Trade Me C.J. Wilson
Just four short days ago, Jeff Zimmerman inspired anger and vitriol from the loyal readers of this blog by suggesting that it was time to sell C.J. Wilson.
Well, I am nothing if not a man of the people, so I am here to defend the honor of the Angels’ very expensive lefty.
In reality, I am a Wilson apologist, a three-year owner of the converted reliever and a believer in his apparently magical abilities to outperform his FIP on a regular basis (or at least for 2.5 years as a SP). Earlier this year, in my 10 Bold Predictions article, I claimed that Wilson would be the ace of the Angels three-headed-pitching-monster, and he has done nothing to disappoint.
But, as Jeff rightly points out, many of the underlying numbers just don’t support the success Wilson has had in the stats that count in your fantasy league. The K/BB ratio is not good, mostly due to a high walk rate, and he has had some good fortune on balls in play. Wilson’s FIP is more than a run higher than his ERA.
But there is also a lot to like. The walk rate is high but 7.1 K/9 IP, while not great, is certainly plenty to make for a successful pitcher, particularly when paired with a 51.6% GB rate. And that ground ball rate helps to eliminate a number of those walks (or singles). Wilson has induced 16 ground ball double plays this year, tied for fourth in the AL. Wilson is no stranger to the double play, as he brought on 31 in 2011, leading all pitchers. He was 12th in the AL in 2010, his first year as a starter, with 21.
Part of this is because Wilson has always had good infield defense behind him – but who cares? He gets to keep that good infield defense, at least for the next few months. Besides, it isn’t all defense. With men on base, Wilson’s K% increases, his BB% decreases, and his GB% goes up while his FB% goes down.
In addition to erasing base runners through double plays, Wilson has the 11th best CS% of any pitcher in the AL. Once again, he is likely benefiting from his team – he ranked outside the top 20 in 2010 and 2011, while Dan Haren and Jered Weaver are both in the top 20 this year (Weaver is #2), but, as with the infield defense, this support isn’t going away.
As Jeff pointed out, Wilson is likely to see some inflation on his .242 BABIP, but maybe not as much as you’d expect, as low BABIP has been part of his calling card since leaving the pen. But the ground balls come into play here, too. Sure, more of those ground balls should find holes instead of gloves in the second half, but most of those will turn into singles, not extra base hits, and if he keeps inducing those ground ball double plays, he can limit the damage of those additional hits.
Most importantly, Wilson avoids the bane of any pitcher (particularly pitchers who give up a lot of walks) and keeps his HR allowed way down. He has the 4th best HR/9 among AL SP, and again, this is nothing new to Wilson, as he was 6th in the AL last year, despite playing his home games in a well-known launching pad. He has the 10th best FB rate in the AL, and the 4th best HR/FB – if you don’t give up fly balls and those fly balls aren’t clearing the walls, you are going to see a lot of success as a pitcher. And nether his FB% nor his HR/FB varies greatly from his past numbers.
So does this all mean Jeff is just plain wrong? Well, probably not. Wilson HAS had good luck this year, and he likely will fall off. But from where he stands today, he can fall a decent ways without becoming a bum.
Wilson has shown over a three year period that he can consistently outperform his FIP. It could be luck or it could be something we are not measuring well – something like the impact of double plays or the ability to limit HR. Jeff painted a picture of a pitcher who didn’t strikeout enough guys to make up for his walks, who has benefited from a low BABIP and a high LOB%, and who may have even received some friendly scoring at home. I am painting a picture of a guy who limits the damage of his walks by avoiding HR and inducing double plays, who can absorb a bump in BABIP, and who has a track record of success that the statistically-minded crowd can’t always explain.
You can feel free to agree with either of us. In fact, I encourage any Wilson owner in a league with me to re-read Jeff’s article and then let me know the price to take Wilson off your hands.
A long-time fantasy baseball veteran and one of the creators of ottoneu, Chad Young's is the Managing Editor for RotoGraphs, and can be heard on the Keep or Kut Podcast. You can follow him on Bluesky @chadyoung.bsky.social.
somewhat irrelevant but I have a serious man crush on cj Wilson I have owned him for his career as a starter and it makes me wonder what he may be had he began his career as a starter.
I watched his last start, and he really seems to perform better under pressure. Walks a few guys, gets into a lot of trouble, and it’s like he zones right in. Like he needs to feel the squeeze before he starts to come through. It makes for maddening watching, but it seems to work for him.
The data backs this up, at least for 2012. It is possible that he is pitching to contact more with the bases empty and then really focusing on getting the ball down with guys on. Or perhaps he just has better mechanics from the stretch. But regardless, as a Wilson and a Lincecum owner, I’ve spent all year wondering how I can get Wilson to avoid the walks with no one on and how I can Lincecum to avoid falling apart when guys get on base.
It doesn’t work very well for him in the postseason.
Your predictions pretty much suck, man. No offense or anything cause I know they were just for fun. But yeah, they suck.
No offense taken. At some point I will do a retrospective on those. Some of them were pretty spectacular failures, but I am pretty happy with the Wilson prediction, Prince is on pace for under 30 HR. Rosario has shown the power and could still be the most valuable rookie catcher from June on, although that remains to be seen. The Morneau prediction wasn’t TERRIBLE either. But when I missed…Raburn, Gio, Carp…yikes.
