The Consistently Inconsistent Ricky Nolasco

There are few pitchers in baseball as interesting (or, if you’re a Marlins fan, frustrating) as Ricky Nolasco. Consider this fluky little statistic, for instance:

2008, K/BB ratio: 4.43
2009, K/BB ratio: 4.43
2010, K/BB ratio: 4.43

Based on that, we’d like to call him Mr. Consistency. Except, if you’ve watched him pitch, he’s been anything but. In 2008, he was pretty darn good, throwing 212 innings and posting a 3.52 ERA in a breakout season. While he sustained most of his underlying performance last year, his ERA shot up to 5.06, as his BABIP rose to .336 and his LOB% was a crazy low 61%. Most of us had him pegged for a bounceback year, as his luck was bound to improve, but it hasn’t been the full return to form we expected. His BABIP is still .324 and now he’s giving up more HR/FB too, so his ERA (4.66) once again doesn’t come close to his xFIP (3.73).

Despite having good stuff and strong peripherals, he’s more Javier Vazquez than Roy Oswalt at this point. Like Vazquez, Nolasco simply allows more runs to score than we’d expect based on his numbers.

Five years ago, Dave Studemund introduced a formula to predict LOB% from a pitcher’s xFIP. As you can see in the chart, there’s a pretty strong correlation between the quality of a pitcher and how many runners he leaves on base.

Nolasco, a good pitcher, should have posted a LOB% of about 74.2 percent over the last three years, based on Studes’ formula. In fact, if you look at the average LOB% for all pitchers with a K/BB ratio of 3.00 or higher in that time frame, the average is 74.6%, and Nolasco has the fourth highest K/BB ratio of that entire group.

Instead, his actual LOB% since 2008 is 69.1%, the second lowest in baseball among qualified starting pitchers. He’s ahead of only Brian Bannister, and he’s stranded about the same amount of runners as Livan Hernandez and Nick Blackburn. Clearly, he’s better than those guys.

What’s the deal? Well, his high BABIP is almost entirely concentrated in situations with runners on base. With the bases empty, his career BABIP is .290, but if you put a runner on, its .326. Most pitchers are better from the wind-up, but this is an extreme split. The league average BABIP with the bases empty is .295 versus .304 with a man on base.

The sample is too small to say this is evidence of Nolasco doing something wrong, as we’re still just dealing with 600 innings of data, but it’s something to keep an eye on. Vazquez has almost 2,600 innings in the big leagues and has a career LOB% of just 70.9%, significantly lower than the 73.8% that is predicted based by his xFIP. It is at least within the realm of possibility that these two share a common trait that cause them to perform worse out of the stretch.

Only time will tell, but it’s an area worth looking into.