THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

1. Are your projections available for public download?

2. No NL relief pitchers made your list.  Who were the highest ranked NL relief pitchers, and how close were they to breaking into the overall best list?

vr, Xei

I’ve got to believe Saito and Wagner were close.  Saito maybe doesn’t surprise me too much, since we only have two reliever seasons worth of data from him - so perhaps mgl is regressing his stats relatively heavily.

Wagner, on the other hand, has been pretty consistent for a while now - consistently good!

Halladay really surprises me.  His best days are behind him, I think.  He’s lost his impressive K rate… now he’s just a groundball pitcher who doesn’t walk too many people.  Hello CM Wang.

I assume you’re referring to Jose Mesa as one of the worst relievers when you write “Meas.”

Hum, Roy Oswalt gets no respect at all.

Mesa, Meas, Meat, toast, it’s all the same thing.

One reason why there are no NL pitchers on the reliever list is the disparity between the leagues.

Saito, Wagner, the good Cordero and Heath Bell are the best relievers in the NL and are up there close to their AL counterparts.

Without the league adjustments, I have Saito as 4th best, Cordero as 10th and Wagner as 12th.  With the league adjustment, Saito is equivalent to like Putz, K-Rod, Jenks, and Street.  Wagner is not really up there among the elite closers anymore.  In the AL, he would be far down the list among the likes of Shields, Benoit, Al Reyes, Soria, etc.

There is nothing in the stats to indicate that Halliday has “lost it” other than normal aging.  His K rate in 07 was almost exactly the same as in 06 and only a little less than in 04 (05 was high point in K rate).  But his extremely low BB and HR rate are what makes him a great pitcher. Here are his normalized (to 4.00 in the AL) component ERA’s for the last 4 years:

3.51
2.18
2.86
3.13

That is a great pitcher.  I’ll gladly wager that he exceeds the league ERA by at least .75 runs (after adjusting his ERA for his opponents, park, and defense) next year.  (That is not too bold, but I’ve got to give myself a big edge in order to bet.) Keep in mind that the best starters in baseball are projected with around a normalized ERC of 3.00, a run less than an average starter.  There are ocassionally starters whose projected normalized ERC’s fall below 3.00 (guys like Pedro, RJ, Clemens, and Madduz in their heydays).  The only one presently is Santana at around 2.9 (he slipped from around 2.8 last year).

mgl, how does Horacio Ramirez miss the cut of worts pitcers?

By having good (ERC) numbers in 04 and 06 (because of very good HR rates) and not having bad BB numbers over the last 4 years. You are colored, as everyone seems to be, by his poor 07.  I pay no attention to when a pitcher has his bad and good years.  Pitchers don’t decide to all of a sudden be good or bad in any given year.  They just keep pitching and happen to have lots of days off in between seasons.  Of course, as they age, they tend to get worse.  They occasionally learn how to pitch better or forget how to pitch or get injured.  Which is why we weight recent seasons more heavily.

That being said, he IS a truly a bad pitcher and he is up there with the worst in baseball.  I just don’t have him as the 10 worst or so.  There is enough innaccuracy in pitching projections that he might be among the 10 worst if we knew everyone’s true talent level.  As well, if you were to only include full time pitchers, especially starting pitchers, he would definitely be up there with the worst, perhaps in the top 3 or 5. 

In all fairness to the M’s, he was not projected TOO badly going into 07.  07 really jacked his projection up (or down, if you will).  Of course, one reason for the bad performance in 07 is his move to the AL, where the pitchers are a lot better.

Basically though, at 29, with that overall projection and K rate, he should be pretty much done as a major leaguer and be thankful for what he has been able to do and earn.  But given the stupidity of major league teams and the fact that he is a lefty, he will probably hang around for a couple of more years.  Well, I take that back.  I have not looked at his career platoon splits, but if it is at all large, he could certainly be a LOOGY.