Giants Considering Rick Peterson or the Value of Coaching
Posted by Chris - 18/06/08 at 10:06 amWell, that didn’t take long.
Henry Schulman ponders the possibility of the Giants hiring recently fired Mets pitching coach Rick Peterson to work personally with Barry Zito.
Rick Peterson was Barry Zito’s pitching coach through the pitcher’s best years in Oakland. Now that Peterson is unemployed, would it not make sense for the Giants to hire him as a special instructor to work with Zito and help right him?
There were indications Tuesday that some in the front office have reached the same conclusion and are considering Peterson, who was canned as Mets pitching coach early Tuesday morning. New York manager Willie Randolph and first-base coach Tom Nieto also were let go.
If you rub your temples fast enough, while standing on one foot and chanting “Zitooooo” in a low, and monotonous voice, it almost makes sense. When Peterson coached Zito he was good. It’s as simple as that, Zito + Peterson = fixed.
Right?
Maybe.
I’m not sure that this is the same Zito that Peterson worked with 4 years ago. He’s obviously lost a good bit of velocity and his control has moved from just kinda-bad to where-is-home-plate-bad. And Shulman warns as much. Peterson is no safe bet to fix whatever is ailing Zito.
For kicks, I decided to use some of Josh Kalk’s awesome PFX data and compare Zito’s pitch-types from 2007 to this year. Since control has been such a big problem with Zito — he’s even started to say it in the the press — I wanted to compare the percentage of balls thrown for each of his pitch-types.
Pitch 2007 2008 Fastball 42.7 36.6 Curveball 35.5 32.3 Slider 48.5 22.3 Change 29.3 31.9
These are the percentages of balls thrown on each pitch-type. So, in ‘07 42.7% of fastballs that Zito threw went for a ball. To my surprise, Zito’s control on his pitches of: fastball, curveball, and slider, appears to have gotten better this year. His control of the changeup has gotten slightly worse. But, a couple of caveats. I’m looking at not even a half season worth of data from Zito and it could be even less when you consider that PFX might not be tracking all of his starts. Also, don’t get overly excited about his slider percetnage, it’s a really small sample size in both years of something like 70 sliders thrown. Zito’s control has slipped this year even if it’s not showing up in his actual pitch-types. But it is indeed odd to see the percentage of balls on his pitch-types go down mostly across the board. Are hitters becoming more patient against Zito? Making him work to throw strikes? I’ll have to think about this one more and consider doing a comparison PFX article of Zito from ‘07 to ‘08.
Back to Peterson. I think wherever you might fall on this issue might be how you view coaching as a whole. Can coaches help a player get out of a funk? Find that something they’ve been missing? Notice some mechanical flaw, teach a new pitch or technique, or change positioning to produce better results? Because we don’t actually know where Zito’s talent stopped and Peterson’s coaching started, I have a really hard time quantifying how much help a good coach is actually worth. I could probably coach Johan Santana pretty easily and if he had success, who would be responsible?
Thats why coaching can be so cloudy. You just don’t know where the talent stops and the coaching begins. We can’t know, and that makes it hard to judge. Are coaches worthless? Certainly not. But they could be given more credit than they deserve, or not enough credit. We just don’t know. The question of coaching is almost a philosophical one. Does a tree make a sound in the forest if it falls and nobody is around to hear it? Can Rick Peterson really help Barry Zito? I dunno.
I do know that if I’m the Giants, I hire Peterson. I’m going to exhaust every option I have to fix Barry Zito. They’ve paid too much money not to exhaust every thinkable option. Let him work with Peterson, let him surf, let him burn incense on the pitchers mound, let him do yoga in the dugout, let him play guitar in the bullpen, let him do whatever wacky new fangled new age thing he wants to do. But we don’t know if any of those things are ever actually going to help. And thats what makes this situation tricky.
Bringing in Peterson to work with Zito is a drop in the bucket compared to what they’ve invested in Zito. This is just another option to take but ultimately, it could be futile, you have to take that chance.
Comment Starter: Can coaches really fix a player? Yes, no, or indifferent?
June 18th, 2008 at 10:15 am
Also, one additional comment about the PFX data I used.
It’s extremely basic, I’m not looking at the type of contact made against Zito in ‘07 or ‘08. I’m guessing that if I did, hitters are making better contact this year than last. But that’s just an assumption off the cuff.
June 18th, 2008 at 11:44 am
I agree, the Giants must sign Peterson. However, Gary Radnich is raving madly right now about how ridiculous it would be to bring on a baby-sitter for Zito, talking about how small that makes Zito.
