Archive for Colby Lewis

Question: what do these guys all have in common?

• Colby Lewis
• Ryan Vogelsong
• Kameron Loe
• Chris Resop
• D.J. Carrasco
• Scott Atchison

Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers can succeed without striking batters out, but a failure to whiff shifts more of the burden to the defense. Based on what we know about pitchers and their controllable skills, limiting the number of balls in play increases the likelihood of a good outing. Strikeouts might not guarantee an out due to the dropped third strike rule, but they result in outs virtually 99 percent of the time.

Successful pitching lines lacking strikeouts are strange to the eyes. They’re even stranger when high-strikeout hurlers post them. You’d think a pitcher like Colby Lewis could easily record one punchout in seven innings of work, but in a May 10 start, he held the Athletics to one run over 7 1/3 innings. And he didn’t record a strikeout.

In honor of Lewis’ odd line — 7 1/3 IP, 5 H, 1 R, 1 BB, 0 K — I decided to research two items: the best non-strikeout games in the Retrosheet era, and the highest percentage of non-strikeout starts in a season.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dear Wide Readership,

This is Carson Cistulli. You may know me from such films as “How Stella Got Her Groove Taken Away in the First Place” and “Haters Gonna Hate: The Life and Times of Jimmy Stewart.” Also, I contribute with some frequency to this site.

Tonight, as you probably know, we, the Baseballing Enthusiasts of America, have the opportunity to watch Colby Lewis pitch a potentially ALCS-clinching baseball game against the New York Americans.

Alot of people have asked, and attempted to answer, the question “Who is Colby Lewis?”

The answer to the question is obvious: there is no answer. Or, rather, there is no one answer. Allow me to explain.

It is not uncommon for theologians — and this extends across multiple faith traditions — for theologians to describe God by describing, instead, what God is not. The practice, called apophasis, is predicated on the belief that God is ineffable*, and therefore cannot be apprehended directly.

*I once had a girlfriend who was ineffable, but in a totally different way.

The Mystery known as Colby Lewis is also ineffable. Yes, we can point to him and say, “There is Colby Lewis on the baseball mound” and, yes, we can look at his player page and say, “His slider has been considerably above average (+1.56 runs per 100 thrown) while his curve has been below average (-1.54 per 100).” But that is to ignore the entirety of Colby Lewis.

Jorge Luis Borges comes closest to representing this dichotomy in his very short story “Borges and I.” In said text, Borges struggles to see the similarities between Borges the Man and Borges the Famous Argentine Author. “I do not know which of us has written this page,” he ends by saying.

Similar is the case with Colby Lewis. Sitting here, in Madison, Wisconsin, I imagine Colby Lewis. Later, in front of a television, I will see someone named Colby Lewis, pitching against the Yankees. But that man, throwing from that mound, is only part of the Colby Lewis I imagine.

My colleague Joe Pawlikowski has suggested, via Twitter, that Lewis will fail tonight versus the Yankees and that I, among his (i.e. Lewis’s) biggest supporters, will be crushed.

But I have the leg up on Joe Pawl here, on anyone who’d adjudge Lewis’s success by mere wins and losses, by swinging strikes and groundballs-induced. For the Mystery of Colby Lewis is unassailable. As Walt Whitman has stated, it is large and contains multitudes. One game will have no effect on it. Colby Lewis has won already.

Humbly Yours,
Carson Cistulli

Just kidding, it actually is about Colby Lewis. Except not entirely about Colby Lewis. Except mostly about Colby Lewis.

