Three Lefty Playoff Rotation

by
July 30, 2009

The Phillies acquired Cliff Lee yesterday with the eye on the playoffs, they are six games up in NL East and by at least these estimates have over an 81% chance of reaching the post season. So I thought I would look to a potential Philly playoff berth. With Lee, their potential playoff rotation looks like:

Cole Hamels, LHP
Cliff Lee, LHP
Joe Blanton, RHP
J.A. Happ or Jamie Moyer, both LHPs

This is three-lefties-one-righty rotation is all the more interesting in light of the potential righty-heavy lineups they could face. Dave noted that the Cardinals have a very righty-heavy lineup, and the Giants only have one lefty in their regular lineup now that Ryan Garko replaced Travis Ishikawa. On the face of it this could present Philly with a real problem, but let’s look at these lefties’ career platoon splits.

 Career OPS against
+--------+----------+----------+
|        | OPS vRHB | OPS vLHB |
+--------+----------+----------+
| Hamels |    0.698 |    0.716 |
| Lee    |    0.737 |    0.710 |
| Happ   |    0.711 |    0.651 |
| Moyer  |    0.741 |    0.764 |
+--------+----------+----------+

Hamels has a devastating changeup, a pitch that generally does not show a platoon split, as a result Hamels has a reverse platoon split.

Cliff Lee, with a good changeup and curveball another pitch with no platoon split, has shown only a modest platoon split over his career.

Happ, on the other hand, has a quite large platoon split, which he had in the minors too (0.678 vRHB and 0.622 vLHB). It is backed up by his pitch usage which is very fastball heavy, with almost no curves and few changeups.

You Aren't a FanGraphs Member
It looks like you aren't yet a FanGraphs Member (or aren't logged in). We aren't mad, just disappointed.
We get it. You want to read this article. But before we let you get back to it, we'd like to point out a few of the good reasons why you should become a Member.
1. Ad Free viewing! We won't bug you with this ad, or any other.
2. Unlimited articles! Non-Members only get to read 10 free articles a month. Members never get cut off.
3. Dark mode and Classic mode!
4. Custom player page dashboards! Choose the player cards you want, in the order you want them.
5. One-click data exports! Export our projections and leaderboards for your personal projects.
6. Remove the photos on the home page! (Honestly, this doesn't sound so great to us, but some people wanted it, and we like to give our Members what they want.)
7. Even more Steamer projections! We have handedness, percentile, and context neutral projections available for Members only.
8. Get FanGraphs Walk-Off, a customized year end review! Find out exactly how you used FanGraphs this year, and how that compares to other Members. Don't be a victim of FOMO.
9. A weekly mailbag column, exclusively for Members.
10. Help support FanGraphs and our entire staff! Our Members provide us with critical resources to improve the site and deliver new features!
We hope you'll consider a Membership today, for yourself or as a gift! And we realize this has been an awfully long sales pitch, so we've also removed all the other ads in this article. We didn't want to overdo it.

Moyer is an interesting case, over his career he has had a reverse platoon split on the strength of his good changeup and curveball. This year, though, he has a very drastic split in the other direction (0.885 OPS against RHB and 0.700 against LHB). Normally I would write this off as noise, but as I noted in this post Moyer is throwing many fewer changeups and curves this year and many more two-seam fastballs, which have a large platoon split. If he keeps this pitch breakdown going forward I would assume his split will stay like it has been this year.

All told I don’t think it should be much of a concern. Lee and Hamels are both great pitchers who do better or just marginally worse against RHBs, so I don’t think the Phillies should worry about facing righty-heavy lineups in the playoffs.





 

Dave Allen's other baseball work can be found at Baseball Analysts.

24 Comments
Oldest
Newest Most Voted
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
Davidceisen
16 years ago

Something I’ve been thinking about when looking at these type of splits is when you have a righty who kills lefties vs a lefty who does equally well against righties as lefties, who has the advantage? It sort of seems like the unstoppable object hitting the unmovable object. Do we assume that the pitcher is fine because he has shown the ability to get righties out, or do we assume the hitter is adept at hitting lefties and is at the advantage?

Of course numerous people posting here have mentioned the RH dominated lineup of the Cardinals actually is better against RHP rather than LHP, so the Phillies might have even less reason to be worried.

0