Archive for Tim Lincecum

Rich Harden is effective when healthy, but that caveat is more relevant for him than it is for most others. Over nine major-league seasons, he has never thrown 200 innings in a single year. Since logging 189.2 frames in 2004, he hasn’t even thrown for more than 148 innings in a season — and he’s working on his second consecutive year with fewer than 100 innings to his stats line.  He can’t seem to stay healthy long enough to have an impact commensurate with his talent.

Regardless, Harden’s possibilities are tough to ignore. He misses bats at an elite rate for a starter and induces feeble contact when batters connect. He has a career .274 batting average on balls in play, significantly lower than the league average. He also ranks third among starters with at least 200 total innings since 2008 with a 10.1 K/9: only Brandon Morrow and Tim Lincecum have a higher rate. Over the same span, batters have whiffed at 13 percent of Harden’s offerings, by far the highest rate for a starting pitcher. Cole Hamels ranks second at 11.7 percent. He’s a starter with elite reliever numbers.

It’s easy to see why teams are always interested in him despite the checkered injury history, and why that interest persists even with a small sample of starts this year.

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The weekend took your faithful Phillie correspondents to places we didn’t expect, and none of those places featured wifi and a comfy moment to kick back and review the first two games of the NLCS. Better late than never. The Phillies and Giants split the weekend, which wasn’t great for the maroon marauders because the series tilted lightly in the Giants’ favor with those results – teams that win one of two games on the road in a seven-game MLB series win the series 56.2% of the time.

Game One was just one of those games, it seems. Seven innings, eight hits, seven strikeouts, no walks and more ground balls than fly balls doesn’t seem like a line that would normally produce four earned runs, but that’s what happened to Roy Halladay Saturday night. The difference between excellent and a -8.8% WPA night for the Doc could have been summed up in two fly balls from Cody Ross that ended up in the seats. This same Cody Ross had exactly average power this year (.145 ISO) and had gone -for-16 against Halladay in his career. The same Cody Ross that was Cody Ross the Marlin until Brian Sabean briefly made him Randy Myers by supposedly claiming him just to block the Padres. Then the Giants then realized that he was better than Jose Guillen, at least in the field, so that he could become the Cody Ross, Giant, that the Bay Area now knows and loves. Either way, you read that fateful name backward as Grant did on the McCovey Chronicles, and you get “ssoR y doC,” which is about all that can be said to Halladay, who pitched well enough to win.

It did seem like the Phillie offense could have put together a five spot – Tim Lincecum wasn’t at his best either. He walked more (three), and gave up equal numbers of fly balls and ground balls, but he also struck out eight – one of which was Ryan Howard with two batters on in a tie game in the third inning (worth 6.6% in WPA alone). Though the two teams had the same amount of baserunners, and the Phillies showed a better slugging percentage as a team, it was the Giants that strung together the hits in the big moments.

The following may seem random – and most likely was – but the big lineup change between games one and two may have had a little bit to do with the different outcomes. As Rob Neyer noted before the game Sunday, Charlie Manuel reversed Placido Polanco and Chase Utley in the batting order so that the heart of the order did not include two straight lefties in Utley and Howard.

It’s a little strange to see Polanco and his lack of power batting third, and it may feel like separating two lefties isn’t that big of a deal, but just look at what the Giants did in the two games for your pudding-based proof. In Game One, Javier Lopez brought his lefty sidearm release to the mound to get Utley to ground out and Howard to strike out before leaving in a double switch that would have made Dusty Baker proud. In Game Two, Bruce Bochy brought Ramon Ramirez out to pitch to the righty Shane Victorino, but after Victorino sacrificed, he was faced with the choice of walking the lefty Utley to keep Ramirez in the game and pitch to Polanco, or burning Lopez on Utley, bringing in Sergio Romo to pitch to Polanco, and then summoning Jeremy Affeldt to get Howard. That is a lot of relievers, but with the off-day coming today, the second move-heavy approach is probably what Bochy should have done. Instead, this is what happened:

Bottom 7th: Philadelphia
– R. Oswalt singled to shallow center
– R. Ramirez relieved J. Sanchez
– S. Victorino sacrificed to third, R. Oswalt to second
– C. Utley intentionally walked
– P. Polanco singled to shallow center, R. Oswalt scored, C. Utley to second
– J. Affeldt relieved R. Ramirez
– C. Utley stole third, P. Polanco stole second
– R. Howard struck out swinging
– J. Werth intentionally walked
– P. Sandoval at third
– S. Casilla relieved J. Affeldt
– J. Rollins doubled to deep center, C. Utley, P. Polanco and J. Werth scored
– R. Ibanez lined out to third

4 runs, 3 hits, 0 errors
San Francisco 1, Philadelphia 6

Don’t underestimate the difference the new lineup made, as it obviously made Bochy’s life difficult in the seventh inning Sunday night (and then he went and made some dubious decisions of his own). Now it’s clear that he’ll have to use both of his lefties to get through the heart of the order late in game three, provided his starter once again gets the job done against the new-look lineup.

