Hey all. It’s been a while, hasn’t it?
I’ve been a little out of the loop recently, mostly on account of a lengthy and exhausting trip to the States with our two little kids. After so many nights in strange houses, it’s taken us a little while to convince our two-year old that the bedroom he’s currently sleeping in is really his. Our zero-year old, who is still grappling with the idea of object permanence, has taken our recent wanderings in better stride.
But no more travelling: it’s time to settle back for a bit, and get back to watching baseball. And writ’n about it. I should do more of that, just so Bill keeps me on the roster. He’s added some new names, I see. Welcome aboard, interlopers.
Let’s kick things off with a quick question: who’s been the best pitcher in the American League?
There are some obvious contenders. Chris Sale, whose arm miraculously continues to stay attached to his body, is making a run at 300 strikeouts. The-Other-Chris Archer has blossomed into one of baseball’s brightest stars. Sonny Gray has an ERA of 2.10 in Oakland (and, actually, he has a 2.10 in any city he might find himself in). David Price remains David Price. Dallas Keuchel remains Dallas Keuchel, but he’s also a lot like Mike Scott, circa 1986. Corey Kluber remains a robot, if I’m understanding his nickname correctly.
That’s a lot of fine pitchers to choose from, and that’s ignoring all of the fine relievers on the Yankees in the American League.
Here’s a pitcher you probably wouldn’t choose:
Name
|
W-L
|
ERA
|
IP
|
K
|
Player A
|
9-8
|
4.19
|
122.1
|
120
|
At first glance, this pitcher doesn’t look too impressive. A 4.19 ERA certainly doesn’t scream ‘ace,’ not in a year when Zack Grienke can post a 1.67 mark. A 9-8 win-loss record isn’t going to impress anyone, even in this age of ‘Kill The Win’ hashtags. Even a strikeout rate of one per inning is pretty much par for the course this year. And he’s missed some time…..122 innings pitched isn’t a lot.
The pitcher’s name isn’t ‘Player A’, of course….that’s just a feint so that I can throw one more table at you, before giving up the ghost:
Name
|
W-L
|
ERA
|
IP
|
K
|
Chris Sale
|
12-7
|
3.34
|
164.1
|
222
|
Sonny Gray
|
12-5
|
2.10
|
175.1
|
155
|
Dallas Keuchel
|
15-6
|
2.28
|
185.2
|
178
|
Player A
|
9-8
|
4.19
|
122.1
|
120
|
David Price
|
12-4
|
2.40
|
176.1
|
171
|
Chris Archer
|
11-9
|
2.77
|
169
|
205
|
Corey Kluber
|
8-13
|
3.43
|
194.1
|
213
|
The first thing you’ll notice is that our man-in-hiding has no business being on this list.
The second thing you’ll notice is that Corey Kluber has a losing record. Not a kind-of-losing record…a really losing record. That’s astonishing. He should really learn how to pitch to the score better.
I’m just kidding about that last sentence. If you’ve just joining our community, please know that those of us at the BJOL do not endorse ‘pitching to the score’ as a useful criteria to measure a pitcher’s ability. The only people who do that are the kind of people who support Jack Morris for the Hall-of-Fame. Or the kind who would sign Rick Porcello to a long-term deal. Those kind of people. Ugh.
We don’t put a lot of salt in things like ‘wins’ and ‘loses’ and ‘proper punctuation.’ So how do should we evaluate pitchers?
Last year, Bill wrote a
two-part article asking
which pitching stats are most closely connected to value. That’s a quote from the article: "Which pitching stats are most closely connected to value?" It turned out that ERA was a pretty poor measure of a pitcher’s value.
A pitcher’s winning percentage and win-loss record was a little better than ERA, but those metrics are more true-ish than true. The best indicator of a pitchers’ value, from the stuff we can count just by looking at their game-by-game performance, is their strikeout-to-walk ratio.
This makes an intuitive kind of sense. A pitcher’s strikeout rate is a measure of a) the quality of a pitcher’s pitches, and b) their capacity to think about and adjust to the one-on-one battle that takes place during every at-bat. A pitcher’s walk rate is a measure of how much control they have over their stuff, but it is also a reflection of a pitcher’s ability to process information as an at-bat.
