Sonny Gray is a great pitcher. Sonny Gray is also coming off of an absolutely horrendous season, one that was especially shocking given how good Sonny Gray is. Conventional wisdom holds that you probably should never trade a pitcher as good as Sonny Gray, and even if you decided to buck a bit of conventional wisdom and trade a pitcher as good as Sonny Gray, there would be a whole different level of conventional wisdom to saying
now, with his value at an unquestionable nadir
, is the
most terrible time to do it.
Conventional wisdom is wrong.
Gray came into last season with 491 career major league innings, a 2.88 career ERA, a 1.13 WHIP and a strikeout to walk ration of nearly 4 to 1. He’d thrown more than 200 innings in each of the preceding 2 seasons and despite being only 5’10”, the then-26 year old was making a name for himself as one of the best young starters in baseball.
Then 2016 happened. Now, there are a lot of people out there saying 2016 has been a pretty bad year. But no matter your political leanings, taste in music, or whatever else, your year probably wasn’t as bad as Sonny Gray’s.
To Continue reading about why the Oakland A’s should Trade Sonny Gray, Please visit offthebenchbaseball.com
About Sean Morash
Sean is a Braves fan from Knoxville, Tennessee. He was formerly an outfielder for the Vassar College Brewers, a Division III program in upstate New York. After the Brewers, Sean shifted focus from dominating the blog, to dominating international baseball as he became the head coach and number 2 hitter for the Erbach Grasshoppers, a semi-professional team competing in Germany's Regionalliga Südwest. Sean's commentary usually errs on the side of statistical analysis (he developed his own sabermetric, revised it, and then developed another one), though he does offer more general opinion pieces as well. Sean is currently working for an electric power research consultant in grid modernization. His work in renewable energy examines the political, regulatory, engineering factors associated with the advance of modern electricity technologies.
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