I thought he would improve at keeping his pitch counts down. He was young, still kinda is. Big strong guy with a lively arm and good stuff. The Astros front office was fooled too, I guess. I think they gave him $65 mil.
Yeah, it's hard to be a solid innings eater type when your control sucks and you're constantly running up high pitch counts. He had a BB/9 of nearly 5 during the 2021 season and we're talking about essentially a 2 pitch mix here that is primarily the fastball. His advanced stats outside of 2022 have never been that good. Take whatever stat you like - xERA, FIP, xFIP, SIERRA - they have been 4+ in every season aside from 2022. I'd love to be wrong but I don't think he will ever have a season even close to what he did in 2022.
No…if you read what I’ve been saying it’s pretty clear my opinion. IMO his 2022 season was a fluke. He’s got a career FIP of 4.14 and regularly runs pitch counts up so he’s not going deep in games either. I don’t think you can count on him being anymore than a 4 or 5 which is fine because Hunter, Imai and Burrows look like they are going to be a solid 1-2-3.
It is hard to say. I personally am not that high on Javier right now, but it is pretty easy to build a case for optimism. He’s been worth 7.6 fwar over 538 ip in his career. That ratio would paint him as ~2.2 fwar over 160 ip, which is the workload he should be able to handle in a season. That would make him roughly one of the ~60 most valuable pitchers in the league in any given season. And there’s probably upside to that because over his career he has been used inconsistently and/or has battled injuries, likely pitching hurt in some spots. His velo is where it needs to be. It looks like he might’ve lost a little bit of spin on his fb since 2022. It seems like he’s gone away from his 4s fb and leaned more on his change and sinker and the results haven’t been as good. But the way the Astros other SP have looked, Houston might have one of the 5 best rotations in the league even if Javier is pretty mediocre.
I don’t disagree with any of this - all I’m saying is you can’t expect him to post anywhere near a 2.54 ERA again. It sounded like Tomstro and I’m sure many others expected him to become a SP1 or a high end SP2 after that 2022 season. If he puts up a high 3 ERA and a fWAR around 2, I’ll be happy.
