Last week Dave and MGL both made points about how just about anything can happen in 40 inning stints. To hammer that point home a little harder, let’s do an exercise that shows just how much variance exists. Below I’m going to list a few starting pitcher lines from the last 30 days; I’m also going to list the names of the owners of these lines, but not in order. Your job is obviously to attempt and match the line with the name without cheating.

A. 44.1 IP, 40 H, 4 HR, 8 BB, 21 SO, 2.23 ERA
B. 43 IP, 58 H, 8 HR, 4 BB, 36 SO, 4.4 ERA
C. 42.2 IP, 42 H, 4 HR, 7 BB, 52 SO, 4.22 ERA
D. 38 IP, 40 H, 9 HR, 8 BB, 32 SO, 4.97 ERA
E. 34.2 IP, 28 H, 2 HR, 13 BB, 28 SO, 2.08 ERA
F. 37.2 IP, 54 H, 6 HR, 7 BB, 12 SO, 6.21 ERA

Barry Zito
Mark Buehrle
Bronson Arroyo
Roy Halladay
Justin Verlander
Dan Haren

Answers after the jump.
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Days like today prove that the best results are sometimes the most unexpected ones.

The Mets have about a gazillion regulars on the disabled list and are playing for 2010. The Marlins have a slimmer of playoff hopes and sit pretty at second place in the National League East. Anibal Sanchez isn’t great (4.72 FIP and 5.38 tRA in 41 innings this year) but against the Mets lineup, it looked like an easy victory. I mean, really, look at this morbid crew:

Angel Pagan CF .343 wOBA
Wilson Valdez SS .248
Daniel Murphy 1B .307
Jeff Francoeur RF .299
Cory Sullivan LF .330
Fernando Tatis 3B .314
Omir Santos C .300
Anderson Hernandez 2B .278
Tim Redding P .056

Of the eight batters, two can be called league average hitters or better. That’s it. Three-fourths of the Mets lineup consisted of below average hitters, and yet, they went out and scored 10 runs on the Marlins.

Hernandez contributed three hits on the day and scored twice, Valdez knocked in a run and had two hits, Murphy had a pair of hits and three RBI, Sullivan had two hits, Tatis popped a solo home run, and so on. Every Mets starter A) had a hit, B) had two.

For Anibal, his final line after 3.2 innings pitched: eight hits, two earned runs, three walks, two strikeouts, and one bewildered glance at the scorecard to see whether such a pathetic looking group actually knocked him around. Cristhian Martinez relieved Sanchez and didn’t fare much better as he allowed six hits and four earned runs in three and a third innings.

Fans of the Mets don’t have much to look forward to when batting nowadays, but for once they weren’t the ones vomiting at the results.

Without stealing Caron’s shtick, let me say that if you enjoy undervalued players stuck in baseball purgatory, you probably have a soft spot for Matt Murton. For whatever reasons Murton has been stuck in Triple-A two years running and yesterday was designated for assignment to make room for Juan Rincon of all people.

This could be a blessing in disguise though, as you have to figure some team will give Murton a chance for no cost.

Murton is 27-years-old and has hit well in Triple-A 954 plate appearances and counting. A .312/.388/.469 line is impressive and Murton isn’t someone proven incapable of hitting major league pitching either. Murton hit .287/.353/.438 in 1,051 plate appearances split between the Cubs, Athletics, and Rockies. He can play on a daily basis or platoon as a lefty masher.

Defensively he’s graded out above average in each of the seasons in which we have data. At absolute worst he’s an average player who only plays against lefties and plays in the corners. He’s not a superstar and won’t move jerseys by the pound, but some team should absolutely jump on this chance to acquire him for a 40-man roster spot.

Which leads me to the best part, in that Murton can be optioned to the minors for the remainder of this season. That means a team can store him away for an off-season and reconsider whether they have a lineup slot for him next spring. Of course that’s essentially what happens at this point anyway.

Matt Murton has major league baseball player talent, some team should give him the label, jersey, and roster spot and reap the benefits.

Ken Davidoff penned a piece today looking at potential landing spots for Hideki Matsui. He’s an interesting case given the depressed market for designated hitters last off-season, so let’s look at his potential value.

Matsui’s wOBA is .379 this year, which ranks as his third best offensive season since arriving Stateside.. His BABIP is only .260 – last three years: .320/.392/.312 – and his walk rate is relatively static. His home run per fly ball rate, however, is a career high 18%. This is only challenged by his 2004 rate of 16%, and over the last three seasons his high is 12.8%. That inflation explains his .262 ISO, another career high. He’s 35-years-old and it’s not often you see players flip the power switch this late in their careers which should raise some caution flags on his ability to repeat such an outburst.

