With one out in the top of the 7th of a game between the Mets and the Yankees on June 13th, Gary Sheffield hit a home run to deep left off of Alfredo Aceves. With two outs in the top of the 5th of today’s game between the Marlins and the Yankees, Hanley Ramirez hit a two-run home run off of Brett Tomko that tied the game at three. What is the significance? Well, between those two events, Yankee relievers allowed exactly zero runs, a period that spanned 20 innings. Lets have a roll call of the eight pitchers involved.

Alfredo Aceves pitched the most of those 20 innings, clocking in with five. Over his stints, he allowed zero walks and struck out three.

Phil Hughes, coming out of the pen while Chein-Ming Wang remains in the rotation, was next in line, tossing four innings, striking out six and not issuing a walk.

Phil Coke handled three innings and punched out six batters during them, though he did allow a walk.

Jose Veras had a quiet pair of innings, walking none and getting two strikeouts.

David Robertson faced eight hitters over his two innings pitched. His two walks made him the only pitcher to walk that many. He also struck out three and induced two ground outs and an infield fly out.

Brett Tomko had a ho-hum 1.2 innings with no walks and two strikeouts.

Brian Bruney chipped in for 1.1 innings with a strikeout and a pair of ground outs.

Mariano Rivera matched Bruney but in one less out, going one inning with a strikeout and a pair of ground outs.

All told, 20 innings, three walks, 24 strikeouts and, quite obviously, no home runs. Of the 46 balls put in play, 18 of them were on the ground, a solid 39%. It was quite a stretch of dominance.

Continuing on from my previous post, here now are the five most unlucky pitchers thus far baseball.

First, a word of explanation on what I mean when I use the term luck. It actually comprises three distinct realms: defense, park and noise. A pitcher may change his or her approach depending on the quality of the defense behind him, though I am not sure if we have ever seen an extensive study really delve into the topic, but I consider the presence of a good or bad defense behind the pitcher to be outside of his control and thus, a pitcher is lucky if he has a good one and unlucky if he does not. Ditto on pitcher’s versus hitter’s parks. The last part is the actual luck, or noise as we statisticians are more apt to label it.

Manny Parra has certainly not been outstanding this season. His 55 strikeouts to 41 walks should be enough to see that. His FIP stands at 5.14 in the National League. Still, that is a far cry from his 7.52 ERA and for that you put the bulk of the blame on his .368 BABIP. He has pitched a bit worse this year than last, but I would agree with ZiPS and say that if given a chance, a 4.30 FIP going forward sounds about right.

Jorge De La Rosa gets to pitch in Colorado, and no matter the reduced effect over the early 2000s, it is still a friendly place to hitters thanks to its large outfield dimensions. De La Rosa has actually improved on his good 2008 season but a .343 BABIP and 61.6% LOB% do much to hide that.

Chien-Ming Wang might be no surprise given his 12.65 ERA. After all, it is awfully hard to earn an ERA that high. Then again, Wang’s appearance on this list despite just 26.1 innings thrown is remarkable. But that is what can happen with a .458 BABIP and a 50.4% strand rate. That is not to say that Wang has actually been fine and just unlucky. No, he has been legitimately terrible. Just not 12.65 terrible.

Ricky Nolasco plays on the team that is currently second worst in the Majors in UZR. That right there will make you a prime candidate to appear on any unlucky pitcher list. Nolasco’s 4.10 FIP is not far off his 2008 mark of 3.77 but his BABIP has risen from .284 to .399, though a decent part of that is his own fault as he the rate of line drives that Nolasco has allowed has risen from 19% to 25%.

Brett Anderson plays in front of a good defense housed inside a pitcher friendly park. It is pretty remarkable then that he has managed to accrue the fifth most unlucky runs scored against him in 2009. You would not think so looking at the spread between his FIP (5.30) and his ERA (5.77), but it is true nonetheless because of the key factor that FIP ignores, batted balls. Anderson’s low 14.4% line drive rate should help keep his BABIP below the league average, especially when paired with a good defense. Instead, it sits at .329.

As you might have noticed, one of the major differences between this list and the previous list is that a majority of these pitchers (four) are still poor even after we account for their good fortune, whereas in the last list all but Matt Cain were bad pitchers looking good because of good luck. These are bad pitchers looking worse.

