Diagnostics, #3

I sorta feel guilty about blogging while at work, but still, I'm technically on a lunch break. And, I just have to bring up another Diagnostic. The order we're jotting them down isn't necessarily the order of importance that should be assigned to them. Maybe once we're done listing the diagnostics we come up with, we can look at them deeper, and order them by importance.

3: Will Kenji Johjima and Rafael Chaves have any measurable impact on the pitching staff?

Okay, so that's a bit of an obscure one. I'm not much of a sabermetric stathead yet, but I do understand that things like Catcher-ERA and other similar stats aren't overly valid measuring sticks (sample size, etc...). Since statistics don't measure everything yet, I'm curious to see if there still will be any decipherable difference with the change at catcher and pitching coach. I suppose you could pull out Gil Meche and Joel Pineiro (as well as guys like Thornton, Putz and Mateo in the 'pen), and look at their performances (and that probably deserves its own Diagnostic). But, aside from statistics, I'm wondering if there's any way we can measure the impact of these two changes alone. Any suggestions on how to approach this? Even though I'm not exactly sure how I'm going to measure it, I do believe that there will be a noticable effect on the overall pitching performance. Certainly a full season of Felix (knocks on wood), and replacing Franklin with Washburn are going to add some noise into that Diagnostic.

Maybe it's my gut-headedness (since I'm neither a scout nor a saber-dweeb), but I seriously believe we will see some sort of positive impact on the pitching staff, merely by swapping Price with Chaves and the 7-headed Hydra that was our catcher last year with JoMama (and whatever backup we decide we need). I'm sure we'll single out Pineiro + Meche and Kenji Johjima as Diagnostics later, but I see this one as a little bit different.