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Miguel Batista is not Awesome.

or:

The Worst Starting Pitcher Performances of the Past Half Decade

Last First Team tRA xOuts YeartRA+
Floyd  Gavin  PHI  8.02 165 2006 63
Batista  Miguel  SEA  7.67 257 2008 61
Chen  Bruce  BAL  7.57 182 2006 67
Elarton  Scott  KCA  7.39 329 2006 69
Nomo  Hideo  LAN  7.32 247 2004 64
Waechter  Doug  TBA  7.22 202 2004 68
Bacsik  Mike  WAS  7.20 315 2007 70
Davies  Kyle  KCA  7.19 154 2007 69
Fossum  Casey  TBA  7.18 158 2007 69
Correia  Kevin  SFN  7.10 156 2005 68
Mulder  Mark  SLN  7.05 291 2006 71
Table 1: xOuts >= 150. ~IP > 50

2 recs  |  80 comments

Comments

Gavin Floyd and Mark Mulder??

Wow. I wouldn’t have guessed those two would be on this list.

Huh, two Rays? Ouch.
Just suprised it was only 2
Surprised*

Dammit, I always type a bagillion times more at LL

Sadly, you're correct.
I had the same thoughts for the Mariners. Where are you 2007 Horatio?
And Weaver.
Weaver was pretty decent
You have a soft spot for him, eh?

That writeup on his awesome game was one of my favorite pieces from you.

It's not even a soft spot

Weaver wasn’t that bad last year

According to THT, his LD% against was only 17.4%.

Walks were a little elevated from the past few years (not as high as his 04 campaign, though). HR/G down from prior seasons…

What gives? What the heck happened?

63.7% LOB%
That'll do it.
Let it be said that Weaver wasn't a *good* pitcher last year

he just wasn’t terrible.

5.38 tRA

Carlos Silva (2008): 5.48

I still think we should have re-signed him
In place of Silva?

In a second.

Oh I understand that.

It’s just that it doesn’t look like his results should have been that awful.

Is that current?

I thought Graham said during the GT that he was over 8 now?

That was a guess based on his performance last night

Matthew’s numbers are right

Astoundingly he only allowed one line drive
Oh, OK.

I was just skimming the GT this morning, and saw that.

So in order to continue the trend if suck thats gone Moyer>Pinero>Ho>Batista

We would literally have to the worst pitched season in the last 10 years. Neato.

Nah, last five years.

Matthew said half decade.

I am shocked that '07 HoRam and Jeff Weaver are not on this list.
Weaver was pretty decent
Ho's not far off though
Almost a full point away
Weaver's BABIP was horrific.

Staggeringly bad.

I am staggered that his BABIP against was so awful with a not-that-bad LD rate
It's situations like this in which we could really use the sort of information that HITf/x would provide
PITCHf/x has been such an eye-opener for me.

I can’t wait to see what HITf/x can uncover.

We'll never have to look at BABIP - LD ever again
That will be glorious.
It's so much better than the alternatives

Everyone looked at BABIP w/o batted-ball types before.

BABIP -LD still seems really cool and cutting edge to me, albeit with major drawbacks. Hell, it wasn’t THAT long ago that no one knew what the hell BABIP was or why they should give a damn about it.

Progress!

now get off my lawn.

The others in that table

Most of the xOut figs are quite low, only a couple are up around the 300+ mark.

Is it fair to assume that quite a few of those seasons were injury-ravaged?

or, I guess, they were just replaced/demoted?
Most teams are smart enough to not let pitchers with a tRA above 7 continue to pitch.
Glad to see we're learning from our mistakes...

I wouldn’t be surprised to see Steve Traschel donning a M’s uni next season, because he looks good in blue.

What's Gavin Floyd's TRA Look like this year?

He looks like he’s turned around some.

4.84
Isn't there somewhere we can look these up ourselves?
If you have access to Graham's computer, sure
Damn.

We need a daily leaderboard or something like it.

