The biggest knock inside baseball circles on Banny — other than the obvious knock that he doesn’t have a dominant pitch — has been his tinkering.

There are quite a few players out there who understand and consider the advanced stats, but nobody did it as publicly or as intensely as Brian. He took a lot of bleep for it. Banny has a mathematical mind. He just thinks that way. So when he had a very good rookie season in 2007...