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Wednesday, March 09, 2011
rWAR v fWAR: pitchers
The information here is as best as I know it. If I’m wrong, Dave and Sean will hopefully correct me.
There are three components to the number of runs a pitcher allows:
1. those that don’t involve his fielders (BB, HB, SO, HR)
2. those that do involve his fielders (BIP, baserunning)
3. the sequencing of the events (BB,2B,FO,K,K v 2B,BB,FO,K,K)
In step #3, this is a combination of pitcher and fielder responsibility. After all, the fly ball can be a sac fly, a regular fly out, or even a single, depending on the outfielder.
fWAR (WAR from Fangraphs) focuses only on #1. It dismisses any responsibility to the pitcher on any balls in play that involve his fielders or baserunning events.
rWAR (WAR from Rally at BaseballProjection and BR.com) focuses on all three, but removes the effect from the fielders on a global basis. What this means is that the fielding impact is first establish as game-state neutral (the flyout with a runner on 3B and less than 2 outs is not given extra credit) and pitcher-neutral (if Gutierrez makes a ton of great plays in centerfield for Washburn, well, all the pitchers get the same benefit).
It’s still not clear to me that either choice is a good choice. From rWAR’s point of view, the pitcher is going to get all the benefit and cost of sequencing, even if his fielders may be the ones establishing the sequence. For example, Brad Radke gives up 1B, 3B, FO, GO, GO. But, it’s not really Brad Radke that did that. It’s his fielders with Radke on the mound. That triple was a triple because… well, we don’t know. Was it his fielders, was it Radke? And going single-triple instead of triple-single counts toward Radke, not his fielders, using rWAR.
What’s happening is that Radke’s runs allowed is:
- Radke’s talent
- luck around that talent
- fielder’s talent
- luck around fielder’s talent
rWAR tries to only remove the fielder talent, while accepting the fact that sequencing is given 100% to the pitcher.
fWAR takes a firmer stand by completely absolving the pitcher of all balls in play and all sequencing. So, a pitcher who has lots of K with men on 3B and less than 2 outs gets no benefit of that, even though it is something that he himself was a part of.
So, I continue to be stuck between the two, that each does part of what I want by taking such an extreme view. This is actually a good thing (for now), because until we can come up with a more balanced view that each side can agree with, the two extreme views gives us the range for us to consider.
Expect me to have this kind of post every few months, until we can agree on something…
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