Views from the Promenade

I’ve been hearing it all season. Livan Hernandez is a gutty veteran. Oh, sure, his numbers aren’t good, but he knows how to win! He’s crafty, and can get people out with mediocre stuff. He’s the kind of guy you want on your team.

Whenever you hear these sorts of platitudes thrown around about a player, you should immediately be suspicious. Why can’t people come up with a tangible reason why I should be excited about this player? Usually, the answer is that the player’s on-the-field performance is lacking.

Such is the case with Livan Hernandez. Let’s be honest here: it’s been a few years since he’s put up even average numbers for a starter, and his last good year was probably 2004, when he was an All-Star. If you want one number to look at for pitchers as a quick and dirty analysis, I like WHIP — walks and hits per inning pitched (or put another way, baserunners per inning). Livan’s WHIP has been over 1.50 each of the last three seasons. This is not good; the league average is about 1.41. His ERA has also been above the league average each season since 2006.

Finally, some people will likely point to his “ability to win” or something similar as a reason why Livan’s stats don’t tell the whole story. I don’t like win-loss records, but that’s a topic for another post on another day. If that’s what you want to point at for Hernandez though, you might be surprised to find that his career record is a mediocre 152-143 — hardly the “winning veteran” many seem to classify him as.

This may seem like piling on Livan after a few rough outings, and I don’t want to do that. Tonight’s start just seemed like a good jumping off point for a discussion of his real value to the team. I didn’t mind him as a number five starter, at least temporarily; he does seem to give the Mets more length than most teams get out of that spot, and he gave us a surprisingly good run to start the season. But I’m afraid his recent performance is more a return to form than an aberration. In either case, it might be time to give Jonathan Niese that role going forward. He probably won’t do worse, might do better, and will gain some valuable experience in the big leagues either way.