Let’s Play a Game, Starring 3 AL Starting Pitchers
Who doesn’t like playing games? The most common baseball article game I have seen is the Player A and Player B game. And guess what…that is exactly what I am going to play today, with the addition of Player C, who will also be joining the party. So put on your thinking caps, this one is going to be an exciting one, and it stars three American League starters named A, B and C!
You only have the following stats for three pitchers. Which one is better?
Pitcher A: 7.8 K/9 | 2.6 BB/9 | 40% GB%
Pitcher B: 7.9 K/9 | 2.3 BB/9 | 39% GB%
Pitcher C: 7.6 K/9 | 2.0 BB/9 | 34% GB%
These three pitchers seem rather similar in terms of overall skill. Would anyone disagree? Strikeout rates are very close, they all have good control and they induce ground balls at a below league average level.
I considered including xFIP into the above table, but decided against it. Better to show just the skills. If you must know though, the xFIPs of these three pitchers ranged between 3.57 and 3.75. This confirms that these three pitchers are indeed similar skill-wise.
So really, whoever you pick as the best could be correct as they are very close. Unfortunately, ERA tells us a different story. Two of these pitchers have sub-3.00 ERAs, while the third has an ERA above 4.00. How is this possible? The short answer is that in a single season, ERA does a terrible (okay, maybe an exaggeration) job of telling us whose process was best. Notice I said process and not results, because a pitcher’s results factor in too many other variables outside his control.
I am getting dangerously close to letting this become another article ranting about ERA and trumpeting xFIP, SIERA, etc, which I did not intend. But I do want to stress how important it is for fantasy owners to try their darnedest to give as little weight as they can to the number the ERA roulette wheel ends up landing on. It just does not really matter much when trying to project next year’s ERA.
Oh, you want the names of Pitchers A, B and C, right? Well, if you haven’t figured it out by now.
Pitcher A = Max Scherzer
Pitcher B = Josh Beckett
Pitcher C = Jered Weaver
Weaver is almost guaranteed to be overvalued next season, while Beckett has a solid chance, and Scherzer will likely be undervalued.
Mike Podhorzer is the founder of ProjectingX IQ, an advanced fantasy baseball analytics platform that transforms projection data and in-season performance signals into actionable intelligence. He is the 2015 Fantasy Sports Writers Association Baseball Writer of the Year and three-time Tout Wars champion. He is the author of the eBook Projecting X 2.0: How to Forecast Baseball Player Performance, which teaches you how to project players yourself. Follow Mike on X@MikePodhorzer and contact him via email.
Weaver is averaging 7.2 INN/GS, Beckett 6.5, and Scherzer a mere 6. I will grant that team defense, park effects, and luck dragons have a role in every start … but I think that there’s an unstated skill here. Something along the lines of pitch efficiency. Weaver’s got it and Scherzer doesn’t. Mad Max has too many games where his peripherals look fine but his pitch count gets way too high way too fast, and it’s holding him back.
Or, Scherzer appears less efficient because more batted balls are falling in for hits, causing him to face more batters in higher leverage situation, leading to higher pitch counts and fewer innings pitched per game.
I looked into the effects of team defense on a player’e ERA and WHIP a while back. It is measurable, but not enough to make for the deference’s seen.
http://www.fangraphs.com/fantasy/index.php/effects-of-defense-on-era-and-whip/
Here are the adjustments for each of these 3 pitchers:
Team UZR/150 WHIP adjustment ERA adjustment
Tigers -3 -0.01176 -0.081
Red Sox 8.2 0.032144 0.2214
Angels 8.6 0.033712 0.2322
Player WHIP aWHIP ERA aERA
Scherzer 1.33 1.32 4.21 4.14
Beckett 0.97 1.00 2.44 2.66
Weaver 1.01 1.04 2.03 2.26
I wouldn’t think it was team defense causing the bulk of the difference in ERA – I assume it is primarily luck.
If you watch his starts, that is not at all how it appears. It appears that he’s perennially in a 2-2 or 3-2 count, often with a foul or three thrown in.
What’s missing from this diagnosis is the baseball. Weaver’s motion and stride create a difficult situation for the hitter, not to mention his excellent control of a number of pitches. Scherzer and Beckett have more conventional motions/strides which allow the hitter to see the ball better for longer and Scherzer has struggled spotting his pitches all year, hence the high pitch counts. Until there exists a stat that includes some of these intangibles, Weaver will always appear to overachieve.
Are you saying that Weaver’s unusual motion and his excellent control of a number of pitches are not already showing up in his strikeout and walk numbers? Or that in addition to contributing to his strikeout and walk rates, his motion and pitch arsenal have some additional effect on his batted ball profile that Beckett and Scherzer lack?
career BABIP:
Weaver – .277
Scherzer – .303
career HR/FB%
Weaver – 7.4%
Scherzer – 10.4%
Weaver has outperformed his SIERA/FIP/xFIP measures 5 out of 6 seasons. His career ERA is 3.27, compared to 4.03 xFIP and 3.88 SIERA (which gives him a bit more credit for the two skills above).
