Can Silva keep improving?

I wrote of DIPS early when I talked about Jesse Crain and the defense behind him. I surmised that Crain would improve and he has. Can Silva improve?

I am not a fan of Silva I don’t think he strikes out enough batters to be a quality pitcher and he is not the groundball pitcher everyone makes him out to be. His groundball percentage this year is about 51%. That is less than the league average. I think if he was really able to become a groundball pitcher he would really improve.

Now I wanted to look at Silva and briefly look at his DIPS ERA and see what that means for the rest of the season. So far this season Silva has an ERA of 6.43. That is horrible. He has been improving this, mainly due to the fact that he is allowing fewer homeruns and fewer hits. The hits allowed are primarily due to the fact that he finally has a better defense behind him.

His DIPS shows that with an average defense he would have an ERA of 5.39. Still not good but at least it is something he can improve on. And he has.

Since he went back into the rotation his ERA has been an average 4.06, with a DIPS of 3.78. That is a good pitcher. I don't know if he can keep that up but it is great to see an improvemnet.

His defense still isn’t doing as good of a job as it should but at least it is improving and isn’t costing him a run a game. If he can pitch the rest of the season with an ERA around 4.00 he would still be a valuable 4th starter for this team.

I believe this is the pitcher he is. I don’t think he will ever post a sub 4.00 ERA but he can keep it close, and if does so for the rest of the season he will win the Twins many more games.

I think he will keep the improvement up and remain the slightly below average pitcher I hope he can be.

One more thing. We shouldn't have been surprised by his decline this year. I was expecting a fairly large decline, but not this bad. Last year he had an ERA of 3.44 and a DIPS of 4.33. Showing that his ERA was better than he actually pitched. These things have a way of evening themselves out. So far this year they have.

Of the top 10 pitchers who had the highest DIPS to ERA ratio only Kenny Rogers is pitching better this year. In fact, all of the other pitchers ERAs have ballooned too. Clemens had the highest ratio and has barely pitched this year. All of the other top 10 have ERAs are over 1 run higher. One exception is Hudson whose ERA has only risen about 3/4 of a run.