That completely asinine blurb appears in ESPN.com's recent 2011 Fantasy Baseball Sleepers, Busts article. I don't know if AJ Mass just mailed this one in or what, but he couldn't be any further from the truth. I'm not even looking at this from a fantasy baseball perspective - it's just all wrong from a general baseball aspect.
I try to not get on anyone for stating their opinion, but it's tough when they're basically inventing a reason like this. The reason Hamels has been a .500 pitcher over the last two seasons has nothing to do with the execution of his curveball being "few and far between". Wins are a fickle stat and not entirely indicative of how well a pitcher is performing. Plain and simple, Hamels got no run support last year. He struck out over 200 guys with an ERA of 3.06 for Christ’s sake. If he even gets a little more run support, he's easily a 15 win pitcher. In fact, according to Fangraphs, Hamels only threw his curve 8% of the time last year due to the introduction of his cutter. The debut of that cutter helped keep hitters off balance and only helped make his fastball, curve, and changeup (his true “out pitch”) more effective.
Anyway, it's predictions like these that just annoy me and make me wish AJ Mass was in my fantasy league. If you're looking for some really exceptional fantasy baseball advice, do yourself a favor and go to Razzball.com. Best fantasy blog on the interwebs. You can thank me later.
The thing that frustrates me more than the blurb/article AJM Ass wrote, is that this blurb/article put dollars in his pocket. I get the "they can't all win 20 games" comment, but Chris nailed it, his reason for Cole is completely fabricated. Did he even watch Cole pitch last year? Doubtful, but again, he got paid to write about something he obviously knows nothing about. Awesome. Thumbs up to ESPN for this guy's employment.
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