I got on the subject of looking up pitchers whose ERAs wildly differ from their actual performance level today so I decided to share. We hopefully all know by now that ERA is a very flawed measurement of a pitcher’s performance and that is why we defer to metrics like FIP, DERA or tRA. Using a combination of the three, I decided to pull the top five pitches on each side of the luck spectrum and present them.

First, a word of explanation on what I mean when I use the term luck. It actually comprises three distinct realms: defense, park and noise. A pitcher may change his or her approach depending on the quality of the defense behind him, though I am not sure if we have ever seen an extensive study really delve into the topic, but I consider the presence of a good or bad defense behind the pitcher to be outside of his control and thus, a pitcher is lucky if he has a good one and unlucky if he does not. Ditto on pitcher’s versus hitter’s parks. The last part is the actual luck, or noise as we statisticians are more apt to label it.

I will start with the “lucky” ones.

Kevin Millwood has seen his swinging strikes fall to a career low and he is throwing more pitches out of the zone than ever by a wide margin, dipping down below 50% for the first time all the way to 45.8%. His ground balls have returned to pre-2008 levels, but that has done nothing to help his home run rate, at its highest point as well.

John Lannan, the 24-year-old lefty seemed poised for a good season this year after some encouraging trends last year in his ability to throws strikes, miss bats and keep the ball on the ground. The strike throwing and the ground ball rate have at least remained stable, but the missed bats are down a whole two points and the home run rate remains elevated. Lannan is young and under team control for awhile, but I might consider moving him if I were the Nationals and could trick some team into giving up a haul of prospects for his shiny ERA.

Matt Cain has had his ups and downs in numerous key categories over the years to a point that he has become hard to peg down. This season has seen his strike throwing dip to a new career low while his first pitch strike percentage reaches a career high. The ground balls are up and the line drives are down. He is missing a touch fewer bats than last year, but he is right in line with his 2006-7 years. In fact, unlike the previous two pitches, Matt Cain has been legitimately good, he has just also been lucky.

Mark Buehrle follows the trend set above of pitchers missing the zone at career high rates this season. It builds off his 2008 season which was his previous career low in strikes thrown. Buehrle has gone from 52.5% to 49.7% and now to 46.4% over the last three seasons. That is a cause for concern.

Trevor Cahill completes the set with his lowest zone% of his career in 2009. Of course, that is somewhat cheating since Cahill has never before pitched in the Major Leagues. Or in Triple-A for that matter either, so we have no pitch data from which to compare against. Suffice to say that his .269 BABIP and pitching-friendly stadium are enough to land him fifth.

While this is a list of the five most lucky pitchers, which in and of itself, has nothing to do with their overall skill level, it is curious that all five of these have had just poor performances in the areas that do allow us a glimpse into their controlled performance level.

With the activation today of Brian Bruney from the disabled list and the designation of Jose Veras, I thought it a particularly good time to check in the end of the line of the Yankee’s bullpen, Mariano Rivera.

The first year into his three-year, $45-million contract, signed about two weeks after he turned 38, Mariano Rivera posted his best strikeout rate since his first full season in the bigs in 1996. And his 12.83 strikeouts to each walk absolutely shattered his previous career best of 6.92. On top of all that personally controlled awesomeness, Rivera also benefited from a .232 BABIP and the lowest hits per batter faced of his career. Add it all up and it is no wonder he posted a 1.40 ERA. His 2.03 FIP showed it was no fluke though.

Move forward to 2009 and how has Rivera done? Well, noticeably worse is easy to see, but there are some frightening numbers beneath the surface. Rivera’s 7.5% swinging strike rate is the lowest on record for him. There has been a sizable dip in the number of pitches thrown within the strike zone and hitters are not chasing these extra balls out of the zone.

Rivera’s ground ball rate is also at its lowest point on record, though that is over a smaller sample than his individual pitch results. It is no surprise then that the home run rate has increased, though the rate by which is has increased is surprising and not likely to continue. Rivera has allowed five home runs already this season through 26.2 innings. The last time he allowed more than five home runs was 1995 when he was a starter.

