Archive for Gio Gonzalez

Lost in the improbable and rather infatuating season from R.A. Dickey and yet another commanding performance by Clayton Kershaw sits Gio Gonzalez and his measly 5.4 WAR season.

Gonzalez went 21-8 for the Washington Nationals with a 2.89 ERA, 2.82 FIP, and 25.2% strikeout rate and yet garnered only one first place vote in the Cy Young balloting. It’s not that Gonzalez so much deserved more attention from the Baseball Writers Association, but his season might have been as surprising as Dickey’s yet few seem to be talking about it outside of the Capital.

When Gonzalez came over from Oakland for Brad Peacock, A.J. Cole, Tommy Milone, and Derek Norris, reactions were mixed. If you could boil all the sentiments down into a prognosticator sludge, the general consensus was probably that Oakland did well to get highly regarded A.J. Cole and ready to nearly-ready prospects for what was likely a middle of the rotation kind of arm. To be sure, some were much higher on Gonzalez, but there were just as many that expected him to underwhelm the senior circuit.

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The Washington Nationals entered the 2012 season with a plan to limit Stephen Strasburg’s activity. Since the flamethrowing ace recently underwent Tommy John Surgery, this was a medical decision designed to work him back into shape without overexertion. The team never announced a specific activity threshold, but it was generally believed to be around 160 innings, or the normal equivalency in total pitches thrown.

The Nationals followed a similar plan with Jordan Zimmermann last year, shutting him down after 161.1 innings. The obvious difference between this year and last year is that the Nationals are now legitimate playoff contenders.

Last season, the Nationals were fighting to reach .500, so losing Zimmermann after an August 28 start wasn’t as huge of a deal. This year, the Nationals have a great chance to make the playoffs, but their odds of succeeding in the postseason are clearly reduced if the starting rotation lacks its best pitcher.

Seeing as Strasburg has already thrown 100 innings this season — 99 in the regular season and his one inning all-star game appearance — it’s making for quite the interesting dilemma. General Manager Mike Rizzo was adamant that the team would stick to the plan no matter how well it was playing. Given Rizzo’s word, what’s important for the Nationals now isn’t figuring out how to manipulate Strasburg’s starts to keep him pitching into September and October. Instead, with the trade deadline fast approaching, they need to figure out who is going to replace him to increase their odds of making, and succeeding in, the playoffs.

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Zack Greinke has been the most valuable National League pitcher this season, tallying 3 WAR over 13 starts. Not too far behind him is a pair of Washington Nationals starters who have each made one fewer start: Gio Gonzalez ranks second with 2.7 WAR and Stephen Strasburg comes in third with 2.6 WAR. At this point in the season the 0.3 wins separating Greinke and Gonzalez isn’t significant, nor is the more minute differential between Strasburg and his southpaw teammate.

But the fact that Gonzalez is even in the same discussion as a former Cy Young Award winner and a phenom living up to the hype bears notice. Entering the season, the 26-year old Gonzalez was considered a good pitcher, one who could easily miss bats but who struggled with control and was prone to racking up walks. He wasn’t projected to pitch at an all-star or award-worthy level, but the Nationals saw something they loved and offered, at signing, the largest-ever contract for a first-time arbitration-eligible pitcher.

His five-year, $42 million deal, which includes a $12 million club option in 2017 and a $12 million player option in 2018, stood to buy out the most effective years of what we typically consider a #2 or #3 starter. The deal offered some savings at the end if Gonzalez turned into an ace, but would still prove worthwhile if he sustained the 3-3.5 WAR performance he established over 2010-11.

If Gonzalez can sustain his current level of performance, or some semblance of it, the Nationals are going to have a legitimate second ace in the rotation and a potential #1 starter signed to a fairly modest deal throughout his prime.

Can Gonzalez keep rolling through the National League at this pace? While there are a couple of reasons to think some of his numbers will regress to the mean, there is also ample evidence to suggest he has made long-lasting improvements and isn’t simply a posterchild for switching to the easier league.

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Though it’s quite brief, I have to believe that Jeff Sullivan’s post on the correlation between pitcher contact rates and strikeouts from this past August has got to be one of the most exciting of the year. It makes so much sense — miss bats, get strikeouts — and yet Mr. Sullivan appears to be the only one on the interweb (besides our own Matthew Carruth) asking substantive questions about it*.

