Archive for Carlos Zambrano

The Royals officially released Kyle Davies earlier this week following poor performances in parts of five seasons. Acquired from the Braves in exchange for half of Octavio Dotel’s 2007 season, Davies seemed like a solid return. He threw hard, complemented the heater with a decent yet underwhelming curve, and was not yet eligible for arbitration. In other words, he was exactly the type of project the Royals were looking for. While the trade itself was good for the team at the time, Davies has arguably been the worst regular starter in baseball over the last five seasons. His presence on the Royals roster this season, as well as his career numbers, invites discussion regarding tendering contracts, building rosters and large gaps between ERA and estimators.

Since debuting in 2005, Davies has thrown 768 innings with below average peripherals, poor controllable skill marks and abysmal run prevention rates. He has a career 6.4 K/9 and 4.3 BB/9, and a 39 percent groundball rate. He doesn’t miss many bats, exhibits poor control and struggles to keep the ball on the ground. The anti-Halladay, if you will. He stranded runners at a meager 67 percent clip, which hurt mightily given his 1.62 WHIP and .318 batting average on balls in play. Plenty got on and plenty came around to score, translating to a 5.59 ERA. Though his xFIP and SIERA were a bit kinder — they are identical at 4.91 — they didn’t exactly vouch for his performance.

Since 2007, the year he was traded to the Royals, there are 83 pitchers to throw 600+ innings. Davies has the sixth lowest WAR (5.6), the worst ERA (5.40), third worst SIERA (4.87), fifth highest BABIP (.313), second worst WHIP (1.58) and second worst strand rate (66.8 percent). No matter how one slices it, Davies has been the, or one of the, worst starting pitchers in baseball.  Read the rest of this entry »

Any more rosterbation and I might go blind. That said, this comment on last week’s second Phillies lineup session was too much to pass up:

Dann M. says:
January 27, 2011 at 11:47 pm
If they break camp as expected with Schumaker, Theriot and Punto in the starting lineup (David Freese not ready and Allen Craig primarily used in a platoon role with Lance Berkman), I think that he’d be justified batting Adam Wainwright 6th every fifth day.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Chicago Cubs are going to win the NL Central en route to their second straight playoff appearance. They have been firing on all cylinders virtually all year and bolstered an already solid rotation by adding Rich Harden, who has been nothing short of fantastic since joining the team. The Philadelphia Phillies, with just six games to go, a 1.5 game lead on the Mets and a 3.0 game lead on the Brewers, look like they very well may be heading to Dane Cook October baseball for the second straight season. Two key players in this regard are Carlos Zambrano and Brett Myers, big pitchers with plus arms who could largely determine the fates of their respective teams.

Each has had a very interesting week, however. Zambrano tossed a no-hitter against the Astros, at Miller Park (not the home park of either the Cubs or Astros), posting the following line: 9 IP, 0 H, 0 ER, 1 BB, 10 K. And no, nobody in the Cubs front office decided to protest the ball four in the hopes that their appeal would result in a perfect game. How did he follow that act? Well, against the Cardinals, Big Z went just 1.2 innings, surrendering 6 hits and 8 earned runs, while walking 3 and striking out just 1 hitter. Talk about opposite extremes. When put together, Zambrano had a two-game stretch of 10.2 IP, 6 H, 8 ER, 4 BB, and 11 K, which results in a 6.75 ERA. No way anyone would, without knowing, guess that the above line divides into a no-hitter and, well, an all-hitter.

Since his callup, Brett Myers has been brilliant for the Phillies, one of the major reasons they have stayed alive and taken the division and/or wild card lead, however you choose to look at it. From August 9 to September 14, Myers made 8 starts, compiling this line: 62 IP, 52 H, 11 ER, 11 BB, 62 K, good for a 1.60 ERA. The last start in that span, on September 14, Myers tossed a complete game against the Brewers, going 9 IP, 2 H, 1 ER, 1 BB, 4 K. How did he follow that masterpiece up? Well, he took on the fiesty fish from Florida on Friday night and promptly posted this line: 4 IP, 9 H, 10 ER, 2 BB, 3 K. His ERA actually rose from 4.06 to 4.46. His two-game stretch? 13 IP, 11 H, 11 ER, 3 BB, 7 K, a 7.62 ERA. After giving up 11 ER in 8 starts, he managed to give up 10 in one outing.

Interestingly enough for Zambrano, he is a repeat “offender.” On July 29, in Milwaukee, he pitched a five-hit shutout with nine strikeouts. Two starts later against the Cardinals he surrendered 9 ER and 10 hits. On August 21, against the Reds, he gave up one run over seven innings of work. His next start, in Pittsburgh, 8 hits and 6 runs in 4.1 innings. All of this seems very Jeff Weaver. Make no mistake, both Z and Myers are tantamount to their team’s success, but it is rather strange how pitchers so good can look so very bad, and ironic how these awful outings followed tremendous ones.

A conundrum is loosely defined as anything that puzzles… so it makes perfect sense to use the term when describing the anomaly present in the ERA and FIPs of both Carlos Zambrano and Jeremy Bonderman. We’ve written about pitchers either outperforming their FIP or failing to live up to it plenty of times here, but, in probing the last three calendar years feature recently instituted on the leaders page, it appears that things tend to even out a bit. Except, of course, with regards to Zambrano and Bonderman.

Sixty starting pitchers qualified for inclusion over the last three calendar years and they produced the following averages:

ERA-FIP: 0.12
BABIP: .303
LOB: 71.8%
K/BB: 2.48
HR/9: 0.98

One standard deviation of the ERA-FIP is 0.28, meaning we can expect about 2/3 of the data to fall within the -0.16 to 0.40 range; additionally, 95% of the data can be expected to fall within the -0.44 to 0.68 range. Of the group of sixty pitchers, just two fell beyond the 95% confidence interval: Carlos Zambrano at -0.53 and Jeremy Bonderman at 0.83.

Now, one potential reason that someone like Zambrano consistently posts better ERAs than his FIP would suggest could deal with his BABIP: the average BABIP of this group in this span is .303 and Zambrano comes in at .273, a full thirty points lower. On the other end of the spectrum, Bonderman comes in at .325, over twenty points higher. In fact, when looking at the eighteen pitchers who fell beyond one standard deviation of the ERA-FIP mean, the nine higher than 0.40 ranged from .297-.332 in BABIP while those below -0.16 ranged between .269-.309.

I actually discovered whilst writing this post that a question regarding Zambrano outperforming his FIP was posed in the Inside the Book mailbag, to which MGL mentioned the possibility of him posting a lower than average BABIP after concluding that it is definitely possible for certain pitchers to post certain types of BABIPs. This is definitely the case. As MGL also noted in the mailbag, “FIP is a very good at eliminating the noise in BABIP, which allows us to get a better estimate of a pitcher’s run prevention skill, in the short run. In the long run, ERA, RA or ERC is MUCH better because it captures the differences in BABIP skill among pitchers, as well as the other things I mentioned above that contribute to a pitcher’s run prevention skill but are not addressed at all in FIP (like WP rate).”

So, one reason these two guys are constantly posting ERAs much better or worse than their FIP would suggest could be that they have posted above or below average BABIPs with enough regularity to show they have some type of control over it; in that regard, their ERA would be a better indicator of run prevention. Then again, they might not have control over their BABIP and this could all even out, but it would seem that this is a very likely cause at this juncture.