Chicago (NL) at Texas | Friday, May 21 | 8:05 pm ET
Starting Pitchers
Cubs: Ted Lilly
31.0 IP, 4.94 K/9, 2.03 BB/9, .262 BABIP, 36.6% GB, 10.9% HR/FB, 4.70 xFIP
Projected FIP: 4.02 (FAN) 4.10 (CHONE) 4.06 (ZiPS)

Rangers: Colby Lewis
51.1 IP, 9.47 K/9, 3.68 BB/9, .261 BABIP, 36.6% GB, 8.3% HR/FB, 3.99 xFIP
Projected FIP: N/A (FAN) 3.99 (CHONE) 4.39 (ZiPS)

Watch For
• Colby Lewis’s slidepiece. (See below.)
• Starlin Castro. He’s just a tiny, tiny baby. The type of baby with only four strikeouts in his first 49 plate appearances.
• Geovany Soto. Specifcally, his place in the batting order. Soto’s started 32 games and has batted either seventh or eighth in 30 of those games. Also, guess what? He has a .452 OBP.
• Marlon Byrd. Somehow Byrd is third among all MLBers in WAR with a 2.2 mark.

On Colby Lewis’s Slidepiece
A couple weeks ago, Dave Allen commanded his computer brain to think about Colby Lewis’s slider. Here’s what it found out:

Compared to his previous time in the MLB, he is getting tons more swings outside the zone and swinging strikes — not surprising given his huge strikeout rate. This increase seems due, at least partially, to increased slider use. In his pre-NPB days he threw it 7% of the time, but through five starts this year he is throwing it a hair below 30% (according to the BIS classifications as well as my classifications of the pitchf/x data). By linear weights of the BIS classifications it is his nastiest pitch, already worth 5 runs above average, and I see it getting swinging strikes 20% of the time. The average slider last year got a swinging strike 13% of the time. Overall, Lewis is getting just under 12% swinging strikes compared to a league average of 8%.

Another Thing About Colby Lewis
In case you haven’t seen Matthew Carruth’s series previews over at Lookout Landing, you should know that he provides these great tables. As Carruth writes:

Basically, it lays out each pitcher’s basic repertoire, frequency and average speed and then grades it on the familiar 20-80 scouting scale. The grades are determined by league percentiles in swinging strikes (K), strike rate (BB) and ground balls (GB) for each pitch. Hopefully this should give you an easy overview of each pitcher’s strengths and weaknesses. The last row is the overall ranks for the pitcher based on all his pitches thrown.

Here’s what Colby Lewis’s repertoire looks like by that method:

Pitch 	%	Sp 	K 	BB 	GB
FB 	56% 	90 	65 	45 	20
SL 	25% 	82 	65 	70 	75
CB 	12% 	79 	40 	50 	65
CH 	7% 	85 	40 	75 	50
Overall	--	--	70	55	25

What you notice there is that (a) yes, Lewis’s slider is good, and (b) probably another ground ball or two on the fastball wouldn’t hurt. For how high he works in the zone with it, though — the fastball, that is — such a thing might not be happening, stat.

What You, the Reader, Are Saying to Me
Hey, Carson: did you ever consider for even one second in your life that maybe Colby Lewis isn’t some kind of deity?

What I Am Saying Right Back to You
Yeah, I actually did think that for a second, and it was the darkest, loneliest second of my life, you jerk nut.

If I Had My Druthers
• Colby Lewis would found a fast-food chain.
• The featured item on menu of said chain would be sliders.
• Get it? Sliders!

Cinco de Mayo is Spanish for “the Fifth of Mayo.”

Feel free to use that tidbit of information early and often.

Texas at Oakland | Wednesday, May 05 | 3:35 pm ET
Starting Pitchers
Rangers: Colby Lewis (R)
32.2 IP, 10.47 K/9, 3.58 BB/9, .280 BABIP, 38.8% GB, 5.7% HR/FB, 3.61 xFIP
Projected FIP: N/A (FAN) 3.99 (CHONE) 4.39 (ZiPS)

A’s: Trevor Cahill (R)
178.2 IP, 4.53 K/9, 3.63 BB/9, .276 BABIP, 47.8% GB, 13.2% HR/FB, 4.92 xFIP (2009)
Projected FIP: 4.56 (FAN) 5.08 (CHONE) 5.05 (ZiPS)

This Is Not About Colby Lewis
Even though it’ll probably seem like it most of the time, Colby Lewis will not, in fact, be the only guy on the field this afternoon in Oakland. In fact, there are a couple-few players who — despite lacking Lewis’s direct connection to the godhead — have actually managed to distinguish themselves as worthy of the baseballing enthusiast’s attention.