There’s a nice balance in strikeout-to-walk ratio, a yin-yang sort of thing to the metric that satisfies on an intuitive level. And there’s a logical argument for it, too: strikeouts and walks are the purest outcomes of an at-bat: a batter who walks will reach base 100% of the time, and a batter who strikes out will never reach base, not unless the pitch gets past the catcher. Whereas every other outcome of an at-bat (grounder, fly ball, line drive) are somewhat centralized in regards to outcome, walks and strikeouts exist on furthest poles: a walk is always a success for a hitter, and a strikeout is (almost) always a success for a pitcher.
It isn’t a good idea to rely on any single metric to judge a pitcher’s performance, but let’s go ahead and do that. Let’s see how our unnamed starter ranks among his peers in strikeout-to-walk ratio:
Name
|
W-L
|
ERA
|
IP
|
K
|
BB
|
K/BB
|
Chris Sale
|
12-7
|
3.34
|
164.1
|
222
|
33
|
6.73
|
Sonny Gray
|
12-5
|
2.1
|
175.1
|
155
|
44
|
3.52
|
Dallas Keuchel
|
15-6
|
2.28
|
185.2
|
178
|
41
|
4.34
|
Player A
|
9-8
|
4.19
|
122.1
|
120
|
16
|
7.50
|
David Price
|
12-4
|
2.4
|
176.1
|
171
|
35
|
4.89
|
Chris Archer
|
11-9
|
2.77
|
169
|
205
|
42
|
4.88
|
Corey Kluber
|
8-13
|
3.43
|
194.1
|
213
|
35
|
6.09
|
As you guessed, he laps the field. He’s almost a strikeout better than the #2 guy in the AL.
And he is best starter in all of baseball. Here are the major league leaders in strikeout-to-walk ratios as of this moment:
Rank
|
Name
|
K/BB
|
1
|
Player A
|
7.80
|
2
|
Max Scherzer
|
7.73
|
3
|
Clayton Kershaw
|
6.94
|
4
|
Chris Sale
|
6.73
|
5
|
Madison Bumgarner
|
6.43
|
6
|
Corey Kluber
|
6.09
|
7
|
Bartolo Colon
|
5.89
|
8
|
Phil Hughes
|
5.67
|
9
|
Carlos Carrasco
|
5.41
|
10
|
Zack Greinke
|
5.34
|
11
|
Jacob deGrom
|
5.03
|
12
|
David Price
|
4.89
|
This is a shortlist of the guys who will appear on the Cy Young ballots at the end of the year, plus two guys (Hughes and Colon) who are sort of famous for not walking anyone ever. Okay….Carlos Carrasco isn’t going to get any Cy Young support, but he’s had some fine moments this year.
And our guy…New York Yankees right-hander Michael Pineda…is at the top of the heap.
Pineda does well by a lot of the advanced metrics preferred by those of us who enjoy putting together spreadsheets. For instance:
Stat (Courtesy of FanGraphs)
|
Pineada’s MLB Rank
|
FIP (Fielding-Independent Pitching)
|
15th
|
xFIP (Expected FIP)
|
6th
|
SIERA (Skill-Interactive ERA)
|
7th
|
FIP is an attempt to improve on ERA. xFIP is an attempt to improve on FIP. SIERA is an attempt to improve on FIP and xFIP, mostly by using a sexier acronym. These are all great metrics that smart people invented and update, and they all agree that Michael Pineda has been really great this year.
Even fWAR, when adjusted for playing time, agrees that Pineda’s been excellent this season: Pineda ranks 13th in the majors in WAR/100 IP, right between Gerrit Cole and Madison Bumgarner.
* * *
That’s not the end-point of this article. I’ll get to the point, but here’s an aside.
Looking forward just a bit, the Yankees have the chance to an impressive pitching staff for a few years. Their bullen is locked down: Dellin Betances and Andrew Miller are each under team control for the next four years. Tanaka is under contract for five years. The clock for top prospect Luis Serverino has just started to kick, and the Yankees have Pineda under contract for two more seasons. It isn’t impossible that Nathan Eovaldi enjoys having W-L records that are disproportionate to his secondary metrics, so maybe he’ll resign with the team. Hell, it’s not impossible that CC Sabathia has a Bartolo Colon-esque renaissance in the late years of his contract.