*If there are others, please don’t hesitate to mention them below.

You can see the correlation between the two in this image I’ve stolen directly, unforgivably from Lookout Landing:

That’s pretty striking. And it begs a question: If the correlation between Contact% and pitcher strikeouts is so strong, then couldn’t Contact% help us understand which pitchers might be poised to top the strikeout charts next year?

Yes. With some caveats.

In that same post to which I’ve linked above, Sullivan also notes that, beyond Contact% (league average 80.5%), pitchers also control their strikeout rates by other means, such as First-Pitch Strike% (league average 58.2%), Zone% (league average 49.3%), Called Strike%, etc. While none of these factors correlate as strongly as Contact% to pitcher strikeout rates, it does appear as though they’re not entirely negligible, either. To that end, I’ve included the first two of those below for comparison’s sake.

What happens when we run the 2009 numbers for Expected K%s (xK%)? That’s the question I asked myself — and which I answered, I think, by means of the kinda dumpy looking table you see below. Here are the Top 10 starting pitchers (50+ IP) by Contact% with expected and actual strikeout rates, plus K/9:

So, what do we see here? Some likely suspects, for sure: Harden, Lincecum, Vazquez, de la Rosa. But also some surprises: Felipe Paulino (second!), Gio Gonzalez (third!), and Bud Norris. The first two of those guys I wrote about last week as tRA* surprises. Bud Norris I didn’t mention, but he actually finished 66th in tRA* out of the 183 pitchers with 150+ xOuts.

What conclusions can we draw from this? Well, we should probably be careful about that, as more research needs to be done in this area. Still, it’s probably reasonable — given his xK% and overall profile — to expect at least a small improvement in strikeouts from Felipe Paulino. Moreover, there’s reason to think — given his excellent Zone% — to think that Bud Norris will probably turn some of his walks into strikeouts.

How well do you think Norris will perform in 2010? Enter your Fan Projection here.

It may or may not interest the reader to know that I’m writing these words from Aix-en-Provence. Yes, in France. No, I’m not joking. Yes, c’est totally vrai.

As to why I’m here, I can’t say exactly, on account of how unimaginably low down on the Down Low it is, but I can tell you this: My wife lives here. Is she a spy, sent here by the US government to learn more about stinky cheese and arrogance? Obviously, I’m not at liberty to answer that sort of question.

But one more thing I can tell you is this: While milady speaks the native language fluently, my own French — to put it lightly, and probably also wrongly — is pas bien. As a result, I don’t do a lot of the old “talking” here. Mostly I spend my time indoors, imbibing all manner of fermented beverage, and pruning my awesome fantasy basketball team so’s to make it even awesomer. (Actually, I should add: I also try to read L’equipe, a real-live sporting daily that, despite being a little light on quantitative analysis, appears to be a legitimately awesome paper.)

So, like I say, I don’t parle the Francais real great. Still, one thing I know for sure how to say — perhaps the first phrase I ever learned — is Je deteste voyager en hiver. For those of you following along at home, that means (en anglais), “I hate to travel in winter.” I don’t know why or how I learned such a thing, but I’m glad I did, on account of I actually do hate traveling in winter. And not just that, but there are like thirty other things I hate to do in winter — things like going outdoors and paying the gas bill and also just being awake. Cold = my worst nightmare.

As much as that might be the case, I’m quite sure the reader didn’t come here to get bummed the frig out by Carson Cistulli. Which, that’s why I’m proud to announce that there are also a number of winter activities I enjoy — activities like drinking hot toddies and drinking mulled wine and drinking hot cider.

Oh, and also sorting statistical leaderboards like a mother.

One such leaderboard to which I’m particularly looking forward is the wRC+ one. When FanGraphs Overlord David Appelman adds it to these electronic pages, I can tell you right now that I’m gonna sort the crap out of it.

But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. What I’m here to talk about is how today I was sorting through the tRA* leaderboard — that is, regressed tRA — over at our own Matthew Carruth’s StatCorner.

If you sort tRA* for the starting pitchers who recorded at least 150 xOuts — that is, expected outs based on the tRA outcomes — you get a lot of the usual suspects. For example, here are the top 10 finishers in tRA*, compiled in an embarrassingly sophisticated table (with tRA, so you can see the difference):

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