Why White Sox Fans Should be Careful About Drinking the Gavin Floyd Kool-Aid

Check out this list of "aces" that finished around that mark last year (actually, only four pitchers threw at least 100 innings and did worse in this category). We're talking about Matt Chico, Brandon McCarthy, Lenny DiNardo, Livan Hernandez, Mike Maroth, Noah Lowry, the late Joe Kennedy, and the league-worst, Steve Traschel. What adjectives come to mind when you see these names? The most polite one I can think of is "innings-eater", and that's only if you stare at Livan Hernandez's name way longer than those of the other guys. More accurately, they are "rotation fodder" or "bad pitchers."

Finally, we take a look at groundball-to-flyball ratio (G/F). Gavin Floyd's 2008 G/F is 0.71. That's really, really, really low. Only six guys that threw at least 100 innings last season did worse. Just like the last two statistics, I'll show you the four guys that finished just above that mark and the four guys that finished just below that mark last season.

They are, in order from best-to-worst, Jeff Weaver, Ted Lilly, Matt Chico, Zack Greinke, Oliver Perez, Buddy Carlyle, Jason Bergmann, and Chuck James. You'll notice the only three good pitchers in this group (Lilly, Greinke, Perez) make up for their fly ball tendencies with a high K/9, a high K/BB, or both.

So as you can see, unless we are witnessing perhaps the only pitcher in history with a sustainable skill of consistently inducing weakly-hit fly balls as a primary means to get outs, Gavin Floyd's due for some regression to the mean, and worse luck than he's been having.

I am not saying that he will never be a good pitcher, but it's going to take some serious improvement in his abilities to miss bats and keep the ball on the ground if he's going to be successful in the big leagues. The fact that a pitcher with his skillset has come as close to a no-hitter as Floyd has TWICE is nothing short of unbelievable, as it takes far more luck than usual for a guy like Floyd to do it than it would for say, Javier Vazquez.

By all means, as a Sox fan, I hope that Floyd beats the odds and that I'm wrong.  But I'm expecting a serious downturn from Floyd in the not-too-distant future. If struggling Sox hitters like Nick Swisher snap back to their old selves, that will certainly lessen the blow, and perhaps the White Sox will still be able compete despite the nearly inevitable struggles that Gavin "The Magician" Floyd has in his future.

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