Kip Wells Is Confident in His Abilities

Kip Wells' 2007 hasn't gone very well, and you don't need me to tell you that. Kip's a free agent again when the season ends and it's hard to believe he'll be back in St. Louis. Lucky for Kip, though, he seems pretty certain there will be a market for his services:

"There's still a demand for starting pitching in this game, regardless of whether I pitched well or not," Wells said. "If that translates into interest from other teams and what shape or form that takes, I don't know. I've still got plenty of weapons that are above average."

Now there's an interesting use of the phrase "above average." Now granted, I am no wordmetrician, but in the past I've always seen the phrase "above average" to describe things that are better than average. In this case, Kip Wells seems to be confusing it with "really, really bad."

Baseball-Reference keeps track of a stat called ERA+. It's just a pitcher's ERA normalized for park factor and compared to the league average. 100 is an exactly average ERA+. Above 100 is above average, below 100 is below average. Since 2004, Kip's yearly ERA+s have been 91, 84, 70, and 75. Maybe he's got "weapons that are above average" but his results haven't been in a long time.