PIÑATAFEST 2003 @ BIRDS IN THE BELFRY

The 2003 Kerry's Piñata Award Recipient
The 2003 Piñata Award decision was as difficult as any I've had to make in the history of this prestigious honor.  There was a large number of candidates, with varying strengths (or weaknesses, depending on whether you're a glass is half-full or glass is half-empty kind of person), but when it came down to crunch time, the man of the hour, the individual with the Performance Best Resembling a Piñata in a Starring Role, was none other than Omar Daal!  Let's have a big round of applause, ladies and gentlemen, for this year's top fiesta implement:

OMAR DAAL, 2003

Omar "won," but he had to fend off heavy competition from a variety of Piñata Award suitors.

Jason Johnson put up a better than expected effort.  It may be surprising to see Johnson's name mentioned, given his relatively solid 4.18 ERA in 2003, but a closer look shows that Johnson was really pretty awful last year and an ERA a run or more higher wouldn't have been surprising.  Of those throwing at least 180 innings in 2003, Johnson had the second worst baserunners per nine innings (BR/9) mark in all of major league baseball (14.52) and was the worst among AL qualifiers.  He was ninth in hits per nine innings (10.25 H/9) and tenth in walks per nine innings (3.8 BB/9) among 180+ IP big leaguers.  His Component ERA (abbreviated ERC, a sabermetric measure designed to neutralize a pitcher's ERA based on his peripheral stat performance) was 5.21, a huge disparity from his actual mark, and one that desperately calls into question whether the Orioles should offer him salary arbitration this year, but that's another story for another time).  But in the end, Johnson was overcome by many of his competitors, including Daal.

Rodrigo Lopez was another pitcher who was a Piñata Award finalist, and justifiably so.  Lopez was awful in 2003.  The threshold had to be lowered to include Lopez among baseball's worst because he threw only 147 innings last year, but looking at pitchers with at least 140 IP in 2003, Lopez posted an even higher BR/9 mark than Johnson (14.76 vs. 14.52).  Only two 140+ IP pitchers allowed more hits per nine innings than Lopez (11.51) last season.  The right-hander was also tagged for 24 home runs (1.47 HR/9) and finished with a 5.82 ERA (ERC 6.00).  Yes, Lopez was right there, and one of the three clear finalists.

A second obvious finalist was Rick Helling.  His 5.71 ERA in 138.2 IP for the Orioles was driven by his 30 home runs allowed (1.95 HR/9), a truly dreadful mark.  Helling was, it should have been obvious, a pitifully poor fit for a team playing in a ballpark like Camden Yards (basically a pitcher's park except for extreme fly ball pitchers--which is what Helling is).  But beyond the home runs, Helling wasn't that horrible.  He allowed "only" 10.13 H/9 (nothing to be proud of, but more run-of-the-mill lousy than pathetic), and his overall 13.5 BR/9 mark wasn't much worse than the league average.  Helling was, really, pretty much a one-trick pony.  Admittedly, he had his single trick down to an art form but it wasn't quite enough to push him past this year's winner.

Damian Moss pitched badly enough to win the award but, in the end, I decided he didn't pitch badly enough enough.  In other words, he barely qualified on technical grounds for consideration in the first place.  He only appeared in 10 games for the Orioles and fired just 50.2 innings.  He did walk 29 batters and surrender 12 home runs, both dreadful marks.  He also allowed a total of 63 hits.  In short, he stunk, but as a general rule, unless someone like this is dramatically worse than anyone else in the field, I won't present him with the hardware.  Moss was, statistically speaking, the worst of the qualifying pitchers on the Orioles last year, but there's something to be said for depth of impact.  Daal pitched roughly twice as much as Moss did (17 starts to nine, 19 overall appearances to 10) and therefore had the opportunity to make a deeper impression.  And, essentially, Daal was almost as bad qualitatively and had the added bonus of his quantitative effect.

In the end, it was impossible to look past Daal.  Of big league pitchers with at least 90 innings, only six posted higher BR/9 marks than Omar (15.95) and only two of these were in the American League.  Daal was the MLB champion in terms of H/9 (12.88) among those with at least 90 innings last season.  In fact--and this really cemented the decision to give Daal the trophy--no big league pitcher with at least 90 innings pitched has allowed as many hits per nine innings in a season as Daal did in 2003 since 1980 when both Mike Parrot and Ed Figueroa were worse.  Daal's mark is 25th worst in the modern era, and the fifth worst since 1939.  It was also the worst ever in the Baltimore history of the franchise now known as the Orioles.  Furthermore, Daal's 6.34 ERA was, if anything, an understatement of how dreadful he was in 2003; his ERC was 6.57.

Assuming he's Piñata eligible, Omar has to be given a real chance to become the first ever back-to-back winner of the Piñata Award in 2004.

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