Not the least of these players is Oakland starter Trevor Cahill. Cahill — along with other young Oaklanders Brett Anderson and Andrew Bailey — made his debut last year, and was actually rated as the organization’s number-two prospect (behind Anderson) in Baseball America’s 2009 Prospect Handbook. Despite having thrown only 37 innings of ball above Double-A before 2009, Cahill’s excellent K rate (9.96 K/9) over that time — combined with Oakland’s youth movement — created a space for him in Oakland’s rotation. Back in December, our man Dave Goleblahblah justified the confidence the A’s would’ve had in his success:

Sure, Cahill’s command sometimes abandoned him. But he drew as much praise as any pitching prospect in the game. And why not? In addition to all of those Ks, Cahill was a groundball machine. He burned worms at a 56.4% clip in 2007 and kept the ball on the ground 61.5% of the time in 2008. Generally, strikeouts and groundballs have an inverse relationship: one comes at the expense of the other. It’s rare to find a young pitcher so adept at making batters whiff or chop the ball into the dirt when they do manage to make contact.

In light of those expectations, it’s fair to qualify last year as a bit of a disappointment. After having missed a lot of bats at lower levels, Cahill posted a mark of only 4.53 K/9 in 2009. Nor was his walk rate of 3.63 BB/9 anywhere near low enough to let him be effective in the mold of Carlos Silva circa 2004-2008, or even Rick Porcello of last year.

The question for this start — for Cahill, in general — is whether he’s able to get some breathing room between his strikeout and walk numbers. Perhaps the answer is in altering his repertoire. As resident cyborg Dave Allen wrote last year:

Like many ground ball pitchers Cahill throws a lot of fastballs (almost 70% of the time), and the problem is he has not been very good at getting them in the zone. His fastballs are in the permissive pfx zone 50% of the time, compared to the 55% for the average fastball. This is one of those things that seems like a small difference but is not. The variation is fastball zone percentage is narrow, so 50% is quite low, and over the course of the whole year those extra balls really pile up.

A little snooping over at Texas Leaguers reveals that, last year, Cahill got swing-and-misses on 5.5% of his two-seam and only 3.3% of his four-seam fastballs. Though his changepiece generated whiffs 13.5% of the time, he threw it too rarely to bring his overall whiff rate to league average.

What’s peculiar is the almost complete absence of Cahill’s knuckle-curve, a pitch Baseball America described in 2009 as “nasty… a swing-and-miss pitch with hard downward movement.” Texas Leaguers shows a curve, but the whiff rates are modest, and the drop, though fine, isn’t otherworldly.

Okay, It’s a Little Bit About Colby lewis
The reader might not have access to ESPN Insider, which means the reader might not know that ESPN’s Jason Grey — while less immodest in his prose stylings on the matter — is also smitten with Mr. Colby Lewis. Gray has been riding the CPL train since at least March 9th, when, after attending an Angels/Rangers spring training game, he wrote of Lewis:

He worked two innings Monday. He did allow a solo homer to Mike Napoli (a big bomb to center field on a hanging curve), but was otherwise impressive, throwing 20 of his 26 pitches for strikes, working very quickly and efficiently, and being aggressive. He reached 92 mph a few times and had very good cutting action, and also showed he could throw his fastball to both sides of the plate. He mixed in a curveball that ranged from 74-79 mph that was sharp at times, but a bit inconsistent. He also mixed in some good 82-83 mph sliders, and even ran it in the back door against a few lefty hitters. There was a lot to like, and it was hard to believe I was looking at the same pitcher I saw a few years ago. I snagged him for $4 in the AL LABR (League of Alternative Baseball Reality) auction Saturday, and was happy then to do so. I’m even happier after seeing him Monday.