Two quotes rattled around in my brain as I prepared to write this preview:

“Every pitcher is Roy Halladay to the Giants. You know what kind of pitchers do well against the Giants? The ones with noses.” – Grant, from the McCovey Chronicles in his post called “Sizing up the Phillies’ starting rotation“

“I’ve been calling for a long time to see metrics about how hitters and pitchers fare against different types and/or quality of opponents. In the postseason, this is really all that matters.” – Commenter B N, on the review of Game Three of the NLDS

If this were the mainstream media, it would be so easy to say something semi-resolute and catchy about this matchup. Tim Lincecum has a 3.17 ERA and a 0.99 WHIP in seven career games against the Phillies. Roy Halladay has a 7.23 ERA and 1.61 WHIP in three games. OMGz! Don’t count the Giants out! They have Halladay’s number!

Hardly. Of course. Those numbers are career splits, and what do starts against other iterations of these lineups even mean? Diddly. And then, if we try to boil it down to splits in this season, we get one poor game for Halladay against the Giants (seven innings, ten hits, five runs, five strikeouts and no walks) and one excellent game for Lincecum (eight and a third innings, three hits, two runs, 11 strikeouts and one walk).

But somehow we want to find something we can say with some amount of certainty this year. And since head-to-head matchups won’t give us a sample worth discussing, we’ll have to see how these teams do against certain types of pitchers in our (probably fruitless) aim to say something about this one, single game on Saturday.

Maybe we can say something like: in 2010, the Giants had an X OPS against pitchers like Halladay. Dangit, who’s like Halladay? Or rather, what kind of a pitcher is he? He throws 93, doesn’t walk anyone (1.08 BB/9), and gets groundballs (51.2% this year). Is he a groundballer? A finesse pitcher? A power pitcher? Lincecum throws only 91 this year, but gets more strikeouts (9.79 this year) and fewer groundballs (48.9%). Can we call him a power pitcher? A guy who walks 3.22 per nine doesn’t seem to be a finesse pitcher.

The inspiration for this line of reasoning is the team splits pages on Baseball-Reference.com. Thankfully, they have a definition there:

Power pitchers are in the top third of the league in strikeouts plus walks. Finesse are in the bottom third of the league in strikeouts plus walks.

Ah-hah. So Tim Lincecum = ‘power’ pitcher, Roy Halladay = ? Let’s just not bother with how the Giants do against finesse pitchers – we already ‘know’ that every pitcher looks like Roy Halladay to them from the quote at the top. However, Lincecum seems to fit the definition for a power pitcher, so how do the Phils do against power pitchers? Answer: not as well as they do against finesse pitchers. Their 99 sOPS+ against power pitchers is well below their 110 sOPS+ against finesse pitchers.

Otherwise, the Phillies lead the Giants in batting RAR (27.9 to -14.6) and starters’ RAR (144.5 to 141.4; and more once Roy Oswalt is considered). The Giants lead in bullpen RAR (59.1 to 25.8) and defense (8.5 to 0.8 UZR/150). If there wasn’t the hint that the Phillies’ offense might not be as good against power pitchers, it would be tempting to take the team with the better lineup and starter in game one and in the series.

Here’s one thing we can actually say with certainty: It will be interesting to see Lincecum face off against Halladay. Phew. How’s that for resolute?

The beauty behind the philosophy of advanced analysis is that it seeks to eliminate as much variance as possible. As simple of a thought as this may be, it is one that still eludes the majority of the baseball world, and most of society in a variety of other areas. Our metrics here at Fangraphs do seek to base value on much more that raw numbers. We can not only adjust for league, but also park and era, among other variables.