I agree that Wilson can cease getting lucky and still be an outstanding pitcher, but to say that Wilson or anyone else has demonstrated anything over a 3 year period is nonsense.
Let’s accept the idea that some pitchers do indeed have the ability to consistently outperform FIP. Let’s also say that a typical pitcher without this particular skill will have a 0.5 chance of outperforming FIP in a given year, and a 0.5 chance of underperforming. Conditional on being allowed to pitch for three years, he will have a 0.125 probability of outperforming FIP in each of the three years by chance alone. With c. 150 starting pitchers in any given year, and maybe 50-100 starting pitchers who start in every year over a given three year period, we should expect to see about 7-15 pitchers who outperform in any three year period simply based on luck, and some small number more based on the FIP outperformance skill we have posited.
Let’s say there are 5 pitchers in the skill bucket at any given time – I haven’t seen anyone nominate more than 3 or 4 current pitchers for this particular skill, so 5 seems a reasonable estimate. So among the FIP outperformers over a given period, we have 5 in the skill bucket and 7-15 in the luck bucket. So with a threshold of 3 years, we should expect MORE outperformers to be in the luck bucket than the skill bucket. To conclude that a given pitcher is in the skill bucket with even a 0.5 probability, we either need some piece of exogenous data besides his ERA vs. FIP performance, or we need a longer history of ERA/FIP outperformance than just 3 years.
C.J. Wilson, or Cueto, or Vogelsong, or anyone else you want to nominate, may very well have a repeatable skill for outperforming FIP. But 3 years of data is just not enough to draw that conclusion about anyone in particular. Neither is 4 years. 5 years might be on the border, but you’re still talking about confidence levels of c. 0.8 at best… 5 people in the skill bucket, and an expectation of c. 1-3 in the luck bucket, which implies p less than 0.833.
It feels like 3 years is a lot of data, but it just isn’t.
you make a bad assumption early in your analysis. it doesn’t make sense to start with a p=0.5 under- or over- perform. what you’re saying is overperforming by 0.01 (<1%) is the same as overperforming by .31 (10%). no one should be saying that there is skill in outperforming fip/xfip by 0.01.
thus, your resulting conclusion is wrong. someone was discussing this in terms of coin tosses in the other thread. what you've set up is potentially treating the outcome of a coin coming up heads 51 times out of 100 as the same probability as a coin that a coin comes up heads 65 times out of 100. the degree to which a player outperforms fip/xfip expectation *should* matter in determing whether there's something at work that allows him to regularily exceed expectations.
Yeah, agreed Coop. That’s why for the quick analysis I did below, I broke guys into segments of .2 below or above, not just below or above. Not sure it is clear in my comment, but in that list, a guy who has outperformed FIP 3 of the last 4 years, was more than .2 better than his FIP for those 3 years and with .2 of his FIP the other year.
A fair point. Let’s be more rigorous.
In 2011, the standard deviation of ERA-FIP among all pitchers who threw 100 innings or more was 0.59. So let’s estimate the implied probability of outperforming FIP by 0.2 runs as 0.367, assuming this metric is normally distributed. The probability of outperforming by 0.2 runs for 3 consecutive years is 0.05, and so we should expect something like 3-7 pitchers to do this by luck in a given three year period.
While we’re on the subject of rigor, we’re not factoring in the inherent bias in the data. Starters that have outperformed will tend to be more likely to continue starting in the future, while starters that underperform will tend to be less likely to continue starting and thus disappear from the data set. Thus we should expect the number of pitchers who display this historical tendency to be overrepresented in the data.
My point remains. This may indeed be a real skill, but to differentiate between who has the skill and who has just been lucky, with any reasonable confidence, requires more than three years of data.
That standard deviation, though, would include anyone who outperformed by skill and anyone who outperformed by chance. Let’s say Johan, Lilly, and Wilson actually have a skill that allows them to consistently outperform their FIP by at least .2 every season. Then including them in a data set to find a standard deviation for E-F and using that standard deviation to assume a normal distribution does not work. I thought about doing something similar, but I think it is going to take a more advanced approach and more time than I can spend on this right now to figure this out.
Fair enough. Johan didn’t pitch in 2011, so I went ahead and removed Wilson, Cueto and Lilly from the data. The standard deviation fell from 0.59 to… 0.587. P fell from 4.96% to 4.93%. So not much of an effect.
We’re not even considering defense here. The entire Rangers staff outperformed by 0.24 runs in 2010 and 0.19 runs in 2011. The Angels so far have outperformed by 0.33 runs. Part of that is attributable to Wilson himself, but remove Wilson and the teams still outperformed overall. How much of the outperformance is attributable to the pitchers and how much to the defense? If we’re going to claim a given pitcher has this skill, we definitely have to factor this in.
Agreed that 3 years isn’t a ton of data, but it also depends what your assumptions are. If you start with the assumption that FIP is NOT perfect and that there are guys who can consistently outperform it, three years does suggest that Wilson might fall into that class.