There will be very shortly
This is probably a dumb question, but whatever...

Can someone explain how the Cardinals become SLN? Or the Royals become KCA? Is there some obvious pattern I’m missing?

KCA = Kansas City, American League

SLN = St Louis, National League

The N and A preserve the three-letter abbreviation
You could always go for STL

and KAN (I forget what broadcast I saw that on).

I adhere to MLB standards
Source?
Per

mlb.com St. Louis is STL and Kansas City is KC

This is what I expected.

Most of the other teams just use the first three letters of the place. I can’t figure out why that didn’t hold up.

Saint Louis Browns

were in the American League (-> Orioles in 1954). This made me think that maybe MLB just wanted to keep this clear. But the only KC team in the NL was the the Kansas City Cowboys were in the National League who played just one season in 1886.

So this is probably just a case of bureaucracy leading to uglier abbreviations (as happened to the state abbreviations once the Post Office got its way on using just 2-letters).

I always liked CWS for the White Sox

but that one’s a little unusual.

Post updated to add tRA+ to the mix.

Guess who’s worst!

I thought he might be
I'm really excited because it sure looks like Batista is going to pitch more than anyone else on this list

257 xOuts with 50 games to go…

I wouldn't be sure about that.

If they bring RRS up, it could all be over real quick.

Doubt he gets (m)any starts in Sept though.

RRS, possibly Morrow, Dickey and Bedard should all be vying for rotation turns by then.

Are you in anyway suggesting that Miguel Batista doesn’t belong in a Major League rotation?

I have a really hard time reconciling the Gavin Floyd of today with the Gavin Floyd of two years ago

Or even the Gavin Floyd of last year.

Batista

Remember when he grumbled about being slotted 5th in the rotation before the start of the season considering he was a “16-game winner”?

Wow, he sucks.

Why should I trust this stat named "tRA"?

I know, I know, our community’s finest minds are working on it. But it’s not public yet, right? How is it calculated?

I don’t want to sound too pissy here – hey, I love my evil Lookout Landing overlords! – but I instantly discard all BP proprietary stats precisely because, however close they seem to come to my own assessments, they’re ultimately a “black box.” I’m intrigued by tRA, especially due to the massive pimping it’s been given by Graham, but can you understand my reluctance to see it constantly cited as the PRIMARY statistical determinant of pitcher quality until I’ve been able to kick the tires a bit?

[wonders if he is about to smell the inside of The Box]

P.S. Miguel Batista sucks worse than The Simpsons after season 7 or so.
I've done my best to ensure that it's not a black box though...

Short of sitting next to everyone and deriving the stuff on paper, my tRA posts have been designed to explain the calculations in enough detail for you to play with them yourselves.

Furthermore, if anyone wants last year’s spreadsheet to play with, all they need to do is ask (and I’ve said this a few times). I don’t want to be in the BP position of black boxing everything – I wrote a post about that strategy being detrimental to the advancement of research, but at the same time I don’t want to hold everyone’s hand as they work through the calculations.

PS: 'Not public' just means that the website Matthew and I are working on isn't ready for release yet

I think all the information you really need can be found in ‘the tRA post’ over in the reference section, or searching tRA through the archives and looking at my diaries on it.

tRA is no more black box than FIP or xFIP is.
You previously mentioned the possibility of doing these for the minors

How much work are you looking at in terms of compiling data?

Lots.
Did you hear from Jeff Sackman about possibly

using his spider/bot to grab PBP data from MiLB.com?

Or do you need to create something specific to this project?

? through Graham's tRA posts he's made his method very clear

and it’s really not that hard to go back and re-create it from scratch given the data that he provided in those posts – if you made a quick spreadsheet, you could probably guesstimate tRA within ~5% just from the early 2008 data that Graham gave and fangraphs batted ball profiles

I can attest that you can get pretty close within five minutes.

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