Interestingly, Rivera’s strikeout and walk rates have not moved much despite the drastic change in his individual pitch outcomes. 32 strikeouts to just two unintentional walks, and no hit batters, gives Rivera an even better ratio than last year. Given his extreme drop in missed bats and overall strikes thrown however, I would not expect that to continue. It will be interesting to see which regression, the strikeout and walk rates or the home run rate, influences Rivera’s final line the most.

Approaching the same issue that I covered in my last post from the opposite side, consider the Washington Nationals. Their .333 team wOBA ranks 13th in baseball. We do not have much information on their new park yet in order to adjust for it like we would like, but factoring in adjustments on all other teams bumps the Nationals up to 12th in baseball in terms of value derived from their lineup. But just as the Rangers were hurt by the American League/National League wOBA gap, so are the Nationals helped. They actually rank 4th out of 16 teams in the senior circuit in batting value according to the numbers listed here.

And once again, it is not just FanGraphs. They rank 4th in the National League, and 10th overall, at StatCorner as well. Baseball Prospectus also agrees that the Nationals are the 4th best NL hitting club, and they have them as the 8th best overall.

Nick Johnson has been healthy and producing in his usual way with 36 walks to 44 strikeouts and a .416 on base percentage. Christian Guzman continues his remarkable transformation with a .790 OPS, though his slipping strikeout to walk ratio (31-6 this season after a 57-23 last year) are cause for concern going forward. Adam Dunn is … well … Adam Dunn (at the plate, that’s a good thing). and Ryan Zimmerman, highlighted by his long hitting streak, is finally hitting like many foresaw after his debut in 2005.

It all adds up to a lineup that is one of the best in the league. Now if only they could figure out a way to get the same level of production at the plate without completely sacrificing defense in the meantime, they might be on to something for the future instead of setting up another clock in their draft room counting down until the second they get to pick Bryce Harper with the first overall selection in the 2010 draft.

Dave Cameron mentioned it in his weekly blurb piece this morning, but I wanted to take some extra time to highlight the Texas Rangers, namely their offense.

I have mentioned the concept of numerical anchors a couple times already on this site and others, but as an extremely brief refresher, it basically describes how it is our nature to form opinions around extremes and around first impressions. This is why grounded analysts have to work so hard to point out small sample sizes. I am writing today to try to dispel another potential anchor around the baseball community, that the Texas Rangers have a potent offense. Now, the critical part of this statement rests on the park factors for The Ballpark in Arlington (TBiA). Over the years, TBiA has consistently ranked as one of the most hitting friendly parks out there and its’ effects have colored how many people have seen the Rangers offense.

One only needs to compare two different numbers to see this. The Rangers have a team wOBA of .342 as published here. That ranks 7th in baseball. That seems pretty potent, doesn’t it? Turn them to Batting value, which is the park adjusted version of wOBA translated into runs above or below average and suddenly the Rangers, at 12.2, drop to 11th in baseball. Okay, so not world beaters certainly, but hey, they are above average still, right? Well, except we are still ignoring the league differences. The NL essentially punts a batting slot every game. The difference between the average NL wOBA and the average AL wOBA is around 10 points so far this year and is usually about five or six points. Counting just AL teams, the Rangers actually rank 8th out of 14th, below average.

This is not just limited to FanGraphs’ interpretations of the stats either. At StatCorner.com, where I make use of the wOBA formula without a running game element and park factors developed by David Gassko at The Hardball Times, the Rangers check in with a .339 park-adjusted wOBA to a league average of .341. Baseball Prospectus ranks the Rangers as having the 8th best EQA in the AL and 16th overall.

The Rangers had a torrid start to the season at the plate, but they have had some very ugly stretches since. After May 17th, the Rangers had won seven in a row and sat 4.5 games clear in the AL West with a 23-14 record having scored 5.65 runs per game. Since then, the Rangers are 12-13 and the scoring has dropped to just 4.04 runs per game. Michael Young has a .673 OPS, Josh Hamilton .696 and now he’s gone for a month or two. Chris Davis has struck out 38 times in just 80 plate appearances since May 17th. Andruw Jones is hitting .200/.260/.444. About the only person who has continued hitting is Nelson Cruz who is still proving people stupid for letting him rot in Triple-A for so long.

