If you have been with us for a while, you know that we rarely throw a lot of numbers at you. We know as well as most that numbers rarely tell you the whole story. And while we believe there is a place in baseball for all the new-age sabermetric stuff, you won't see it on this site very often. It is like food. We are not going to eat it, unless we know for certain what is in it.

Still we like dabble in the numbers every once and a while just to see how our Devil Rays are stacking up against the rest of the league.

One number that is starting to gain steam in baseball circles is VORP (Value Over Replacement Player), a stat invented by Keith Woolner of Baseball Prospectus. Without boring you with all the brain-surgery math behind the number, we will just say that it measures the contribution of a player to the number of runs scored/allowed by the team. The idea being that if you replaced Player A with a fictitious Player B what would the difference in runs be over the course of a season. The replacement player is an average fielder and a below-average hitter/pitcher.

let's take a look at the eight worst VORP values for starting pitchers in the Major Leagues:

Rank	Pitcher	Team	VORP
1	Jeff Weaver	Sea	-21.8
2	Mark Redman	Atl	-13.3
3	Jae Seo	TB	-11.4
4	Tony Armas, Jr.	Pit	-11.1
5	Rick Vanden Hurk	Fla	-10.8
6	Casey Fossum	TB	-10.5
7	Kip Wells	StL	-10.5
8	Edwin Jackson	TB	-9.8

Three of the eight worst starting pitchers in baseball are Devil Rays. Combined the three pitchers have a VORP value of -31.7. In other words, the Rays could have signed three pitchers off the street before the season. Three pitchers that nobody else wanted, and the Rays would be on pace to allow approximately 30 less runs this season. Three bums from the alley would allow 32 less less runs than 60% of the Devil Rays starting rotation.

And on the positive note, James Shields currently has the 11th best VORP in baseball (+16.9).