Unfortunately, there seems to be a limit to this. As much as we know Dan Haren gets unlucky for pitching at Chase Field (or the opposite for Dante Bichette at Coors), or that pitchers in the late 60s were helped by a higher mound (or the opposite thanks to steroids in the late 90s), we still haven’t found a way to, somewhat literally, level the playing field in terms of whom a pitcher or hitter faces. Here’s an example:

Tim Lincecum: 6.4%
Bronson Arroyo: 7.4%
Jonathan Sanchez: 5.3%
Wade LeBlanc: 6.0%
Mike Leake: 8.2%

Those are the HR/FB rates of the pitchers in baseball who have faced the worst opponents in baseball sorted by OPS. Here are some more:

Josh Beckett: 13.0%
Joel Pineiro: 10.9%
Jeremy Guthrie: 8.6%
David Huff: 10.1%
Mitch Talbot: 7.8%
Ben Sheets: 12.0%

Those are the starting pitchers who have faced the best hitters based on OPS this year. I didn’t run a full study, but I would think that the correlation between HR/FB and the OPS of opposing batters is decently high. This is logical and intuitive: better hitters in baseball have better HR/FB rates, so if you face more of them you’re likely to feel the effects (and vice versa). When you see a pitcher have a bunch of years of giving up HR/FB rates either above or below average, you may want to believe it is more of a “skill” than a “trend.” But said pitcher may have just been facing competition the whole time that would dictate the results, and with a little bit of luck added in, it looks like a trend.

But what does it mean? It means we shouldn’t just think of things like HR/FB and BABIP as a pitcher getting “lucky” or “unlucky” based on the quality of the balls in play, but also by the quality of the opponents. Tim Lincecum‘s opponents have an OPS of .675 this year. For reference, that’s about 2009 Randy Winn, who had a wOBA of .302. Josh Beckett’s opponents have an OPS of .767 this year. That’s roughly 2010 Chipper Jones, who has a .349 wOBA.

Luckily, that’s as big of a difference as you’ll generally find. However, sorting out even the most minor differences has some significant value. I don’t have a panacea, but it’s something we should keep in the back of our minds when analyzing players. It often goes overlooked.

2008 Draft Slot: Fifth overall
Top Pick: Buster Posey, C, Florida State University
Best Pick: Buster Posey
Keep an Eye On: Brandon Crawford, SS, UCLA (4th round)
Notes: I’ve been on the Brandon Crawford bandwagon for a couple months now, and the reputation for having a good glove but no bat is starting to be shed. After a very good performance in A-ball, Crawford is already in double-A, although the strikeouts are starting to catch up to him. LHP Scott Barnes (St. John’s University) is another quality sleeper to keep an eye on. Supplemental first round pick Conor Gillaspie has already been in the Majors, but it was a contract stipulation, and it was not based on his production (He’s having a respectable, but unspectacular, season in ’09). Buster Posey, on the other hand, is knocking on the door for a promotion to double-A.

2007 Draft Slot: 10th overall
Top Pick: Madison Bumgarner, LHP, North Carolina high school
Best Pick: Madison Bumgarner
Worst Pick: Wendell Fairley, OF, Mississippi high school (Supplemental first round)
Notes: What is in the water in North Carolina…? Prospects just seem to come out of the woodwork, whether it’s through the prep or the college ranks. Madison Bumgarner, in less than two full years, has risen to double-A and is one of the Top 3 pitching prospects in all of baseball. The club’s other first-round pick, Tim Alderson, is another excellent pitching prospect, who was also taken out of high school and is also in double-A. With six choices before the second round, the club made a number of overdrafts to save money, rather than really reap the benefits of the once-in-a-decade (or more) opportunity to restock the system. Picks such as Wendell Fairley (29th overall), Jackson Williams (43rd) and Charlie Culberson (51st) were all picked well ahead of where many teams had them ranked going into the draft.

2006 Draft Slot: 10th overall
Top Pick: Tim Lincecum, RHP, University of Washington
Best Pick: Um, Tim Lincecum
Worst Pick: Mike McBryde, OF, Florida Atlantic (5th round)
Notes: Tim Lincecum is, as you likely know, already one of the best pitchers in the National League. The club lacked a second round pick thanks to its foray into the free agent market. Supplemental first round draft pick Emmanuel Burriss is contributing in the Majors right now. California prep pick Clayton Tanner (3rd round) is moving slowly, but the southpaw is having some solid pro results. Mike McBryde has not been a terrible pick, but he’s a tweener and is looking at a career as a triple-A outfielder and occasional injury fill-in at the MLB level… Not bad work if you can get it.

