And so it’s come to this. On September 2, Barry Zito allowed four runs in a four-inning start. Shortly thereafter, he was sent back to the bullpen. He hasn’t pitched since. Really, there’s no reason for him to pitch from this point forward, but he might still get one last turn, maybe to rest some arms, maybe additionally in a show of respect to a veteran who was at least always a good sport. This is how the Zito contract ends. Or, probably ends — MLB.com refuses to just outright state the obvious.

Zito’s days as a Giant are likely coming to an end. His seven-year, $126 million contract ends with this season. The Giants almost surely will decline to pay him an $18 million option. Zito then would get a $7 million buyout. The left-hander is 4-11 with a 5.91 ERA and has twice been removed from the rotation.

Zito’s club option is almost as comical as the old Vernon Wells opt-out clause. It’s an enduring reminder that someone once thought Zito could be highly effective through 2013. Zito wasn’t even all that good when he finished up in Oakland, and he never had much of a margin of error. Since then, he’s only declined further, and now one wonders what he’ll be doing half a year from now. But decline aside, I thought it’d be fun to review Zito’s fastest pitches from the 2013 season. Zito has famously long been something of a junk-baller, but he never did away with his heater completely. One always needs at least the threat of a fastball, and you establish a threat by throwing it. So, below, I’ve prepared a list, showing Zito’s top ten pitches from 2013 that registered at least 86 miles per hour.

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Why do some teams hit multi-run homers while other teams struggle? The relationship is not as simple as: better OBP, better rate of multi-run homers. I recently dug through sevens season of WPA logs and determined the baseball gods are not totally logical.

Observing the variation is one thing, but to ascribe it all to purely noise is another. Teams can control their runs per home run rate through constructing rosters and lineups predisposed towards greater home run efficiency. So we can’t consign variations to the random luck spittoon until we’ve more specifically assessed what’s happening in the lineup.

In the previous article, I briefly outlined what I called the Giancarlo Problem — where a team’s best OBP and best HR-rate are located within the same player. The Giancarlo Problem can result in deceiving team-wide statistics. So in this second venture, we are going to examine three dimensions instead of two: 1) OBP, excluding home runs, 2) home run rates, and 3) lineup positions.
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The last pitch Yusmeiro Petit threw while he had a perfect game was the one that ended his perfect game. It was a fastball, thigh-high, over the outer edge, and Eric Chavez got around it and lined it to right. The ball was very nearly caught, but everything in baseball is very nearly something else, and Petit’s bid was over with one strike to go. The pitch was just about right where Petit wanted it to be, and when he retired the next hitter, he had to settle for simply having pitched the game of his life. Immediately, it was easy to see the top of the ninth as bittersweet. Petit’s still never going to forget what he did, and how the crowd roared for him.

The second-to-last pitch Yusmeiro Petit threw while he had a perfect game was almost the one that sealed his perfect game. It was a curveball, knee-high, around the low-outside corner, and Eric Chavez took it for a ball. The count jumped from 2-and-2 to 3-and-2 — Petit would perhaps have to come into the zone. This pitch, more than the next one, is the one I find fascinating. It seemed to me to be almost the perfect pitch. It seemed to me to be the perfect way to end a perfect game.

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Remember when a seven-year, $126 million deal seemed pretty crazy? Sure, Jayson Werth’s similar contract (signed prior to the 2011 season) does not exactly seem great (although he is having a nice year) these days, either, but back during the 2006-2007 off-season, when Barry Zito signed with the Giants, it seemed utterly insane. It was not simply that it was, at the time, the biggest contract ever signed by a pitcher. Prices go up — hot dogs cost more now than ever before, and I do not see any moral panic about that phenomenon. It was that Zito seemed like a poor choice for such a deal. Sure, he was a three-time All-Star and the 2004 American League Cy Young winner. He was durable, as he had pitched more than 210 innings six seasons in a row for the As. However, Zito was going to be 29 in 2007, and his strikeout and walk rates, which had never been all that impressive, seemed to be getting worse. It looked like it was going to be an albatross.

It was. Although he has had his moments over the last seven seasons, as a final cherry on top (insert a joke about the 2014 option here), Zito’s 2013 season has been one more blow to the contract year theory of player performance. In the last season of his notorious contract, Zito has had the worst year of his career. He lost his rotation spot in August (although he received another shot in the rotation for a few starts later). Zito’s time with the Giants is drawing to a close, and he is not going to get a ceremonial final start at home, if that was something someone wanted. This is not meant as a career retrospective. Instead, I want to look at something that Zito seemed to have in Oakland, something that probably played a big part in the Giants’ willingness to give him the contract, something which seemed to depart after he made the move: his ability to outperform DIPS metrics.

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The Giants have not had a great year, to put it plainly. In first place as late as May 26, things went south in a hurry, and they have spent most of August in last place. The race for the bottom in the National League West remains tight — only two games separate the third-place Rockies and last-place Giants. Still, the team’s predicament begs the question of whether or not San Francisco will be the next member in the selective first-to-worst club.

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The author attended a Double-A Eastern League game on Sunday between the Richmond Flying Squirrels (a San Francisco affiliate) and New Hampshire Fisher Cats (Toronto) in Manchester, NH (box). What follows is a brief examination of two Giants prospects from same.

Adam Duvall, 3B

The author had no intention of more closely examining — had, in fact, scarcely heard of — third-base prospect Adam Duvall prior to Sunday’s game. And yet, one finds his name here in bold type, suggesting that something of that sort is in the offing.

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Episode 370
Joe Panik is a 22-year-old middle-infield prospect — with excellent control of the strike zone — currently playing for San Francisco’s Double-A affiliate Richmond. He’s also the guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio, recorded live on tape in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 11 min play time.)

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The last time I wrote about Edge% it was in the context of the Tampa Bay Rays using it to get their pitchers into more favorable counts on 1-1. But now I want to take that topic and drill a little deeper to understand how often edge pitches are taken for called strikes.

Overall, pitches taken on the edge are called strikes 69% of the time. But that aggregate measure hides some pretty substantial differences. Going further on that idea, I wanted to see how the count impacts the likelihood of a pitch on the edge being called a strike.

Here are the results:

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Marco Scutaro made his Major League debut at age-26. It took him two years to get regular playing time, and at age-28, given his first real chance as a big leaguer, he hit .273/.297/.393, good for a 77 wRC+ and an exactly replacement level performance. Undeterred, the A’s stuck with him, and he eventually turned into something pretty close to a league average hitter. From 2005 to 2012 — his age-29 to age-36 seasons — Scutaro posted a 98 wRC+, which isn’t bad at all for a middle infielder. He wasn’t anything special, but through hard work, a no-tools non-prospect turned himself into an average player. That’s a pretty big accomplishment.

But that’s not the amazing thing about Marco Scutaro. Well, not the most amazing thing anyway. The real remarkable story here is how he’s just continuing to get better.

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In his Major League debut for the Mets, 23-year-old Zack Wheeler struck out seven hitters in his six innings of work. Of those seven strikeouts, six came on fastballs — and of those six, four came on whiffs induced by fastballs.

This got me wondering, what pitchers this year have generated the largest percentage of their strikeouts off of their fastball? And how many generated those strike outs on swings and misses on fastballs*?

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