In his final start of August, Cliff Lee went 8 and 2/3 innings without allowing a run. Lee plunked Miguel Cairo with pitch number 117, cuing Ryan Madson to get the game’s final out. Last night against the Atlanta Braves, Lee finished where he started, using only 100 pitches en route to his 200th strikeout and 6th complete game and 6th shutout of the season.

Lee is now at 106 batters faced without allowing a run — 29 and 2/3 straight scoreless innings across 4 starts. Wow.

Despite striking out an uncharacteristically low number of batters (6), Lee instead trolled the Braves hitters by inducing 14 ground balls (second only to his present season high of 17 in his complete game against the Cardinals) and allowing nary a walk.

Last night’s shutout makes complete game number 6 for ol’ Cliff Lee, pushing his statistics down to: 2.47 ERA, 2.64 FIP, 2.76 xFIP, and a 2.67 SIERA.

Lee ranks 3rd in ERA, 3rd in FIP, 2nd in xFIP, and 3rd in SIERA. And he now leads the majors in shutouts with 6, ahead of James Shields (4) and Derek Holland (4). In the NL, it’s not even close:

When it comes to the 2011 NL Cy Young race, it presently comes down to just three fellas: Cliff Lee, Roy Halladay, and Clayton Kershaw. Yes, one could make the case for the likes of Madison Bumgarner, Matt Cain, Cole Hamels, and even Daniel Hudson and Matt Garza, but the Big Three are presently sporting Cy Young statistics, residing on a plateau of their own Manly Awesomeness.
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Education consists mainly of what we have unlearned.

-Mark Twain

In 2010, James Shields led the league in hits allowed, home runs allowed, and earned runs allowed. Many among the Rays faithful protested last year when Joe Maddon tabbed Shieldsy to start game two of the ALDS, wherein he failed to complete five innings.

“He’s broken,” said some. “He shouldn’t even be on the playoff roster!” fumed others.

He finished the 2010 season somehow once again topping 200 innings, but his ERA was over 5.00, his FIP was above 4.20, and his fans were frustrated. Despite his career-best 3.55 xFIP, a career-low LOB%, and career-high BABIP (a whopping .341), many — even among the sabermetric-slanted — doubted he was merely a product of bad luck.

Well, in 2011, his statistics have sung, “Cy Young!” all season long: 2.96 ERA, 3.36 FIP, and 3.11 xFIP. And most impressively: a league leading 10 complete games and 4 shut outs.

For a guy who has pitched 200+ innings in 5 straight seasons, he sure never showed a knack for complete games before:

He went two years without a single complete game, and then BAM! suddenly he has 10 in one season (at least; he starts again tonight). How’d he do it?! Is it just a luck swing-around?! Did he change his approach?! Is his Bradley Woodrum-esque quasi-Amish beard to blame?

The answer: Yes to all.
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We have discovered something marvelous! We only need to know four simple measures to predict what a hitter can do: Their walk rate, strikeout rate, home run rate and BABIP.

For weeks now, we’ve been exploring and playing with my initial discovery, and now we’re to the point where I feel comfortable calling it Fielding Independent Batting (FIB) — an homage to Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP), which predates it and partly inspired it.

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The Seattle Mariners are enduring a pretty miserable season. After last year’s stinker, the Mariners have followed it up with a .438 winning percentage and a pace-worthy of a scant 71 wins. Well, buck up West Coasters, because the Seattle Mariners should hit better through the season’s end!

In fact, the Mariners should be hitting a whopping 29% better.

For several weeks now, I’ve been playing with fielding-independent-hitting tools, specifically the aptly-named Should Hit metric.

Should Hit (ShH, for short) has a variety of uses, though its best used as a BABIP regressor. For your perusal, I created ShHAP!, a Google Doc that’s free for the world to download and allows anyone to regress a player’s present season (or any stretch of statistics), according to a different BABIP.

Well, today, let’s put this tool to use and look at the Mariners.

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Should Hit, or ShH — pronounced like: “Shh! Be quiet or the Nazis will hear!”

Last week, while rifling through the lump of cold numbers that is the 2011 season, I stumbled upon a self-illuminating chest of gold coins: A reliable, fielding independent hitting formula. Today, we’re going to take it to the next level and get nerdy up in this beach.

