Daily Graphing – Brandon Backe

by
October 26, 2005

I'm sick of hearing how baseball playoff games are too long. If it were up to me, game 3 would still be in progress right now (that would put them right around the 48th inning). I wonder who would be pitching in the 48th inning of a game, perhaps Ozzie Guillen? In any event, Brandon Backe will take the mound tonight in game 4 of the World Series as the Astros try to avoid a White Sox sweep. He actually pitched pretty well in his last start, giving up only 2 hits in 5.2 innings while striking out 7 and walking 3. Looking at his season as a whole he's been incredibly inconsistent.

BB9

Taking a look at his walks per 9 innings, things started off quite well for Brandon Backe, but then he literally went off the charts. This is not a good thing on the walks graphs. He had thrown 1,050 pitches on the year before he went on his walk frenzy. Guess how many pitches he threw the entire year before? 1,102. That was the most he had ever thrown in the majors and it was over the course of an entire season. Now he had equaled that total in just 2 months. After he went on the DL with a strained rib cage and missed all of August, he seemed to get his walks under control again.

K9

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about his strikeouts per 9 innings which has drifted down the entire season. All signs point to him being a little overwhelmed with his workload. It will be interesting to see if Brandon Backe can build up the durability to be able to pitch a consistent 200 inning season.

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.




 

David Appelman is the creator of FanGraphs.

Comments are closed.