Evan Meek an Unlikely, Deserving All-Star

Many people reacted with surprise on Sunday when Pirates setup man Evan Meek was named to the National League All-Star team. Almost none of that surprise came from Pittsburgh. That's because Meek has been excellent this year -- one of the most important pitchers on the Pirates' staff -- even if his team's struggles have obscured his success from wider acclaim.

That's not to say that Meek isn't an unlikely All-Star. After the 2007 season, the Rays left Meek off of their 40-man roster and he was selected by the Pirates with the first pick in that year's Rule 5 draft. The Pirates were Meek's fourth organization since 2005; he was released by the Twins after a disastrous '05 season in which he averaged two walks per inning, then signed by the Padres prior to the 2006 season before being traded to Tampa Bay later that year.

Meek had reached Double-A by the time the Pirates selected him, but he was having his share of problems there. He was still walking a lot of batters (4.6 per nine innings) and getting hit hard, which resulted in a lot of base runners. In any case, the Rays obviously didn't think very highly of him. Meek, who had to stay on the Pirates' major league roster for the team to retain his rights, struggled mightily in Pittsburgh, but when the Pirates wanted to demote him back to the minors, the Rays let the Pirates simply buy his rights back.

Meek showed immediate improvement in the minors in 2008 and was effective for the Pirates in 2009 (8.0 strikeouts per nine with a still-high 5.6 BB/9 rate, but he held hitters to just 34 hits in 41 innings which helped him put up a 3.45 ERA) despite missing a big chunk of the season with an oblique strain. This year, though, Meek has taken things to the next level.

In making a case for Meek as an All-Star, the traditional numbers speak for themselves. Meek has already matched his 2009 innings total with 47 in just 38 appearances, and he's done it with a microscopic 0.96 ERA and 0.85 WHIP. If a setup man is going to make an All-Star team, it stands to reason that the guy with an ERA under 1.00 has a pretty good shot of being the one that gets the nod. Meek is more than just a gaudy ERA waiting to crash back to earth, though. Where he once averaged two walks an inning over an entire minor league season, he's now walking just two batters per game with the Pirates in 2010. His FIP (a stat calculated from the three things a pitcher can control most --walks, strikeouts, and home runs -- that's analogous to ERA and thought of by many to be a better predictive stat than ERA) is a still-excellent 2.67.

But why choose a reliever from the Pirates, a team on pace to give up nearly 900 runs? That answer's actually easy; without the back-end of their bullpen, the Pirates would be even worse than their current 30-52 record. So far this year, the Pirates have allowed 449 runs and scored just 267. That gives them a Pythagorean record of 23-59 and, according to some research done by a fan on the Pirates blog Bucs Dugout, puts them on pace for the worst run differential since 1903. The only reason the Pirates aren't challenging the 2003 Tigers and 1962 Mets for the worst record of all-time right now is the bullpen. In addition to Meek, Joel Hanrahan (averaging well more than a strikeout an inning with a 4.08 K/BB rate) and Octavio Dotel have also done excellent work since the beginning of May. The Pirates are 30-52 overall, but they're 14-12 in one-run games and 9-6 in two-run games. The only reason they've been able to do that is because of the incredible efforts of Meek, Hanrahan, and Dotel.

But why not pick Dotel instead? He's certainly been very good this year, at least since May 1. In 25 games since then, Dotel has an ERA of 1.85, has converted 16 of 17 save chances and is striking out nearly 11 batters per nine innings. Manager John Russell has deployed Dotel very carefully. He's only entered one game this year in the middle of an inning and all 19 of his saves have been of the one-inning variety. Pirates starters, meanwhile, only average a little more than 5 1/3 innings per start. In fact, there's only been one occasion this year in which a Pittsburgh starter has thrown into the eighth inning. So while it's true that Dotel has done his end of the job very capably, someone has to bridge the gap to him almost every single night.



Share That means that a bigger demand gets placed on guys like Meek. It's true that Meek has five blown saves this year, but in one he pitched two one-hit innings, struck out three, and the only run that was allowed to score was put on base by someone else. In two other blown saves, key errors by the Pirates' defense made the offending runs unearned (this was also the case in one of his two losses). In a fourth, the runs weren't unearned but they were made possible by poor defensive play (Lastings Milledge misplaying a single into a triple). Put more succinctly, Meek has been in 11 "save situations" this season. In 13 1/3 innings, his ERA is 2.03, his K/BB ratio is nearly 3:1 and hitters are hitting .200/.273/.320 against him. In other words, he's been excellent. Saves are never really a great stat to judge a pitcher by, but they're even less helpful when looking at a seventh- or eighth-inning guy like Meek.

Really, Meek has just about everything you can imagine stacked against him. The Pirates' starters are terrible, which has resulted in his heavy workload this season. And even when the starters pitch well, the team hardly ever scores runs. The defense isn't exactly great. And Meek is generally used as the seventh-inning guy, which means he's the one that's asked to clean up the mess that the starters or middle relievers leave instead of Hanrahan or Dotel. Still, Meek has managed to excel in ways that didn't seem possible just a few years ago.

If the bullpen is the most important part of the Pirates so far this year, Meek is certainly one of the most important parts of that bullpen. There are token All-Stars every year to fulfill each team's quota, but it's not fair to say that Meek hasn't earned his selection in 2010.