Mr. Robert Kip Wells

Kip Wells is due back in the rotation before the end of the month after missing most of the first three months of 2006 coming back from a blood clot that had formed in his pitching shoulder. We know that Kip Wells was a rather promising young pitcher in his first two years with the Buccos in 2002 and 2003, and we know that he got considerably less promising in the next two years, 2004 and 2005. Most of us agree that at least some of Kip's woes from last year, by far his worst year, were due to the blood clot because the nature of blood clots is to not just appear out of nowhere. But the questions lie within. How much of his struggles last year were due to the blood clots? Why did he struggle in 2004? Can he come back and be the pitcher he was in 2003 again? Is there any reason at all to hand a spot in the rotation back to him? I'll do my best to answer those questions, though I admittedly do like Kip and may simply be viewing some of these things through rosy glasses.

We should start with the "good" Kip, the one we saw in 2002 and 2003. In 2002 Kip was 12-14 with a 3.58 ERA and a 1.35 WHIP. While it's not particularly special, it's a pretty good year for a 25 year old in his first season as a full time starter in a new league. Yeah, those are lots of conditions, but in 2003 he was even better, going 10-9 (winning records are rare around these parts, that's for sure) with a 3.28/1.25 line. That was the year that the bullpen famously blew about 12 of his leads (forgive me for not sifting through Retrosheet boxscores for the precise amount, I'm almost positive it was over 10, if anyone has exact the exact number, let me know). I remembered him being very good that year, though a comment from azibuck in this comment thread got me thinking. Azibuck essentially says that the reason Kip had so many leads blown for him was that his penchant for going deep into counts lead to shorter starts, and longer outings for the bullpen lead to more blown leads. I thought this was an intriguing idea, a very possible explanation to that odd phenomena that I, admittedly, had not thought of. As it turns out, I don't think that theory holds much water. Kip averaged about 6 innings a start in 2002 and 6 and 1/3 in 2003. That seems to be a pretty decent average to me, but it's not exactly a normal stat. For comparison's sake, Chris Carpenter averaged about 7 and 1/3 on his way to the NL Cy Young last year while Bartolo Colon averaged about 6 and 2/3 on his way to the AL Cy Young. Roger Clemens, who had one of the best statistical years ever for a pitcher last year was right around 6 and 2/3 as well. Nothing is definitive there, but we can go from there and apply Occam's Razor, the simplest explanation is usually correct. Brian BLOWringer, Joe Beimel, and Mike Williams all figured prominently into the 2003 bullpen and I'm not sure three relievers ever had worse simultaneous years. So I think we can chalk the bullpen blowing Kip's leads in 2003 up to just that, the bullpen being awful. Going from there, I don't see any reason to look at Kip through 2003 as anything but what we remember, at least an upper rotation guy and possibly a budding ace. To add on to the impressive WHIP and ERA, he averaged 6.7 strikeouts per 9 and almost 2 (1.93 to be exact) strikeouts per walk. The walks were a little high (76 total), but they weren't out of control (though perhaps his BB/9 ratio raising from 3.22 in '02 to 3.44 in '03 was an early red flag).

The raises the question, what happened next? Kip opened up 2004 with a great game against the Phillies (6 shutout innings) on a very cold day and continued to pitch well through April, ending the month with a 2.97 ERA and a 1.32 WHIP in 30 and 1/3 innings. At that point the wheels fell off. ERA doesn't always tell the full story, but I think it does here. His ERAs by month for the rest of the season were 5.20, 7.43, 2.60 and 5.30 before pulling up lame in his first start of August after only 1/3 of an inning. For the season his ERA jumped to 4.55 and his WHIP rose to 1.53. His walks rose to almost 4.3/9 innings and he only averaged 5 and 2/3 innings per start. After he complained of numbness in one finger, he had carpal tunnel release surgery, which ended his season. Supposedly that fixed his problems, but his pitching got worse. We all know what happened last year, but a quick numbers rehash shows things were worse than ever, 5.09/1.57 with 4.9 BB/9 and less than 5 and 2/3 per start. And of course, once he started throwing this spring the blood clot was discovered.