If you want a few other guys who have consistently outperformed, Johan Santana has had an ERA .2 lower than his FIP for his last 6 seasons and 7 of 8 since becoming a full-time starter. Ted Lilly has done it his last 6. Carlos Zambrano for 4 of his last 5, Halladay for 4 of 6, Jeremy Gutherie for 4 of 5, Kershaw, Joe Saunders, Cueto, Cahill all for 3 of the last 4, and Wilson, John Lannan and Dickey for all of the last 3. None of those guys, in the past 7 years, has had an ERA .2 HIGHER than their FIP and all have consistently had an ERA at least .2 lower. That doesn’t even include the anti-FIP poster-child, Matt Cain, whose ERA has been within .2 of his FIP for 4 of the past 7 years, but is .35 lower for his career.
Having said that, none of this is definitive – I haven’t really researched the data enough to make a strong statement one way or the other. But I don’t think FIP is the perfect stat. I like it a lot, I use it a lot, I think FIP, xFIP and SIERA are all great stats that tell us a ton, and are far more informative than ERA. But they also all have their limits. My point with Wilson is less “he clearly beats his FIP every year” and more “don’t just point to FIP and say he will regress.”
Thanks for the research. I must point out that you have named 13 pitchers, and even if my methodology is wrong as coop has suggested, we should expect to see SOME number of pitchers outperform FIP due to chance alone. So of these 13, how many do you think are attributable to skill and how many are attributable to chance?
in short, I have no idea how many to attribute each way. I didn’t do enough research or dive deep enough on this to have a clear answer. I think the important thing is to note that even when you put on a bit of a barrier and say to “outperform,” the gap has to be at least .2, you still get a decent sized list.
For example, my dataset has only 22 pitchers who qualified in at least 6 of the past 7 years. Out of that set, if we used a 50-50 shot to be over or under FIP, we would expect 1.5% of pitchers to go 6 years beating their FIP by at least .00001. I have 2 of 22 beating it every year by at least .2. I’d say that at least for those two (Lilly, Santana) there is something going on there beyond pure chance and statistics. There is some selection bias, as pitcher’s performing worse than their FIP are less likely to keep pitching.
But, again, my point isn’t that Wilson is definitively better than his FIP, just that I think we can’t assume he is NOT definitively better than his FIP.
I agree that we can’t assume he doesn’t have this particular skill. My point is that in your article you say that he has demonstrated that he DOES have it, and I don’t think we can make that conclusion.
As you say, survivor bias is a massive problem with the historical data in this kind of analysis. To account for it will require a much more rigorous analysis than I have the time to do, and may well be impossible as we have no reasonable way on estimating the performance of people who fell out of the data set.
I think we are actually on more or less the same page here. I may have over-stated my case in the article, more than anything else. Should not have implied that he has that skill…only that he MAY have that skill IF it exists. More meant to combat the immediate reaction to a big ERA/FIP split, rather than as a defining piece of my argument.
Excellent discussion. Maybe the first long winded discussion I read all the way through on this website.
I will say I largely agree with mcbrown’s points though Chad does make good points as well. I am naturally skeptical of anyone who claims to have an ability to outperform FIP at this point. However, I will say that for fantasy purposes, team defense (such as the Rangers and now Angels here) should be factored into any decision in a positive favor for the pitcher. When playing fantasy baseball, I do not care if Wilson is getting good fortune by the strength of his teammates gloves as long as it figure to keep happening.
I just traded Wilson for Bourne. I think it’ good trade, my team is hurting for SB.
If you need speed and have pitching, nothing wrong with that deal at all. My point isn’t to say that you should hold Wilson at all costs – just don’t sell low out of fear. I own him in one league where I need offense, and may very well trade him myself. I’m just not going to throw him away.
Be sure to come back and let us know how that worked out.
Great article. Love thinking about both sides. I recently moved Wilson and Cuddyer for Felix Hernandez in a H2H 10 Team Keeper League. While I was never going to keep Cuddyer, I believe Felix at $10 more than Wilson is a better long term investment.
I traded CJ for Justin Upton …. keeper league …. I feel pretty good, despite JUP sucking this year.
KFC
Excellent Chad! I wrote the below after Jeff’s article.
“If a pitcher is so good as to be able to avoid hits and home runs more than others, why then can’t he just avoid them hitting the ball all together? I know pitching to contact is used. But what about pitching to no contact with runners on or in scoring position? Or pitching to more ground balls with a runner on first?”
I see you looked up data for 2012 only. I won’t, but maybe someone should look up how he’s done with runners on from the last three years. If he’s done this (higher K and GB rates) all three year then I’d buy into him a lot more. Otherwise, I see a higher possibility for bigger regression.
He did some of it last year (most the change in batted ball profile). 2010 he did not. That might be a a sign of potential increased concern. Could also be a shift in his approach over the years.
I have C.J. Wilson for $4 in ottoneu. I agree with the points Chad and Jeff have both made. For me, I would only consider trading him if I was getting a similarly priced bargain in return, as even if his performance falls off, there really is no risk at his current price. Anyone have thoughts on what you would pay for a $4 Wilson in an ottoneu FG pts league?