The entire sample of the 62 games that we have seen this season paints the picture that most projection systems thought they would see, the Rangers have awful pitching supported somewhat by an improved defense, and a roughly average offense. That is not a recipe for winning a division usually, but this year’s AL West is no usual division and Texas may yet hold on. Just know that it should be a closer race than it might seem now and remember to constantly check yourself before falling back on opinions formed early in the season.

Jason Marquis moved into the rotation full time after arriving in St. Louis. In his first two season there he posted fabulous ERAs of 3.71 and 4.13 but they were both giant smoke screens. His FIPs those two years were 4.55 and 4.95 and his strikeout rate took a very troubling drop to the mid-4 range. tRA, a method of calculating how many runs a pitcher would be expected to allow in front of a neutral defense and park based on his FIP components and batted ball profile says that Marquis benefited from a total of 38 missing runs in 2004 and 2005.

Then 2006 came around and Marquis’ luck diminished and he got notably worse. His 6.02 ERA was only slightly worse than his 5.90 FIP as his strikeout to walk numbers approached parity. His home runs allowed shot up thanks to a whopping nine point drop in his ground ball rate. In fact, his home run per fly ball actually dropped in 2006.

Despite all of that, Jason Marquis signed perhaps the dumbest three-year, $21-million contract ever with the Cubs after the 2006 season. It was unfathomable how dumb that contract was based on past performance. Curiously though, Marquis somehow pitched up to the contract in Chicago. His ground balls returned somewhat and his swinging strike rate which had fallen from from 7.4% to 6.1% to 5.4% while in St. Louis averaged 6.6% in Chicago. He did not turn into a good pitcher by any means, he was still below average, but he did manage to flirt with average, posting FIPs of 4.99 and 4.61.

In total, Marquis was worth $15.1 million in value in Chicago while being paid $13.2 million on his back loaded contract. This winter he was dumped off to Colorado for Luis Vizcaino in a salary move. All Marquis has done is get even better in Coors, now solidly above average with a FIP of 4.28 and enough innings to be worth $6.1 in value, bringing his three-year total already to $21.2 million, a net positive.

Marquis has thus far maintained his results on getting hitters to swing on pitches outside the zone more often that he flashed last year for the first time and he has paired his slightly improved strikeout to walk rate with a return in force of his ground ball ratio leading to another drop in home runs allowed. Marquis’ results this year have been legitimate, the question will be if he can maintain them and then what if, being just 31 at the end of the year, what kind of contract he might find himself worth this winter.

Part One

Last night, I looked at the macro level of Jarrod Washburn’s improvement against left-handed batters and pointed out the dramatic increase in swinging strikes that he had achieved against them this season compared to years past. It seemed to be the result of his added two-seamer, as his missed bats on pitches in the 87.5 to 92.5 mph range had noticeably increased.

But is it just that? I wanted to see if there was also anything to be found in the location data and that investigation brought forth these charts, 2008 pitches to LHB on the left, 2009 on the right.

Well, aside from the fewer pitches in the 2009 dataset, these two pictures look near identical. There might be some trace differences, but I seriously doubt any of those could be playing much impact in the huge jump in effectiveness that Washburn has seen to date.

Location shot down, I took one more stab at pinpointing the cause. On the theory that with a new two-seamer in the mix, hitters were seeing a wider distribution of speeds and that was putting them on guard more, I expanded my first graph to include all pitches to left-handers this season compared to 2008

Nope, not really. It is a fairly close match in terms of speed distributions. What’s left? Movement. I do not have a good way to visualize movement data, so apologies for the lack of readability here. I broke pitches into four categories, whether they were swung and missed at or not and their starting speeds since the above histograms demonstrate that Washburn has a break between pitch types around the 85 mph mark. The first number is the average largest deviation, in inches, of the pitch from the straight trajectory*. The second number is the average angle of that break. To visualize that, draw a compass rose, 0 is south, +90 is west and -90 is east. The final number is the sample size.