But it’s a no-brainer to me: Peterson was the coach when Zito was very successful. Yes, some of Zito’s troubles are due to him being older but one thing people forget is that Zito is supposedly in the prime of his physical health, so that has never fly-ed with me as an excuse. How could it not help?
June 18th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
“Are hitters becoming more patient against Zito? Making him work to throw strikes?”
So I went to his Baseball reference page and totaled up the amount of P.A’s he had for last year and this year so far and got percents. I figured if batters are waiting him out we should see a higher percentage of P.A’s decided deeper in the count. Here is what I found.
Count P.A resolved in - # of PA’s - % of PA’s
First pitch - 71 - 8.8%
1-0 & 0-1 counts - 134 - 16.6%
2-0 & 1-1 & 0-2 - 155 - 19.2%
3-0 & 1-2 & 2-1 - 179 - 22.2%
2-2 - 139 - 17.2%
Full count - 128 - 15.8%
=====
In 2007 806
*************************************************
First pitch - 40 - 13%
1-0 & 0-1 counts - 45 - 14.6%
2-0 & 1-1 & 0-2 - 77 - 25%
3-0 & 1-2 & 2-1 - 63 - 20.5%
2-2 - 31 - 10.1%
Full count - 52 - 16.8%
=====
As of 18 June 2008 308
***********************************************
Year/ P.A’s decided with 1 strike counts / % of overall P.A’s
2007/ 261 / 32.4%
2008/ 102 / 33.1%
Looks pretty even to me so I went for 2 strike P.A.’s
Year/ P.A’s decided in 2 strike counts/ % of over all P.A’s
2007/ 297 / 36.8%
2008/ 101 / 32.8%
4% drop is interesting though I am not sure it dramatic enough to be outside the normal realm of fluctuations. All this tends to make me think the batters are not waiting him to throw a strike as much as when he throws a strike its very hittable. As always I am open correction. This is just my little potato to throw in the stew.
June 18th, 2008 at 5:52 pm
OGC,
Yeah, I’m one of the few who love Radnich but he’s purely for entertainment value only. It’s certain that Zito’s stuff has really diminished from his Oakland days. If Peterson does come, it’ll be interesting to see what he can do with Zito. I’m not sure guys can turn into control pitchers after pitching for years with mediocre to bad control.
But like you said, why not. The Giants have nothing to lose.
Dave,
First of all, thanks for the number crunching. Great post.
Second of all, you’re right. Zito is more hittable now than ever. The reason for that is probably not just a single factor, but many — loss of velocity, command, and pitch quality.
After I posted this I got to thinking and came to your conclusion. Zito might be throwing slightly less balls on certain pitch types, but when throws the ball near the strike zone, hitters are making exceptional contact.
My next post will be on this, but consider this. Zito’s contact rate this year is basically the same as Carlos Silva’s. Think about that for a second. Carlos Silva’s gameplan is to purposely induce contact by making hitters pound his sinker into the ground over and over. Zito, who lacks Silva’s groundball tendencies…not to mention his elite control, is inducing contact at nearly the same rate but Zito is a flyball pitcher.
Batters are not swinging and missing at what Zito is throwing. Combine that with his rising BB% and you’ve got yourself a $126M problem. Zito’s strikes swinging percentage has never been this low before.
He’s either secretly hurt, or his shoulder/arm is dissolving.
Again, thanks a lot for your post. It got me thinking on the right track.
June 19th, 2008 at 9:11 am
Man the Silva reference is scary. Not that I think Silvia is bad but one would think the improved Outfield “D” would help a fly ball pitcher like Zito at least a little. Yet he still looks like this.
I went back to your April FX post on Zito and a couple thoughts occurred to me. One is I don’t see a lot of over lap in his fast ball and change ups. If I am a skilled batter this tells me I can sit on speed if the location is up. Especially because I’ve seen a lot of ump’s give up on Uncle Charlie the last couple years between Zito and Cain. The fact that the slider ( a pitch just a about 6-7 miles slower then his fastball year and breaks) had his highest swinging strike rate leads me that way. It might look similar enough on approach to a MLB batter to fool a batter sitting “hard“ up.
I wonder if part of his problem is the velocity difference between the Slider and fastball is now too small and he not figured out how to back off the slider enough to regain the timing disruption or how to use the his much slower stuff to mask is fastball yet. Nor am I really sure how to disprove the theory. That and $4 gets me a cup of coffee. Either way I look forward to you next post from were ever you Muse takes you.