One of us! One of us!

All-Joy Alert
Three All-Joyers are likely to appear in this evening’s game: Mr. Lewis, Adam Rosales, Ryan Sweeney. Other All-Joyer Kurt Suzuki, unfortunately, is injuricated.

If I Had My Druthers
• Rosales, Suzuki, and Sweeney would all somehow turn a triple play together.
• Colby Lewis would somehow turn a triple play all by himself.
• He’d also turn the beat around.

Over the past couple weeks — and spanning multiple forms of media — Prospect Maven Marc Hulet and I have made clear our differences in re the imminent success (or lack thereof) of current Texas Ranger and citizen of the world Colby Lewis.

Put briefly, while Hulet regards Lewis as roughly the same sort of Quad-A player that he was before dominating the Japanese league these past two years, I’ve been seduced by the righty’s optimistic CHONE projection and have heralded him — on this site, to my mother, wherever — as a Person of Interest for this here season.

As such, this past Friday night’s contest between the Texas Rangers and Seattle Mariners was of interest to the both of us. Exactly one hour ago, Mr. Hulet gave his reading of Lewis’s performance. Here’s mine.

Product
Results are where Lewis fared best. First and foremost, he got the win. If nothing else, that should allow for optimism, however unfounded. Moreover, Lewis allowed only nine baserunners in seven innings of work (a 1.29 WHIP for the game). If he’s on your fantasy team (as he is on mine), you’re probably pretty satisfied with his debut.

Win Probablity Added (WPA) liked Lewis’s performance, too. He led all players with a .298 WPA, barely edging out teammate Nelson Cruz, who posted a .271 on the strength of a 3-for-4 night (which included a well-struck donger). In this case, things could have gone much worse for Lewis. He loaded the bases with only one out in the seventh inning, creating the highest Leverage Index state of the night (a 2.63 mark) despite the fact that Texas held a 5-1 lead at the time.

Unfortunately for the Mariners, the batter for said base-out state was Jack Wilson, whom Lewis quickly dispatched on three pitches (called strike, foul, called strike). Ichiro followed, grounded out to second baseman Joaquin Arias (and his well-groomed moustache), and the threat was over.

Process
It’s always an interesting exercise to assess even a single pitching performance by means of at-bat results and their corresponding run values. If nothing else, it can give us a sense as to whether the pitcher in question was lucky or unlucky with regard to his batted balls, etc.

The following table includes all the possible at-bat outcomes with the corresponding Run Expectancy (RE) of each outcome. Additionally, I’ve added the number of such events conceded by Lewis and the corresponding runs allowed (or prevented, as the case my be). (Run Expectancies courtesy of StatCorner.)

Type	RE	Lewis	Lewis RE
K	-0.105	3	(0.32)
BB	0.329	4	1.32
HBP	0.345	0	0.00
LD	0.384	3	1.15
GB	0.053	7	0.37
OFB	0.046	6	0.28
IFB	-0.096	4	(0.38)
HR	1.394	0	0.00
			
TOTAL			2.42

What we see plainly here is something that I, unfortunately, intuited during the game — namely, that Lewis got somewhat lucky. Given a normal distribution of the above outcomes, we could expect Lewis to surrender somewhere in the neighborhood of two to three runs. And if we were being truly diligent, we might even consider accounting for “partial” home runs by removing the home run RE and adding one-ninth of a home run (so, approximately .15 runs) to each outfield fly ball, as homers occur on roughly 11% of fly balls. To do so would further push Lewis’s RE for his seven innings toward the three-run mark.

Lewis’s greatest weakness is made clear by this table: the walk-to-strikeout ratio. Last year in Japan, Lewis recorded 186 strikeouts against only 19 walks in 176.1 innings. His 2008 season was pretty similar. Lewis is now already 20% of the way to his 2009 walk total after just seven innings.

