Jered Weaver: Angels 2014 Year In Review

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Jered Weaver‘s 2013 season was the least amount of innings he had thrown since his rookie season in 2006. He only made 24 starts accumulating 154 and one-third innings. He had a nice season when he did pitch every fifth day, but that wasn’t promised in that 2013 campaign. So, he needed a big season in 2014 to prove that he could still be the number one arm on the Los Angeles Angels staff and be there to throw every fifth day when they needed him. He did that in 2014 and he made 34 starts for the Halos in a season where they won 98 games.

The Good: Jered Weaver had a lot of good things happen for him in 2014. He was able to pitch over 200 innings for the first time in three seasons and made 34 starts for the first time since 2010. In those starts he had some good things happen. He struck out a good amount of batters, just over seven per nine innings.

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He was able to keep the team in the game throwing 22 quality starts winning 16 of those. I’m not big on the component of pitcher wins, but with Weaver he did a great job of keeping the Angels in the game for a good amount of time and allowed them to eventually get the bats going.

It all wasn’t good unfortunately for the 18-game winner. He did win a lot of games for the team, but he did a lot of bad things.

The Bad: First I will start with the walks. He walked 65 batters, the most since 2009, which put him in the stretch a lot when he really didn’t need to be. Also the home runs he allowed. He allowed 27, the most of his career in one season. This could all come back to the third time thru the order. I wrote extensively on Weaver and the loss of velocity which you can read here. That may explain the reason for the walks, and home runs allowed. He no longer has the ability to blow it by hitters so he is living on the corners and sometimes not getting the call.

Hopefully he is able to work this offseason on possibly getting some of the velocity back, but if not, also working on moving his pitches around the zone. He did that well in 2014, but left some right over the plate, which were hit a long way for home runs. If he can limit those and cut down on the walks, he can be even better.

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The Future: Weaver still has two seasons left on his current contract, and I don’t see him going anywhere any time soon. It is great that he won 18 games, but he has to improve in the offseason. Next season the Angels may not score the most runs in the league and won’t be able to bail him out late in the game with some runs. The third time thru the order was a problem for him and he will have to get better at getting thru the order a third time. But all in all, you can’t really complain when a guy keeps his team in the game in three-fourths of his starts.

The FanGraphs steamer projects him back under 200 innings in 2015, and getting a little less lucky on balls in play. With the loss of velocity his strikeouts are also projected to go down. Hopefully he outplays his projections in 2015, but I wouldn’t expect him to win 18 games again in 2015, I would put that number closer to 13-14, depending on the Angels offense.

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