Before we proceed, let’s do some of the research I did not care to do the first time around. Here are some of Should Hits’s predecessors (though they did not directly influence the creation of ShH):

FIP for Hitters
In 2010, Matt Klaassen wrote “FIP for Hitters? Defense Independent Offense.” His work in the article — though it does stay truly defensive independent and does not bring BABIP into the conversation — probably mirrors my work the most. However, his works is different both in process (he excludes BABIP and does not use wRC+) and intention (my tool focuses on regression, not really true talent levels).
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Maybe there’s is a better way to predict how well a hitter is doing? Rather than glancing at his OBP and SLG and OPS or his wOBA and wRC+ and then mentally calibrating that number according to an inflated or deflated BABIP, maybe we can find a simple means of combining the key elements into a single formula.

Well, I believe I have stumbled onto just such a formula.

Th’other day, when I was trying to solve the mystery of the Tampa Bay Rays and their utterly broken run expectancy chart, I began ruminating about the relationship between walks, strikeouts, and an ability to create runs. You see, the Rays tend towards true outcomes: lotsa walks, lotsa strikeouts. So, for some strange reason — be it bad luck or bad hitter-type chemistry — the Rays seem to have an inability of reaching a standard run expectancy with the bases loaded.

Anyway, I began to investigate this trifle and produced an interesting comparison:

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Ichiro Suzuki is getting old. In life, that’s not a bad thing. In baseball, it is.

He is now in season 11 of the MLB portion of his career and season 20 of his professional career. Despite his age, he has played in 102 of the Seattle Mariners’ 103 games this year (not counting today). Moreover, he has more plate appearances (457) than anyone over age 35 in 2011. The next closest, Paul Konerko, is over 30 PAs behind him.

Ichiro may look as healthy and athletic as ever, but his numbers this year have been very un-Ichiro-like:

wOBA: .285
wRC+: 80
UZR: -8.4
Bsr: 2.3

All, except for the base-running (UBR) numbers, are career lows for Ich-dawg. We have long-anticipated Ichiro would slow down his ageless mastery of baseball at some point, but the depreciation in his 2011 statistics seem rather sudden. Worth noting:

BABIP: .289
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The Chicago Cubs general manager, Jim Hendry, has been described by many as a lame duck, but team owner Tom Ricketts may want to get out the hunting rifle now before the situation deteriorates any further.

Hendry took over the Cubs GM position midway through the 2002 season and has never quite assembled the impressive major league team comparable to the impressive farm system he built in the late 1990s. Once touted for assembling a farm system that included future stars like Corey Patterson, Mark Prior, Eric Patterson, Felix Pie, Rich Hill, and (hey, mildly positive ones!) Kerry Wood and Carlos Zambrano, Hendry is now widely considered a neither great nor terrible GM.

His on-the-field product reflects that dichotomy:

His great times (2008, 2004) have been great; his good times (2003, 2007, 2009) have been okay; and his bad times (2005, 2006, 2010, 2011) have been numerous.

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Whence we last examined yonder batting orders, we came away with several expected observations (Jose Bautista plays baseball like a video game, the Oakland Athletics do not care much for scoring runs, Rick Ankiel and Ian Desmond are not feared hitters, and so forth) as well as a number of curious findings (the Cubs lead-off combo was tops in the majors, the 7th hitters on AL teams were worse than the 9th hitters, NL managers effectively managed the bottoms of their lineups, and such).

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Consider Alex Remington’s excellent pieces on Kim Ng and Justine Siegal and Marisa Ingemi and Kate Sargeant my preamble.

On April 2, 1931, a 17-year-old girl struck out two of the greatest hitters in baseball history. Jackie Mitchell struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig swinging and then walked Tony Lazzeri. Shortly thereafter, baseball’s then-commissioner and all-around inflexible gentleman, Kenesaw Landis, disallowed Mitchell’s contract, ending her tenure with the Double-A Chattanooga Lookouts.

By all accounts, Mitchell threw one pitch throughout her career — a “dropball” or sinker, reportedly taught to her by Hall-of-Famer Dazzy Vance. Despite her incredibly young age, she located the pitch effectively and worked as a middle-reliever during her career (which included chiefly independent league and barnstorming appearances following her departure from MiLB).

Babe Ruth, physiologist extraordinaire, remarked after the game:

I don’t know what’s going to happen if they begin to let women in baseball. Of course, they will never make good. Why? Because they are too delicate. It would kill them to play ball every day.

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