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Tuesday, March 16, 2010
The Tom Seaver Rule
THT:
Note that even after fixing the pitcher MLEs, Stephen Strasburg still projects for a 2.86 ERA this season. Wow.
Strasburg is going to be 22 years old this year. And his forecast is to be at about 66% of the league average. In the 2010 Hardball Times Annual, I said:
Let’s focus on all those pitchers with at least 3000 batters faced between the ages of 25-28 [born between 1922 and 1971]. There’s 201 of these pitchers. At that age, Pedro Martinez allowed a total of 3.01 runs per 9 innings pitched (both earned and unearned). The league average during his time was 4.92. Pedro allowed runs at 61% of the league average. We’ll call this metric the Runs Allowed (RA) Index. Pedro’s figure is the lowest for the time period we’re discussing. Tom Seaver is next at 65%, followed by Greg Maddux also at 65%. Fourth in line is Kevin Appier (!) at 67%. Rounding out the top ten: Whitey Ford, Robin Roberts, Jose Rijo, Roger Clemens, Jim Palmer, and Billy Pierce.
Four points:
1. If Strasburg has a MEAN forecast of 67% of the league average in runs allowed, and we have ALOT of uncertainty of this, then his actual true talent assessment is somewhere between 50% and 85% of the league average.
2. To the extent that Strasburg is actually a 67% pitcher, that puts him in the running for 2nd best pitcher over the last 70 years for pitchers aged 25-28, a list that includes Greg Maddux, Roger Clemens, Tom Seaver, and the underappreciated Kevin Appier. Except those guys did that at the age of 25-28, while Strasburg is going to be 22, and presumably will get better by the time he hits his 25-28 stride.
3. You can’t possibly make that kind of bet can you? Isn’t it better to say that the maximum potential upside for ANY non-MLB pitcher ever, past, present, or future, is Tom Seaver? Isn’t it reasonable to say that? Isn’t it better to say that Strasburg’s runs allowed talent is a 65% - 100% pitcher of league average, with a mean forecast of close to 80%? Basically, you give me the best college or Japanese performance ever, and I say that the UPSIDE forecast (two standard deviations from his mean forecast) for that pitching line cannot be better than Tom Seaver.
4. Regression, regression, regression.