Will there be an Atlanta Braves Red Sox Deal?

Okay What About Pitching and Teheran?

The quandary for Boston and any other AL East team contemplating adding the Teheran is who they will be getting.  Gammons put it like this.

"Anyone they acquire has to deal with 81 home games in a hitters’ park with another 27-30 games in the other three Big Offense parks. Hence the Julio Teheran issue. He has made starts in Toronto, Baltimore and Boston with an ERA over 9. “His stuff has backed up a rotation in a pitchers’ division,” says one NL GM. “For what they’re going to want, the price for a back-end starter that in two years may have regressed, is a huge gamble.”"

There’s a serious flaw in that argument, according to data from Baseball-Reference Teheran has exactly one game in those parks,

This is the epitome of a small sample size. Surely major league GMs look deeper than the ill-informed NL GM.

According to data from Fangraphs Over the last three years Teheran has a 0.92 GB/FB ratio and a 10.3% HR/FB ratio in a ballpark that plays pretty neutral. Would the HR.FB numbers change in ballparks more home run friendly? Probably but no one knows how much.

In a post called ‘How Good is Julio Teheran’ Eno Sarris looked at him through the sabermetric lens. Sarris says that although Teheran is 44th in accumulated fWAR since 2013 “he’s accrued value by staying healthy and racking up innings, but not dominating in the traditional walk, strikeout, and home run categories.”

His take on the question teams have to answer if they are considering trading for him this year is” who he will be on their team; the guy who looks great by ERA or the guy who looks like an innings-eater by FIP?” The article goes into number crunching detail and compares him with pitchers s whose peripherals are similar and concluded that barring an unforeseen change what you see is what you get.

"As long as Teheran maintains his ability to get the pop-up, he should be fine, even if maybe not quite as good as his ERA would suggest. And if you look at pitchers most like Julio Teheran . . . they’re at least a good bet for the next three years. Even more so when you consider the Braves righty is only 25 years old . . .If we assume that Teheran’s youth will allow him to regress less . . . (than the pitchers he was compared to) maybe his true-talent ERA gap is something like 0.3 runs per nine. . . .that would put him as a 3.60 ERA guy going forward. . . (in the NL) closer to 4.00 in the AL, once you adjust for league quality and the DH. That’s not a dominating frontline starter, but . . . he remains a very valuable piece. He’s not likely to keep beating his FIP by this degree, but he is likely to keep beating it  . . . and that makes him a quality mid-rotation arm. A team shouldn’t pay ace prices to land Teheran based on his ERA, but he’s a good pitcher on a great contract. . ."

Next: If not Julio who?