2009 Draft Slot: Sixth overall
Draft Preference (2006-08): They take the best player available and do a great job of it
MLB Club Need: First base, Relief pitching
Organizational Need: Depth just about everywhere on the diamond
Organizational Strength: Pitching, although the depth is not there, Shortstop
Notes: The Giants organization has a very straight forward draft this season with no extra picks and no lost selections. The club will have the opportunity to take an impact player at No. 6, should it choose to. Everyone knows the organization needs quality hitting prospects but the best draftees available in this spot project to be pitchers. Prep right-hander Tyler Matzek is a name being associated with the Giants by most reputable mock drafts (Baseball America, ESPN, Baseball Prospectus).

Last year, Matthew Carruth discussed the idea of anchoring, a process in which fans build their opinions of a player’s season around a good or bad stretch at one of the season’s bookends. It takes extreme contradictory performance, like that of CC Sabathia following his abominable first month to shift these opinions. Otherwise, inaccurate claims are bound to be made and the wrong perceptions of a player’s value and quality will persist. This season, anchoring has occurred for many with regards to Tim Lincecum.

For those wondering why analysts tend to place small sample size disclaimers in their articles, this is the underlying reason. Some people just cannot look at two starts or 15 plate appearances and understand that a change in skill or approach is not inherent. Sure, this possibility always exists but it could just be random given that the pre-requisite playing time for stability has not yet been reached.

Lincecum made his first two starts on April 7 and April 12:

4/7: 3.0 IP, 4 H, 3 ER, 3 BB, 5 K
4/12: 5.1 IP, 10 H, 4 ER, 3 BB, 5 K

All told, his 8.1 innings, 14 hits, 7 earned runs, 6 walks and 10 strikeouts did not exactly do its best to instill confidence. Then again, it was just two starts and thanks to Sabathia’s dreadful start in 2008 + insane dominance from May to September, we now have the perfect response when people get ahead of themselves. Lincecum had two bad starts, like, omg! Hey, Sabathia 08. End of discussion right there.

Around that point, articles surfaced about Lincecum’s release point (which was fine, a maximum of an inch, inch and a half off from last season, which is not significant, and more along the lines of normal home/road discrepancies in the PITCHf/x data), his delivery, and the possibility of injuries. One more bad start and you got the feeling he might get demoted to work on the windup or sent to the DL with a phantom injury.

Since he “figured it out,” Lincecum has tossed 30 innings, surrendered just 20 hits, allowed 6 earned runs, and boasted a K/BB of 40/6. Combine that with his opening starts and his seasonal line now sits at: 6 GS, 38.1 IP, 34 H, 13 ER, 12 BB, 50 K. He has a 3.05 ERA and 1.93 FIP. He has produced +1.7 wins in the early part of this season, tied with Johan Santana and Dan Haren for the throne of top non-Greinke pitcher to date.

Lincecum is fine–sorry, Mariners fans–and he is going to have another stellar season. As Dave noted not too long ago there is always going to be information to be gleaned from small sample sizes, but going nuts over two tremendous or abysmal starts from a pitcher is an ailment worthy of statistical surgery. True talent levels don’t just evaporate or disappear. They might shift or slightly argue with pre-season projections, but to think Lincecum truly had become a somewhat different pitcher or was no longer as dominant as last season based on two starts in early April is absolute lunacy.

The San Francisco Giants currently sport one of the worst offenses of all time, but have posted an 11-14 record on the strength of some quality pitching. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ve probably heard of Matt Cain and Tim Lincecum, both of whom have been anointed by various pundits as the best young pitcher in the National League in the last year. Lincecum, in particular, is getting plaudits at the moment, as he’s off to a terrific start to the 2008 campaign, and his tiny frame and unique delivery make him interesting to watch even when he’s not dominating. However, the Giants don’t just have a big two, and there’s a guy getting lost in the hype shuffle.

See that green dot? That’s Jonathan Sanchez, San Francisco’s 25 year old southpaw with a knockout slider. He’s struggled with command problems and nagging health issues around his arm, but he’s healthy now and making hitters look foolish. His fastball doesn’t have the velocity it used to have, but he makes up for it with a slider that’s among the best swing-and-miss pitches in the game.

Using that weapon, he’s reinstating himself into the discussion of potential aces hanging out in San Francisco. In fact, the K/BB ratio above makes a pretty strong argument that Sanchez is a better bet for the future than Cain, and the difference between he and Lincecum isn’t nearly as large as most people would believe.

When you’re talking about good young arms in baseball, don’t forget Jonathan Sanchez.