The Yankees have sometimes had good pitching, but mostly their good pitching in recent years has come via the free agent market. Most of their good pitchers before that came from deals involving whatever team was willing to exchange dollars for pennies.
So we could be on the precipice of an interesting shift for the Yankees franchise: instead of the Bronx Bombers, we could have the Bronx….actually, I can’t think of a good pitching term that starts with ‘B.’ The Bronx Breaking Balls? Bronx Beanballers?
Anyway, the Yankees could be very interesting next year, for very non-Yankee reasons.
* * *
Another aside: technical glitches have prevented me from posting this article until today. Michael Pineda is no longer the major-league leader in K/BB rate. His bad outing last week dropped him a few ticks below Max Scherzer, who probably isn’t a real person anyway.
* * *
Okay…getting to the conclusion.
Pineda’s current strikeout-to-walk ratio is 7.80. That is very good. Roger Clemens never had a strikeout-to-walk ratio that high, or even in that vicinity. Greg Maddux did have a K-BB ratio of 7.8 or better. He did that twice, posting W-L records of 19-2 and 19-4 in those years.
Putting it in some context, here are the seasons in which a starting pitcher has posted a K-to-BB ratio of 6.00 or better over a full season, from 2000 to 2014:
Season
|
Name
|
K/BB
|
2014
|
Phil Hughes
|
11.63
|
2010
|
Cliff Lee
|
10.28
|
2002
|
Curt Schilling
|
9.58
|
2000
|
Pedro Martinez
|
8.88
|
2004
|
Ben Sheets
|
8.25
|
2005
|
Carlos Silva
|
7.89
|
2014
|
Clayton Kershaw
|
7.71
|
2001
|
Curt Schilling
|
7.51
|
2012
|
Cliff Lee
|
7.39
|
2014
|
Hisashi Iwakuma
|
7.33
|
2010
|
Roy Halladay
|
7.30
|
2014
|
David Price
|
7.13
|
2013
|
Cliff Lee
|
6.94
|
2004
|
Randy Johnson
|
6.59
|
2006
|
Curt Schilling
|
6.54
|
2001
|
Greg Maddux
|
6.41
|
2003
|
Roy Holliday
|
6.38
|
2011
|
Roy Hulladay
|
6.29
|
2014
|
Jordan Zimmermann
|
6.28
|
2013
|
Adam Wainwright
|
6.26
|
2013
|
Matt Harvey
|
6.16
|
2003
|
Curt Schilling
|
6.06
|
First things first: Carlos Silva doesn’t really belong on this list. While everyone else on the list had strikeout rates of 8.46 or 10.12, Silva has a strikeout rate of just 3.39 in 2005. He just didn’t walk anyone. He threw 188 innings and walked nine guys. Two of those were intentional walks, which must have pissed him off. He made twenty-seven starts in 2005 and never walked more than one batter in any of them. It’s an absolute outlier of a season, one that doesn’t really compare to any other season in Silva’s career, or anyone else’s.
Taking Silva off, what you’ll notice is that this is an impressive group of players. You know these guys, and you probably know most of these seasons. You have Schilling’s two runner-up years in Arizona, as well as Harvey’s breakout season. You have Cy Young Award years for Halladay, Maddux, Pedro, and Lee. There’s Kershaw’s MVP season from last year, of course. The worst player is Ben Sheets, a four-time All-Star who had the misfortune of playing for the Brewers when they weren’t very good.
This bodes well for Pineda, of course. We can say that he’s keeping some fine company this year, even though his has been an abbreviated season.
But there’s something else about that list that undercuts, at least a little bit, just how impressive Pineda’s 2015 season has been. Instead of looking at full seasons, let’s starters who might have broken down, and lower our bar to 120 innings pitched. And let’s look at it year-by-year:
Year
|
SP with K/BB > 6.0
|
Pitchers
|
2000
|
1
|
Pedro
|
2001
|
3
|
Schilling, Maddux, Oswalt
|
2002
|
1
|
Schilling, Maddux, Oswalt (again)
|
2003
|
2
|
Schilling, Halladay
|
2004
|
2
|
Randy Johnson, Sheets
|
2005
|
2
|
Schilling, Silva
|
2006
|
1
|
Schilling
|
2007
|
0
|
None
|
2008
|
0
|
None
|
2009
|
0
|
None
|
2010
|
2
|
Halladay, Lee
|
2011
|
1
|
Halladay
|
2012
|
1
|
Lee
|
|
From 2000 to 2012, we saw one or two guys posting really great strikeout-to-walk ratios. You’d have one of the regulars like Schilling and Halladay, and then you’d have the likes of Pedro or Maddux or Randy Johnson or Cliff Lee popping up on the list.
