Buoyed by the welcomes we received upon our return to Fangraphs this season and the compliments extended to us last week, we now fearlessly resurrect what was, from 2015 to 2019, an annual Birchwood Brothers feature: a consultation of the Holy Quadrinity. For newcomers, and for that matter oldcomers: years ago, Bret Sayre, then of Baseball Prospectus, posited that “the three skills that are most important to the art of pitching [are] getting strikeouts, reducing walks, and keeping the ball on the ground,” and that pitchers who can do those three things, as betokened by their above-average numbers in those categories, are worth the attention of those who ponder such matters. He called this approach The Holy Trinity.
Then we came along and, like John Calvin standing on the shoulders of Martin Luther, suggested a variant of Sayre’s approach. We call it the Holy Quadrinity, which admits only pitchers who are in the upper half of two categories (strikeout percentage and soft-hit percentage) and the lower half—in other words, the better half—of two others (walk percentage and hard-hit percentage). We figured this approach wouldn’t turn up much interesting stuff—that the guys who qualified would be the guys who had good seasons by any metric you cared to use. And there were a lot of those guys. But we were surprised to find how many not-great-season (and, occasionally, not-good-season) pitchers this approach identified. Moreover, and more importantly, although the Quadrinity isn’t infallible, it points you more often than you’d expect in the direction of moderately-priced or even cheap pitchers who go on to have better seasons than the market expects.
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