Daily Notes: Largely Concerning Randall Delgado’s Virtues

Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of the Daily Notes.

1. Concerning Randall Delgado’s Virtues
2. Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
3. Today’s Complete Schedule

Concerning Randall Delgado’s Virtues
Introduction
Five of today’s starters currently possess a perfect 10 NERD score*. Four of them (i.e. four of those pitchers) have assembled impressive major-league resumes by one means or another — namely, Homer Bailey, Clayton Kershaw, Matt Harvey, and Jordan Zimmermann. The fifth is Arizona right-hander Randall Delgado. What follows is a brief inspection of Delgado’s very high NERD score, sorted more or less by the degree to which it informs said score.

*The present site’s very proprietary and also infallible watchability metric. See below for more information on NERD.

Fielding Independent Pitching
Delgado has recorded an xFIP and xFIP-* of 3.18 and 83, respectively, this season in 39.0 innings — almost all of them as a starter. The former of those marks is 1.4 standard deviations better than average among pitchers who’ve thrown at least 20 innings in a starting capacity.

*Park-adjusted xFIP relative to league (where 100 is average and a lower than 100 is better than average).

Strike-Throwing
Delgado’s main strength thus far has been his capacity to throw strikes. He currently possesses a strike rate of 67.8% — relative to an average rate of 63.4% (again, among pitchers with 20-plus innings as a starter). Delgado’s strike percentage is 1.8 standard deviations above the mean, in this case.

Youth
Despite entering the 2013 season having already recorded nearly 130 major-league innings over the last two seasons — and having been regarded as a prospect for some time before that — Delgado is still just only 23 years old, or about 1.3 standard deviations younger than the population of starters with which we’re dealing, the average age of which is 28.

Swinging-Strike Rate
One might imagine that there’s rather a strong correlation between swinging-strike rate and overall strike rate. In fact, it’s rather weak. And perhaps it stands to reason: pitchers who induce whiffs often do so by working outside of the zone or by virtue of pitches with tremendous movement — such that, those pitches at which a batter doesn’t offer are more likely to be called a ball. In any case, Delgado has been excellent in both areas — both overall strike rate (as noted above) and swinging-strike rate. His 10.4% mark is approximately 1.1 standard deviations above the mean for starters, for whom the average is 8.5%. His best pitch to this end has been his changeup, on which he’s recorded a 26.9% swinging-strike rate.

Action Footage: Delgado’s Changeup
Here’s footage of Delgado change from a July 3rd start against the Mets — specifically to strike out Omar Quintanilla:

Slower Action Footage: Delgado’s Changeup
Here’s footage of that same pitch, except by means of SNY’s excellent slow-motion camera:

Today’s MLB.TV Free Game
Cleveland at Minnesota | 14:10 ET
Justin Masterson (135.1 IP, 85 xFIP-, 2.4 WAR) faces Scott Diamond (91.1 IP, 113 xFIP-, 0.1 WAR). Of note regarding Masterson, here are his strikeout rates from 2010 to -12, in order: 17.5%, 17.4%, and 17.6%. Now here’s his strikeout rate this season: 24.4%. Probably related is this: Masterson never threw his slider more than 20% of the time those three years; this year, his slider rate is 28.1%.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Cleveland Radio.

Today’s Complete Schedule
Here’s the complete schedule for all of today’s games, with our very proprietary watchability (NERD) scores for each one. Pitching probables and game times aggregated from MLB.com and RotoWire. The average NERD Game Score for today is 6.3.

Note: the following table is entirely sortable.

Away		SP	Tm.	Gm.	Tm.	SP		Home	Time
Chris Archer	TB	5	10	7	6	9	TOR	R.A. Dickey	13:07
Cliff Lee	PHI	9	1	8	6	10	NYN	Matt Harvey	13:10
Jeff Locke	PIT	3	7	6	3	10	CIN	Homer Bailey	13:10
Clayton Kershaw	LAN	10	2	8	2	10	WAS	J. Zimmermann	13:35
Mike Minor	ATL	8	8	6	2	5	CHA	Jose Quintana	14:10
Justin Masterson	CLE	8	7	5	2	2	MIN	Scott Diamond	14:10
Doug Fister	DET	7	7	7	7	6	KC	James Shields	14:10
Hen. Alvarez*	MIA	6	2	5	4	5	MIL	Wily Peralta	14:10
Felix Hernandez	SEA	9	5	6	3	5	HOU	Jordan Lyles	14:10
Eric Stults	SD	4	6	6	4	9	STL	A. Wainwright	14:15
Bartolo Colon	OAK	5	6	5	7	4	LAA	Jerome Williams	15:35
Randall Delgado	AZ	10	2	8	6	8	SF	M. Bumgarner	16:05
Edwin Jackson	CHN	5	5	6	8	6	COL	Tyler Chatwood	16:10
Chris Tillman	BAL	4	9	6	3	7	TEX	Martin Perez	19:05
CC Sabathia	NYA	7	3	5	8	3	BOS	Ryan Dempster	20:05

To learn how Pitcher and Team NERD Scores are calculated, click here.
To learn how Game NERD Scores are calculated, click here.
* = Fewer than 20 IP, NERD at discretion of very handsome author.