I don’t disagree with the general premise that Weaver will be overrated and Scherzer underrated next year, but quoting the three stats listed in the article and positing that their “skill” is that close is just false.
oops, forgot the caveat that obviously some of this is ballpark and defense related, but the point still stands….
while these “ERA estimators” work great in the aggregate, when evaluating specific players they can miss on the extremes, and Weaver, with a phenomenal changeup, funky delivery, and awesome command of multiple pitches is one of those “outliers”. The accumulation of those little marginal things he does better than most pitchers will allow him to keep getting “lucky” according to writers like Mr. Podhorzer. As we are starting to see from research like the recent SIERA update, there are clear skills in inducing “weak contact” and other peripheral stuff that has been overlooked for too long because of the difficulty of teasing out the skills….
career IFFB%:
Weaver – 13.7%
Scherzer – 10.3%
career LOB%:
Weaver – 76.8%
Scherzer – 72.6%
just a couple more examples. Great pitchers CAN show a skill at doing these little things better.
look at, for example, the LOB% leaderboard since 2008: http://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=pit&lg=all&qual=400&type=1&season=2011&month=0&season1=2008&ind=0
the guys at the top are the best pitchers in baseball — Santana, Wainwright, Halladay, Lincecum, JJ, Lester, Hamels, Hudson, Kershaw, Marcum, Weaver, King Felix, etc.
Scherzer’s been so frustrating all year. Flashes of brilliance and then a 6-run 5 inning game. I have to wonder if he is a true-talent 3.75-4.00 ERA pitcher. His BABIP isn’t abnormal, HR/FB is high, but other than that nothing sticks out at me.
The comparisons make sense that you’re doing, but I think Scherzer’s pitching about where we should expect him to, while Weaver and Becket are getting lucky or controlling the game better.
Beckett (84.2%) and Weaver (83.7%) are 1 and 2 in MLB in LOB%. Maybe they hold runners on really well, but that seems too high to sustain. Beckett’s career LOB% is 72.4% and Weaver’s is 76.8%.
Weaver is indeed riding the luck dragon with his HR/FB, LOB%, and BABIP. Still, he is a better pitcher than Scherzer right now and most likely will be in the future.
The 0.6 difference in BB/9 is nothing to scoff at. You may say the increase K/9 somewhat negates that but actually, Weaver has a higher K rate 22% vs. Scherzer’s 20%. Scherzer’s K/9 is benefiting from his bad luck, a la Shields 2010 ad countless others. This “bad luck inflation” through more batters faced also affects the BB/9 but Weaver is still definitively better with 5.8% vs. 6.9% for Scherzer.
Thus, Weaver is a top 15 fantasy option while Scherzer is at least a tier below. Beckett is somewhere in between. Weaver may not be Halladay or even Haren but he is better than Mad Max.
Weaver has the ability to throw 6 pitches, Scherzer has 3. Also, look at the strikezone plots for Weaver and Scherzer on the 24th. Weaver shows command all around the plate, while Scherzer spends almost all his time outside. I don’t care how good your “stuff” is, if you can’t pitch inside major league hitters will sit on the outside pitch, get extended, and make good contact. When you have the ability to pitch on both sides of the plate, you induce more weak contact, which will naturally lower BABIP, HR/FB%, and IFFB% which in turn boosts LOB%. Weaver may be a bit overvalued next year, but until Scherzer can show command of both sides, he’ll be the exact same pitcher he is this year.
Weavers Charts
http://www.brooksbaseball.net/pfxVB/pfx.php?month=8&day=24&year=2011&game=gid_2011_08_24_chamlb_anamlb_1%2F&pitchSel=450308&prevGame=gid_2011_08_24_chamlb_anamlb_1%2F&prevDate=824
Scherzers Charts
http://www.brooksbaseball.net/pfxVB/pfx.php?month=8&day=24&year=2011&game=gid_2011_08_24_detmlb_tbamlb_1%2F&pitchSel=453286&prevGame=gid_2011_08_24_detmlb_tbamlb_1%2F&prevDate=824
Use K%.
What Telo said. Due to their low WHIPs, Beckett and Weaver have noticeably better K% and BB% than Scherzer.
Scherzer: 20.2 %K, 6.9 %BB
Beckett: 22.1 %K, 6.6 %BB
Weaver: 22.0 %K, 5.8 %BB
Your broader point stands about the utility of looking beyond ERA, but any fantasy baseball player worth their salt should already know that. The specifics (Scherzer may be undervalued, regress significantly to the mean for pitchers with ERA luck like Beckett and Weaver) are still very useful to point out, though.
One of my all time special quotes seems extremely fitting here “Success is nothing more than a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day. It is the accumulative weight of our disciplines and our judgments that leads us to either fortune or failure.”–Jim Rohn
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