Unfortunately for me — and for everyone else who’s hopped aboard the Colby Lewis bandwagon — Lewis’s K:BB from this first game much more resembles the 1.25 mark he posted through his first 217.1 Major League innings.

Pitchf/x
I’m far from what you’d call an expert of the ol’ Pitch/f/x, but I also recognize the importance of the information it can provide to us. Anyway, so long as the Pitchf/x Tool over at Brooks Baseball isn’t lying, Lewis only recorded a grand total of nine whiffs in his seven innings of work. That total includes only two whiffs from a total of 33 sliders/curves, at least one of which will have to serve as a reliable out-pitch if Lewis hopes to stay in the rotation.

Conclusions
All in all, while Lewis showed things like pluck and want-to in his seven-inning return to American baseball, he showed less in the way of groundball- and/or strikeout-inducing stuff. Yes, it’s one start, and, yes, the infield flies are nice, but Hulet could be righter than I’d care to admit if Lewis’s next couple of starts resemble this one.

I thought I was pretty smart. This past Friday, I noticed that Colby Lewis was making his triumphant return to the Majors. As many of you know, our very own Carson Cistulli has a Texas-sized Man Crush on Mr. Lewis. I suggested to Carson that we should both watch the game and post a duel article on Monday (today) commenting on Lewis’ start. I should have realized that my “bright ideas” always backfire.

Instead of getting to publicly laugh in Carson’s face, I have to eat crow: Lewis actually pitched well. Prior to his self-imposed banishment to Japan, Lewis had appeared in parts of five MLB seasons and posted a 5.79 FIP, 5.14 BB/9 and 6.34 K/9. Hardly exciting stuff.

But then something happened to Lewis in Japan… He apparently learned how to be a pitcher. This past Friday night, he held the Mariners lineup (albeit not a scary collection of hitters) to just one run in seven innings. He allowed five hits and four walks in the game, while also striking out three.

I am a little worried about Lewis going forward because he allowed a lot of fly ball outs (10) and Texas is known for being a pretty good place to hit for power. As well, his control was clearly better than his command – but both are significantly improved from what he previous MLB numbers would suggest. He’s also going to have to find a reliable third pitch (either his curve or change-up) because his fastball-slider combo is not going to be enough once a scouting report on Lewis starts to circulate.

I’m willing to admit that Lewis may not be quite as bad as I thought he was going to be this season, but I still predict a modest WAR this season in the 1.5 to 2.5 range. I think he’ll give Texas some much-needed innings, but he’s going to have some bad games when his fastball command is off and his pitches catch too much of the plate.

Assuming he passes his physical, Colby Lewis is returning from Japan to his Texas Rangers roots.

Nothing has been written about Lewis this year without mentioning his two outstanding seasons with the Hiroshima Carp, most notably his other-worldly walk rate. But was it Lewis or Japan? We won’t really know until we see Lewis take to the hill in Arlington, but I can pass along a little insight from this NPB Sabermetric guide I picked up on my recent trip to Japan

Let’s start with that K:BB ratio. Lewis posted 9.79 K’s for every BB in 2009. The next best control pitcher in all of Japan was Chiba Lotte’s Yoshihisa Naruse at 5.57, and Yu Darvish, for comparison, posted a 3.71 rate. Lewis pitched in the DH-free Central League, where hitters accordingly struck out more than in the Pacific League, but the gulf between him and anyone else was so wide I’m going to say that this one was more Colby than Japan. Somewhat weirdly though, Lewis plunked 14 batters in ’09, nearly as many as the 19 he walked.

Thanks to his mastery of the strike zone, Lewis managed a .99 WHIP and a league-leading 2.53 DIPS figure, despite a .317 BABIP which was a bit below the Central League average of .298. And 2009 wasn’t exactly a fluke, as Lewis put up similar numbers in 2008.