Matsui hasn’t played an inning of outfield this season. He also assumed the DH role most of the time for the Yankees last season and his last real exposure to the grass was in 2007 when he posted a -7.6 UZR. Matsui is probably a -10 < x < -15 defender in a corner outfield spot over a full season which all but limits him to DH work. Combining his limited defensive ability with a season that smells of fluke doesn’t make for an attractive package. Further, Matsui has dealt with some injury issues over the past few years. Knee swelling and eventually draining has been a reappearing issue since Matsui underwent left knee surgery in late 2008. Matsui offers it all: durability concerns, fielding issues, and a luck inflated offensive season? As last off-season showed us, teams don’t seem overly willing to pay the big bucks for players with his skill set anymore. He figures to average around 2 WAR per season over the last three years when 2009 comes to a wrap, and while that’s valuable, it’s hard to argue that it’s Matsui’s true talent level or expected contribution level heading forward. A few teams should be interested in Matsui, but there’s no reason he should earn anything close to his annual rates with the Yankees.

In a season of grand performances, Zack Greinke added one more to the portfolio with his outing last night. The line: 8 innings pitched, 5 hits allowed, 1 home run, 1 walk, and 15 strikeouts; with 11 swinging strikes coming on 117 pitches for a modest 9.4% whiffs.

It may not even be Grienke’s best performance of the season, as ridiculous as that sounds. if you use Bill James’ Game Score as a reasonable summarizing metric, then the start registers as a 78, good for the fifth best start on the year. Yes, fifth best. How many pitchers are capable of striking out 15 and walking one, and then having that be their fifth best start of their career, don’t even think about seasonal ranks.

I don’t want to say Greinke’s flown under the radar for the past month, but, our last post on him was in early July and not much since. He still possesses a 2.45 FIP, a 2.93 tRA, and only a 11-8 record. Entering last night the Royals were averaging 3.66 runs of support per Greinke start and had lost eight of the last nine games started by Greinke, including defeats by the scores of 4-2, 1-0, 2-0, 4-2, and 3-1.

Run support is like oxygen for starting pitchers; you don’t realize you need some until you have none. In this case, Greinke was gasping while taking hacks that would make Miguel Olivo blush in order to get a few runs on the board. The Royals obliged last night and planted him four by the fourth.

Justin Verlander, Jon Lester, Roy Halladay, and Felix Hernandez are having fine seasons, but Greinke is still the class of the American League when separated from his putrid supporting cast. Enjoy his last few starts folks, this is one special season.

Carson wrote a little about Jeremy Hellickson earlier today, but I wanted to write a little more on the guy I’ve affectionately nicknamed Narwhal – in large part due to the mystique surrounding his numbers and unappreciated talent.

Hellickson has complete 35 innings and a third in Triple-A and his numbers are spectacular; 39 strikeouts, 12 walks, and a 3.45 FIP. Hellickson’s stuff has always been talked about in a conservative manner. His command has been questioned – note: his command, as in placement within the zone, not actually throwing strikes – and while his fastball goes over 90 miles per hour and seems to have decent movement, nobody really talks about him as having good or great stuff.

Which is why, through 597 pitches, a 13.9% swinging strike rate (as provided by StatCorner) seems to shatter everything we thought we knew about Hellickson. The larger the sample size amounts, the more and more it appears that Hellickson has something going on that causes bats to go missing. Whether it be deception, movement better than advertised, or Triple-A batters just swing and miss at everything.

Luckily we can test the last part by looking at some other International League starting pitchers and their whiff rate. The minimum xOuts/PA to qualify is 200 as we look at the top 10:

Clay Buchholz (13.3%)
Lucas French (11.5%)
Ben Jukich (11.2%)
Chris Tillman (11%)
Jake Arrieta (11%)
Carlos Carrasco (10.8%)
Tom Gorzelanny (10.8%)
Chris Lambert (10.6%)
Daniel McCutchen (10.4%)
Homer Bailey (10.4%)

That’s sort of like the who’s who of young pitching prospects in the IL and yet Hellickson tops all of them by a decent shake. I’m not saying he’s deserving of being proclaimed the best IL pitcher or on the same level as Buchholz or Tillman, but he’s seemingly flew under the radar despite being solid at every stop along the way.

It might be time to embrace the Narwhal.

Another week, another Mets star potentially heading to the disabled list; this time, Johan Santana. MLB.com writer Marty Noble gets the impression from Santana’s teammate that he may require surgery n his left elbow. This is the passage that sticks out the most:

Manuel acknowledged being “terribly concerned,” that Santana had experienced pain in the elbow in recent starts though “not at this level,” the level he experienced in his most recent start, Thursday against the Braves. The manager also indicated Santana had not done normal between-starts throwing for an extended period.

Emphasis is mine. If Santana told the Mets he was experiencing — presumably – worse pain than usual a few starts ago, and they continued to pitch him in what amounts to a lost season, then frankly the Mets are getting their just dues here. That assumes Santana did the responsible thing by speaking up, if he didn’t, then shame on him for being selfish and trying to pitch through a potential injury. Take a look at Santana’s alarming velocity chart:

Missing the rest of this season is largely irrelevant. The Mets aren’t in any type of playoff hunt and it’s more about 2010 with them, which is exactly why this hurts if it’s a procedure that would require a lengthy recovery time. I’d rather not get into speculation, but any time one of the best pitchers is having issues with his pitching elbow, it’s no good.

