from Amazon
Saturday, October 08, 2011
How do great starting pitchers pitch the 4th time through the order?
I have my data setup for 1993-2010, so that’s what I’ll be using.
I looked at all starting pitchers, and came up with their wOBA, at night, for the first three times through the order, min 2000 PA.
Here are the top 15:
linct001
martp001
maddg002
johnr005
smolj001
zambc001
santj003
hamec001
peavj001
clemr001
schic002
hardr001
browk001
hallr001
cainm001
All the names should be recognizable.
The totalled 77,530 PA for the first three times through the order at night.
Their average wOBA was .293.
Now, how did they do the 4th and later time through the order?
They had 5,676 PA (which is 7% of all their night time PA).
Their wOBA? .313.
That’s ridiculously good, especially since the overall league average for all starting pitchers was a bit over .340. The league average for all relief pitchers was .330.
Motte (through 2010) had a nighttime wOBA of .317 in relief.
Among the 199 relief pitchers with at least 1000 PA at night, their wOBA was also .317.
So, if the choice is between Carpenter or a pretty good reliever, it’s probably a wash.
Ryan Madson has a .301 career wOBA through 2010, so, his quality level would be the slightly preferred choice. Motte had a great 2011, and if you add it to his career through 2010, he’s probably going to be close to Madson’s career wOBA.
My call based on this evidence? A slight preference to bring in Motte over Carpenter. But, there’s definitely enough uncertainty there that allowing Carpenter to pitch in the 9th is a very reasonable choice.
The tougher choice for Larussa though was letting Carpenter bat in the 8th inning in the first place. He played with fire there, but he did not get burnt.
***
It’s clear that quoting 9th inning runs allowed was terribly deceiving. I don’t blame the poster for doing that, because we’ve all been ensnared by the 9th inning partial-inning rules of baseball.
UPDATE: this data has been corrected later on in the comments section.
As an example, here is the runs scored per 27 outs of each half-inning, since 1993:
inn top bottom diff
1 4.93 5.74 0.81
2 4.12 4.51 0.39
3 4.68 5.21 0.54
4 4.84 5.17 0.33
5 4.76 5.20 0.44
6 4.93 5.29 0.36
7 4.63 4.97 0.34
8 4.48 4.81 0.32
9 4.20 4.07 -0.13
1-8 4.67 5.11 0.44
So, from innings 1 through 8, the home team scores 0.44 more runs. But in the 9th, they score 0.13 LESS. That’s a 0.57 RA9 swing. Why is that? Because of partial innings. Once the home team wins, the bases get cleared. Those runners on base have the effect of being considered as “out on base”.
This is why you can’t look at ERA in the 9th inning. But, you can look at component numbers, like wOBA or OPS.
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