The whole injury situation doesn't sit right with me. In 2004 he had elbow problems and numbness in his fingers. He struggled with his control all year and if I'm not mistaken, his velocity wavered towards the end of the year. Supposedly his troubles were fixed, but in 2005 he struggled with his velocity and control again before experiencing numbness in his fingers and eventually, the discovery of his clot. Now, it's possible that Kip simply tried to strike everyone out after his ugly experience in 2003 leading to an increased number of walks. He did strike out more batters per 9 innings in 2004 than he did in 2003. But his struggles on the field fit the symptoms of his injuries too well, finger numbness would very easily cause control and velocity problems. I have a bit of a conspiracy theory that's been percolating for a while (though it's possible we can just chalk it up to watching too many old episodes of the X-Files). My theory is this, Kip started out 2004 with the mind set that if he needed to become more dominating to take the game out of the hands of his fielders and the bullpen. This precipitated a change in his delivery, which caused the clot to begin forming. The clot grew through the year until eventually causing numbness in one of his fingers and some elbow discomfort. It was still small enough that the medical staff missed the symptoms (different blood pressures in his right and left arm was what I think tipped them off this spring) since it's a pretty rare injury and diagnosed carpal tunnel, something that often gets diagnosed when doctors can't think of anything else. Kip had the surgery and went into the spring and felt OK. Maybe the clot shifted around and wasn't bothering him (I don't know, I'm not a doctor, I don't know exactly how these things work). At some point last year, probably right around now (Kip's ERA on June 8th of last year was 3.39) his arm started acting up again. This is where I think his infamous relationship with McClendon comes in. I envision a situation in which Kip told Spin or Mac he was having the same arm problems as before, and I think they told him that the problem was fixed, so he needed to suck it up and keep pitching. There's no way he didn't experience some symptoms of this massive blood clot before spring training this year, I just don't believe it. We know from the quotes from the young pitchers (especially Duke) this spring that the old staff was rather deconstructive and we know that Lloyd was famously difficult to approach (remember, one of Lloyd's biggest supporters, Matt Lawton, didn't talk to Lloyd until almost June according to an Inside Pirates Baseball from last year). We also know that Kip Wells could barely contain his excitement when Lloyd got the axe last year.

So there's the conspiracy theory. The reason I have it is this, Kip Wells is not stupid. If he started out 2004 trying to strike more guys out and it didn't work, he would've gone back to the way he was pitching before at some point. He often seemed to be as frustrated by his struggles as we were. There's just too much of a contrast between the numbers in 2002-2003 and 2004-2005 for me to believe that there weren't other factors in play. Kip was at an age that he should've been getting better, instead he was suffering from what seems like a pretty typical end of career spiral. It's possible that my conspiracy theory is way off base and that by a strange coincidence, Kip Wells suffered two injuries in two years that caused his hand to go numb, but it's really hard for me to accept that. And I do hope that no one thinks I'm still trying to kick McClendon 9 months after he left, I'm just trying to explain the animosity that Kip seemed to have for Mac.

And so, we finally reach the conclusion (I'm assuming people are still reading). I think that it's likely, maybe even probable, that his poor numbers in 2004 and 2005 were almost entirely injury related. Aaron Cook, who also had surgery to fix a clot after the 2004 season, has a similar statisical arc (though it's the analysis is incomplete without his minor league numbers). Even if we only get the 2004 Kip Wells, it's worth a shot to put him in the rotation because he likely won't be worse than Santos over a long stretch (the 2004 Wells had good stretches just like Santos was having before today) and we're more likely to see the 2003 Wells than the 2005 Wells. I won't get into whether we should replace Perez with Kip because I could write a post 10 times longer than this and not manage to get to the bottom of things where Perez is concerned. I'll simply say that if that's the route Tracy and DL choose to go, I think we'll all completely understand. As for where to go beyond this, well, the Pirates have been pretty loyal to Kip and if there isn't much interest for him on the trade market or the free agent market (a possibility given the last two years and his injury history) despite a good showing from Wells this summer, the Bucs would do well to sign him relatively cheaply and keep this post by Charlie in mind.

I know everyone won't agree with me on this and I'm not really expecting people to, but we can all agree that if Kip Wells is 2-8 with an ERA of over 5 come September, I will have just wasted a lot of hot air.