Q: Why does the Canadian baseball/sports media refuse to give any love to Carlos Villanueva?
CSJ: The easy answer is because neither of Alex Anthopoulos nor John Farrell have ever given them reason to, but we won't go there. Starting over then...Beats me. All he's done is pitched his butt off when asked to fill-in on a decimated starting rotation. In eight starts this year covering 47 innings, he's given up 40 hits and 16 earned runs with 50 K's against 14 walks. Read those numbers again*. They're probably unsustainable, but you'd still think they'd be good enough to at least merit consideration for a starting role moving forward. Yet when referencing the work that needs to be done to fix said rotation for next year, you never hear Villanueva's name come up alongside Ricky Romero and Brandon Morrow. You can argue that he is prone to the long ball (12 HR allowed in 21 starts as a Jay) and that with an average of only 5.2 innings per start, he lacks stamina. But Toronto is 13-8 in those 21 games** and with the options currently very thin both in big-league ready prospects and note worthy free-agents-to-be, why isn't Villanueva being touted as a potential candidate for a permanent role as a starter?
*I wanted to include xFIP, WAR, and K/9, which are all awesome advanced stats but after googling my way to very little and not wanting to spend 2 hours separating the starting numbers from his totals, I can only offer this to my fellow stat nerd brothers: his 2012 WHIP as a starter is 1.15 which would place him 8th among AL Starters.
**Including a passable effort over 13 start last year: 72 IP, 85H, 42 earned runs, 42K, 16BB. Again, sorry for the archaic stats but we should really blame the internet because how can Carlos Villanueva's advanced stats only as a starter this year not be at my fingertips? WHY?
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