Lewis’s success over the last two years recalls Koji Uehara’s excellent 2002-3 seasons, when he posted K/BB figures of 182/23 and 194/23 respectively. Uehara finally got his wish of playing in MLB last year, and despite being injury-prone and past his prime, still put respectable numbers in his limited number of starts. Lewis is doesn’t have Uehara’s injury history and is coming of the best seasons of his career. So there are reasons to be optimistic, and Lewis is definitely an interesting, low-risk alternative to guys like Jon Garland and Carl Pavano.

Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Patrick Newman, and this is my first post here at FanGraphs. Some of you may be familiar with my blog, npbtracker.com. If you haven’t seen it before, I write about Japanese baseball, covering current events and analyzing top players. Starting today, I’ll be doing the same here on a semi-weekly basis.

Every year, players move back and forth between the top leagues in Japan and North America. So let’s kick things off by looking at a few of the guys looking to change leagues this offseason.

Imports

This year’s NPB free agent class is the weakest we’ve seen in quite some time, but there are some interesting arms making the MLB leap this offseason.

The head of the class

• Ryota Igarashi (signed with the Mets)
• Colby Lewis (destination unknown)

Igarashi and Lewis make for an interesting contrast — Igarashi is a power reliever with middling control; Lewis, though no slouch on velocity, is a starter who’s shown pinpoint command in his two NPB seasons. I’ve casually observed that raw velocity usually survives the journey across the Pacific, while control typically suffers.

Will Igarashi’s command degrade at the MLB level, and if so will it hurt his effectiveness? And was Lewis’s dominant K:BB performance a function of pitching in Japan, or an improvement he made?

The other candidate

• Hisanori Takahashi (destination unknown)

Takahashi is the only other MLB-caliber player out of Japan seeking MLB employment at this point (we may see someone posted later in the offseaon). Takahashi is a lefthanded garbage baller with good sinker/screwball, but a sub-par fastball.

Exports

Over the course of a typical season, the 12 NPB teams will employ a cumulative 70-80 “foreign” players. Note that “foreign” is in quotes because it’s NPB’s own definition of the word. Tuffy Rhodes, for example, is no longer considered a foreign player because he’s accumulated enough NPB service time to qualify as Japanese player under NPB’s rules. JapaneseBaseball.com has a rundown of the rules governing foreign NPB players.

Back to the point, most foreign players in Japan only stay for a year or two, so there’s a high degree of roster churn each offseason, opening up opportunities for a new group of players.

In most cases, Japanese teams prefer “hungry” types, guys with years of AAA success who haven’t gotten extended MLB looks and still have something to prove. This isn’t an exhaustive list, but here’s a look at a couple of the more interesting players making that leap this year.

Contact-hitting outfielders

• Matt Murton (bound for Hanshin Tigers)
• Jeff Fiorentino (Hiroshima Carp)

Though Murton has significantly more MLB experience, these two outfielders head to Japan with the same minor league profile: good contact skills, good strikezone judgement, gap power. Their 2009 Triple-A slash lines are virtually identical at .324/.389/.499 (Murton) and .312/.387.510 (Fiorentino).

Despite their similarities, the two are going to very different environments. Murton joins the Hanshin Tigers, a team whose last two American outfielders (Kevin Mench and Lew Ford) were miserable busts, and with a demanding, yet supportive fanbase that expects to win. Fiorentino will find himself in a different situation in Hiroshima, a team with an air of optimism in a beautiful new stadium, but one that has not been in contention this decade.

Hard-throwing, wild relievers

• Juan Morillo (Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles)
• Chris Bootcheck (Yokohama BayStars)
• Eulogio de la Cruz (Tokyo Yakult Swallows)

Perhaps due to the success of Marc Kroon, pitchers with plus velocity but control issues that have kept them off MLB rosters have become a popular target for NPB teams. All three of the guys listed can run their fastballs into the mid-90s and Morillo tops out in triple digits. 2010 will tell whether any of these guys becomes another Kroon, or flames out like similar hard-throwers Chris Resop and Scott Dohmann.