Who knows what this means for the Mets’ off-season plans. After handing Oliver Perez a pricey free agent contract and seeing him implode, you have to wonder if the Mets would seriously consider handing out another big deal. If not, they could always try one of the injured pitchers on the market like Erik Bedard, Rich Harden, or Ben Sheets, but at least two of them seem incapable of staying healthy for long durations.

Still better than Nelson Figueroa though.

For the second time in three years, the Colorado Rockies are back from the dead. On June 1st, the Rockies were 20-29 with roughly 2% odds of making the playoffs per Coolstandings.com. A few days later the Rockies would start a streak of 11 straight wins and after dropping one to the Rays, would win their next six. That’s 17 victories in 18 games. Even if you assume the Rockies are a true talent 60% wins team – and they aren’t, but bare with me – and ran the odds of winning 17 games in 18 tries through a binomial distribution, you would arrive with odds of 0.01%.

So yeah, for one of the best teams in baseball there was a chance of such a run, but the odds are lower for the Rockies because we know they aren’t a team you’d expect to win 97 games. Call the run odds-defying, the Rockies did something similar in 2007 when they won 13 of 14 before downing the Padres in a tiebreaker playoff. The difference is that team’s charge came much later than their present-day brethren. Below you will see CoolStanding’s playoff odds from both years with the games played total on the x-axis. Both teams were down on their luck and up on their October tee times around the 40-45 game mark, they also seem to begin the hike around the 80-100 game mark.

The graph is cut off a bit near the end, but the worthwhile part to take from game 160’s odds is that the Rockies are currently above those odds, which were amongst the highest of their entire season. That is to say, the Rockies are in better playoff condition now than they were for most of 2007.

When someone discusses Derek Lowe’s pitching strategy, the term “pitching to contact” arises more often than not. It sounds good. Lowe uses his sinking fastball to generate groundballs in which his defense converts into outs. Lowe avoids walks and strikeouts while letting his defense do all the work. Most announcers would praise this approach and if you are ignorant to the common principles of pitcher BABIP, then it makes sense to preach it.

For the first time in a long time, Lowe’s pitching is finding a lot of contact. Despite being one of those vapid groundballers, Lowe’s contact rates over the last three years have resembled league average ratios. 82.1% in 2006 compared to 81% league average; 79.6% versus 80.8% in 2007; and 80.2% against 80.8% in 2008. So, Lowe’s 86.6% rate comes as a little bit of a surprise, especially since league average has maintained mostly static at 80.6%. Without surprise Lowe’s increase in contact rate marks the highest in the league amongst qualified starters.

I took each of the 78 starting pitchers contact rates with 100+ innings in this and the prior season then ran the year-to-year correlation, in which I got 0.5398. That means there’s some skill to missing bats, which is intuitive.

For whatever reason Lowe’s contact rate was its lowest in April, but its highest in June. Even the low watermark is higher than Lowe’s previous rates. Our pitch run values show his slider as the biggest difference. A perennial good pitch, last year it was a great pitch, and this year it’s a really poor pitch. The pitch is moving slower with more horizontal and less vertical movement, which could be a conscious decision made by Lowe. There seem to be three answers to the lack of utility: 1) the change has hurt his command – leaving him incapable of properly locating the pitch, but that seems like something Lowe would’ve adjusted to by now – or 2) the pitch has lost deception.

Lowe isn’t pitching to contact; he’s just been unable to avoid it.

Assuming Billy Wagner’s appearances are nothing but an audition for another team, his first act went about as well as the Mets could script.

Wagner entered last night’s game in the eighth and faced Reid Gorecki, Chipper Jones, and Brian McCann. His first pitch was a 94 MPH fastball that missed inside. Wagner would fire a 94.7 MPH fastball for a strike on his next pitch before tossing Gorecki an off-speed pitch and some breaking stuff and retiring him on a swinging strikeout.

He’d fall behind Jones 3-0 and then induce a fly out to right field and make short work of McCann; getting ahead with two heaters (one hit foul, the other for a called strike) and then using his slider to generate a swing and a miss. It was like Wagner was in typical August fashion, making just another appearance.

14 pitches, two swinging strikes, and nine strikes total. Only five of those strikes were actually within the strike zone, meaning Wagner’s stuff looked attractive enough to batters to have them chase outside of the zone, as you can see here. He doesn’t touch 98 anymore, but the eight fastballs last night averaged about 95 miles per hour with good inward break towards lefties.

Wagner’s 2009 salary was 10.5 million with a little under two months to go, that cost is down considerably, making him a possibility for most teams. His 2010 club option is worth 8 million and comes with a million dollar buyout. The problem is that Wagner’s value doesn’t match his pending salary. Over the last three years he’s cracked 2 WAR once and that was in 2006.

As a 38-year-old reliever with injury issues, you have to believe whatever team Wagner winds up on will simply buy him out before attempting to re-sign him; especially given the market for old and injury prone relievers.