Pitches missed, 2008, under 85: 10.1, 9.0, 41
Pitches missed, 2009, under 85: 09.9, 8.8, 25

Pitches !missed, 2008, under 85: 9.5, 6.2, 271
Pitches !missed, 2009, under 85: 9.9, 7.9, 94

Pitches missed, 2008, over 85: 4.7, -12.6, 11
Pitches missed, 2009, over 85: 4.7, -16.8, 23

Pitches !missed, 2008, over 85: 4.8, -15.6, 381
Pitches !missed, 2009, over 85: 4.7, -16.9, 172

Washburn’s slurvey breaking pitches certainly are not moving dramatically differently than before. Among his swinging strikes, the two rows are insignificantly different. There is a big more break and run shown overall as the second pairing shows, but nothing huge. Now granted we have a small sample, but we do have what looks like a potentially meaningful change in the third and fourth pairings. The group of fastballs and fastball-type pitches all seem to be moving more in on the left-handed hitters this season and particularly among pitches that are missed.

Still, I am not anxious to jump to any conclusions on that. We are talking about a four compass degree of difference in that third pairing, which does hint toward the increased use of a two-seamer, but interestingly enough, the length of the breaks are still similar when two-seamers are known for generating more movement.

*Straight trajectory is thus: take the two points where the pitch is released and where the pitch crossed the home plane. Connect the two points with a line.

Jarrod Washburn is experienceing a rather out of ordinary year to date. His 3.07 ERA screams early season fluke, but his FIP has improved from the high 4s to 3.41. Sure, some of that is improved prevention of home runs, but not nearly all of it. Jarrod Washburn has certainly benefited from his improved outfield defense. Just look at his batting average on balls in play amongst fly balls and line drives.
2009: .356
2007-8: .395

and on fly balls only
2009: .131
2007-8: .179

That is a significant boon to any pitcher. But Washburn has not just been coasting on the laurels of his defense either. Remarkably, at the age of 34, Washburn has improved himself as a pitcher as well, notably upping his swinging strike rate by over a point compared to his previous years as a Mariner. Where are those extra missed bats coming from? Lefties.

SwStr% vs LHB
2009: 14.9
2007-8: 8.5

SwStr% vs RHB
2009: 4.4
2007-8: 4.9

The RHB is so small a difference as to be within the same mean based on our sample sizes, but look at the gap against left-handed batters! Further drilling down into the swinging strikes to lefties, I present this:

In 2008, Jarrod Washburn lived off his breaking ball to miss bats from left-handers. In 2009, it is a pretty even split between his cutter/fastball (19) and his offspeed stuff (22). Of the offspeed pitches, based on spin rates, it looks like seven changeups and 15 slurvey things. It certainly appears the Washburn’s slower fastball (whatever you wish to call it) and his 4-seamer are likely candidates for his increased success against left-handers.

You might have already seen the announcement or come across some of the articles, but HIT f/x data is starting to make an appearance. It is partially available to those of us who attended last year’s PITCH f/x conference in San Francisco. The age of HIT f/x is going to usher in a whole new slew of advancement in evaluation metrics so expect the next year or so to see just as much, and likely more, change in the sabr crowd as the past has seen with the widespread adoption of PITCH f/x.

That being said, the data that we have available to us now does not cover that much time. The sample is only that of April 2009 which presents a small sample size issue. Also giving that we do not have retro data from 2008, it is impossible to do the sort of comparison analysis that I bet many of us are interested in.

Still, it is something and it is neat. So let us work with what we do have instead of dwelling on what we do not yet. Here, then as a quick taste, are the initial speeds off the bat for teams over the month of April.

TEX 85.1
CLE 83.5
TOR 83.4
BAL 82.5
BOS 82.2
MIL 82.2
COL 82.2
ARI 81.8
WAS 81.8
ANA 81.7
LAN 81.7
PHI 81.5
DET 81.2
NYA 80.9
MIN 80.7
SFN 80.7
CHA 80.4
TBA 80.4
KCA 80.2
SLN 80.1
FLO 80.0
CHN 79.8
SDN 79.6
PIT 79.5
OAK 79.4
SEA 79.0
HOU 78.9
ATL 78.4
CIN 77.6
NYN 77.4

As you might suspect, this tracks extremely well with a team’s overall wOBA. National League teams are going to get dragged down a bit because of pitchers hitting, so a straight comparison across leagues is not really fair. Also, I suspect that the spreads between good and bad hitting teams are further exacerbated by the worst hitting teams bunting more often.

That is all for now, but rest assured, much more to come.