more than a batter an inning...and still has a K/BB ratio below 1.

Looking at these numbers, frankly, it's a wonder that his ERA is only 9.19.  It could be 15--or worse--and I wouldn't even blink.

As poorly as DeJean has done overall, his performance against left-handed batters is truly mind-boggling (and not in a good sense, I'm afraid).  In a composite four innings against lefties, his opponents have managed 13 hits, 12 walks and have been hit four times.  That's 29 baserunners in four innings, or 65.25 BR/9IP.  He has recorded 12 outs against lefty batters while allowing 29 baserunners, for a 2.42 BR/Out ratio; for every two outs he records against lefty swingers, roughly five reach base safely.  Lefties are hitting .619 (you read that correctly) against him, with a .744 OBP and a .714 slugging percentage.  In other words, DeJean is allowing nearly three quarters of the left-handed hitters who face him to reach base safely.

All of this--totals and numbers versus left-handed batters--is from an admittedly small sample size (approximately 100 plate appearances against), but it's worth noting two things.  First, we're talking about a generally normal workload here.  DeJean has appeared in 18 games for the Orioles thus far this season and is on pace to pitch in close to 70 games at this rate.  Second, the numbers are so horrific, so incomprehensibly bad, that it's simply impossible to dismiss them, or minimize their significance.

DeJean has been so horrible that it's worth putting his performance into some kind of historical context...so, let's go ahead and do just that.

Let's assume that Mike DeJean was released today and didn't pitch again this season.  He'd finish with 18 appearances and all of the ignominious numbers listed above.  Here's where he would rank, all-time (from 1900 to the present), in terms of baserunners allowed per nine innings among pitchers with at least 18 appearances:

Here's where he'd rank in terms of hits allowed per nine innings:

And this would be his walks per nine innings ranking:

DeJean's is having a bad season...an epically bad season, the likes of which have rarely been seen.  Of qualifiers, only Ramon Tatis in 1998 allowed more baserunners per inning than DeJean has thus far this season...and just barely.  DeJean is just about to the point, in terms of workload, where teams simply give up on pitchers who are anywhere near this ineffective, even if they have something of a pedigree.  Note that only two of the pitchers on the 20 (21 including DeJean) all-time worst list reached the 30-appearance plateau:  Rob Dibble in 1995 and Bob Patterson in 1998.  But Dibble got his 31 appearances with two different teams (16 with the White Sox before they gave up on him and 15 more with the Brewers before they threw in the towel).  Patterson got all 33 of his games with the Cubs, but note that neither pitcher ever appeared in another big league game after their miserable campaigns.  Neither, it should be noted, did Ramon Tatis.  Mitch Williams, the only pitcher legitimately close to Tatis-DeJean territory in his 1995 season, missed all of 1996 and then appeared in six games with the Royals in 1997 before calling it a career.  Note that no pitcher has been given the opportunity to record two seasons on the list.  You either get a lot better or you get out; the vast majority of the time it was the latter occurrence that took place.

No previous member of the franchise now known as the Baltimore Orioles makes the BR/9IP list of ignominy.  (That's not to say that no one on the list never pitched for the franchise, just that no one was performing for the franchise when they pitched this badly.)  The worst qualifying BR/9IP mark by a member of this franchise was Ed Linke's 20.93 performance in 21 games for the 1938 St. Louis Browns.  Mike Flanagan's 20.25 mark in 1992 (41 games) is the worst by someone wearing an Orioles uniform.

What's odd about DeJean's performance is that it doesn't, as far as anyone seems to know, seem to be connected to an injury and it wasn't foreshadowed by some previously clear decline.  Only once in his career did DeJean allow significantly more hits than innings pitched and that was in 1998 when he was with Colorado.  I've seen him pitch at least a few times a season for essentially his entire career and there were times--particularly while he was with Milwaukee--where he could be devastating...almost unhittable.  When his sinker and split-finger fastball were on, and they were more often than not in 2001-02 with the Brewers--he was very tough.  When he struggled it was because he'd fall behind in the count and hitters were able to lay off the pitches diving toward the dirt, forcing him to come in with a pitch or walk them.  When he got strike one, it was lights out.  That simply isn't the case this year.  He's really no better after getting ahead 0-1 (.438/.500/.625) than  he is after falling behind 1-0 (.407/.636/.519).

DeJean's confidence at this point has to be non-existent and, though I'm sure no one would admit it, the same has to be true for his teammates who must be all but resigned to an uprising every time he enters a game.

The carnage is so great at this point that it's effectively impossible to see any way that it will resolve itself without some kind of dramatic event--if it resolves itself at all.  At a minimum, DeJean must be farmed out, traded or released.  It's difficult to imagine him ever pitching effectively wearing a Baltimore uniform and history would imply that performances this bad (just for the sake of comparison, this is 2/3 more BR/9IP than Norm Charlton allowed during his disastrous stint with the Birds in 1998 and more than double the BR/9IP that Terry Mathews or Mike Timlin ever surrendered with the Orioles) are frequently an indicator of a career's end.

Hopefully DeJean will be an exception to the rule but--for his sake and that of the team--a conclusive reassignment is clearly in order.

Return to Birds in the Belfry home page