Now here’s 2013 to 2015:
Year
|
SP with K/BB > 6.0
|
Pitchers
|
2013
|
2
|
Wainwright, Harvey
|
2014
|
6
|
Hughes, Kershaw, Iwakuma, Price, Tanaka, Zimmermann
|
2015
|
6
|
Pineda, Scherzer, Kershaw, Sale, Bumgarner, Kulber
|
Over the last two years, we’ve suddenly seen a lot more pitchers posting inflated strikeout-to-walk rates.
More interesting, to me, is that there is far less crossover on this list than in years past: the only repeating pitcher is Kershaw (of course). But there are a dozen starting pitchers in the majors right now who could potentially post ratios of 6.0 or higher. Certainly, there’s still a correlation between a high ratio and being a great pitcher, but it’s no longer a unique event.
* * *
My closing point actually has very little to do with Michael Pineda. I think Pineda is shaping up to be a fine pitcher, and I think the Yankees are going to have a pretty terrifying pitching staff in 2016 and 2017. Enough said on both fronts.
My closing point has to do with the direction baseball is headed, and how we’re currently talking about it.
There’s been lot of hand-wringing lately about the steady increase in strikeouts year-to-year. You can read plenty of articles that show distressing graphs on the rising strikeout rate. Here, por ejemplo, are the numbers for the last decade:
Year
|
K/9
|
2006
|
6.59
|
2007
|
6.67
|
2008
|
6.83
|
2009
|
6.99
|
2010
|
7.13
|
2011
|
7.13
|
2012
|
7.56
|
2013
|
7.57
|
2014
|
7.73
|
2015
|
7.68
|
That’s alarming. The strikeout has increased about 16% during this decade alone. And it’s been a reasonably steady gain…it’s not a one-year adjustment, but a clear trend.
But that’s not the real measure of the problem. Sixteen percent might seem alarming, but spread out over ten years and you’re looking at a gain of 1.6% a year. I can still sleep at night.
Here are the scary numbers. Here is the real issue that baseball needs to address:
Year
|
K/BB Ratio
|
2006
|
2.00
|
2007
|
2.00
|
2008
|
2.01
|
2009
|
2.02
|
2010
|
2.17
|
2011
|
2.30
|
2012
|
2.48
|
2013
|
2.51
|
2014
|
2.67
|
2015
|
2.70
|
Though the strikeout rate has increased throughout the decade, the balance between strikeouts to walks actually remained steady. It was at 2.00 in 2006, which is about where it was in 2001 (2.05), and where is was in 2009 (2.02). Strikeouts went up, but walks went up, too, so there was still an approximate balance of about two strikeouts for every walk issued in the majors.
During the 2010 season, this started to change, and it’s changed dramatically. Strikeouts continued their ascent, but walks are no longer keeping pace. The 2-1 strikeout-to-walk ratio which held steady for the first decade of this century has spun away from us.
There are many reasons for this: a more accurate strike zone, defensive shifts, a harsher drug policy…but the simple fact is that walks and strikeouts are getting increasingly out of balance.
Consider this: over the last seven seasons, the strikeout rate has increased 9.8%. That’s certainly a big jump. But over those same seven seasons, the ratio of strikeouts to walks has increased by 33.7%.
So when you read an article that talks about the strikeout problem in baseball, know that the writer is only getting at half of the problem. An increase in strikeouts is a problem, but the more concerning issue is the widening gap between the number of strikeouts and walks we’re seeing each year.
We can thank Michael Pineda for calling our attention to that fact.
David Fleming is a writer living in Wellington, New Zealand. He welcomes comments, questions, and suggestions here and at dfleming1986@yahoo.com.