Reviewing Steamer and I: Zack Greinke

Today I continue reviewing my preseason posts and this time I will bravely recap how my Pod Projection fared against the Steamer projection for Zack Greinke. As we are all well aware, Greinke just so happened to lead all Major League starters in ERA, en route to a second place finish in the Cy Young voting. Sadly, Greinke wiggled his way into a Steamer and I post because Steamer was significantly more optimistic about his performance than Pod was. I guess we know how this is going to go…

Steamer and I: Zack Greinke

System	IP	ERA	WHIP	K/9	BB/9	HR/9	K%	BB%	BABIP	LOB%
Pod	200	3.36	1.20	8.5	2.3	0.81	23.0%	6.2%	0.305	73.9%
Steamer	199	3.03	1.12	8.5	2.1	0.82	23.1%	5.7%	0.284	75.1%
2015	222	1.66	0.84	8.1	1.6	0.57	23.7%	4.7%	0.229	86.5%

Let’s start at the very beginning. Because Greinke was the stingiest at allowing runners to cross home plate that he has ever been for his career, he set a new career high in innings pitched per start. As a result, he walloped both systems’ IP projection, as he tallied the second highest innings total of his career.

Let’s skip over the ERA and WHIP projections and actuals and move on to the underlying skills first. Pod and Steamer forecasted identical strikeout rates, but there is an oddity hidden within those K/9 and K% marks. Could you spot it?

I am not sure why it took so long for myself and analysts to do so, but I, and others, have finally moved away from per nine inning metrics and toward per plate appearance metrics. The K/9 and K% columns in the above table illustrate why perfectly.

Greinke actually posted a K/9 mark below the two projections, but a K% mark above them! Strange, huh? It’s all because of that microscopic .229 BABIP. Fewer balls in play falling for hits means fewer baserunners, which means fewer batters faced and opportunities to strike out those batters. Greinke could have faced a million batters in an inning, but as long as he struck out just one of them, his K/9 would be 9.0! How absurd is that? In this case, Greinke’s K% correctly announces that his strikeout ability was actually better than what Steamer and I forecasted.

The same issue would apply to BB/9 as well, but we don’t find that problem in this example. By both that metric and BB%, Greinke displayed better control than we expected, as his F-Strike% hit its highest mark since 2005.

Just like we generally agreed about his strikeout and walk skills, Steamer and I were in agreement over Greinke’s home run rate. But little did we know that he would post a suppressed 7.3% HR/FB rate, which ranked as the second lowest mark of his career.

We move on to BABIP where we learn of one of the primary forces behind Greinke’s league-leading ERA. Despite posting a BABIP above the league average in 8 of his eleven full seasons, Steamer actually forecasted a below average mark for 2015, which I found odd, especially coming off a season in which he posted an inflated .311 mark.

And yet, Steamer proved closer, though both of us were far off. Greinke finished second in the league in BABIP, despite posting a similar batted ball type distribution, as well as similar Pull%/Cent%/Oppo% and Soft%/Med%/Hard% rates. Given the data we have available, there is seemingly nothing to explain his suddenly elite ability to suppress hits on balls in play.

Naturally, that low BABIP, along with his HR/FB rate, fueled a LOB% surge. That mark was highest of his career, and, you guessed it, the best in baseball.

We head back to the ERA and WHIP columns and the first question is why Steamer’s ERA projection was 0.33 runs below mine, given that we projected almost identical skills. The answer is mostly the BABIP and the slightly higher LOB% Steamer projected.

As Greinke has found a new home in Arizona, which features a ballpark that is more hitter friendly than Dodger Stadium was, I am quite pessimistic about his fantasy prospects for 2016. At his age, with no obvious explanation for the BABIP and HR/FB rate magic, and in a less forgiving home park, he is likely to have major difficulty earning what fantasy owners pay for him. He’s not going to be a bust in the traditional sense, of course, but owners shelling out top 5 (top 3?) prices for his services are probably going to be disappointed.