I liked Kyle Davies going into this year because of his age, his pedigree, his good spring, and I knew he had added a cutter. What I didn’t know was how big a weapon the cutter seems to be.Â
If Alex Gershwind is right, it’s a big weapon, though there are some open questions about his study. Most pertinent is what the sample actually is. Did he only include players who threw fewer than X number of cutters in Year 1 and more than X number of cutters in Year 2? This would tend to eliminate failures from the pool, but he doesn’t say.
He also doesn’t give a demographic profile to the guys in his study. If they were mostly not Jamie Moyer, or if they were, like Jamie Moyer, all guys on the threshhold of dropping out of the league, their typical regression to their mean career stats might show a dramatic swing.
But I have Davies in one league and I need him to do well. So I’m not looking too closely.