Monday Morning Weekend Wrap: Groggy Coffee Edition
Posted by Chris - 18/08/08 at 08:08 amI’m drinking a jug of coffee and trying to turn on my brain. So, please, forgive me if my writing is a jumbled. I’m getting married in October and every weekend until the Big Day™ is filled with places to go, things to do, and people to see.
But, despite my zombie-like state, a lot of interesting Giants happenings this weekend. Let’s check some of them out:
1. You can come out of your panic room, Buster Posey has indeed signed a contract to play baseball for the San Francisco Giants. Early rumors had Posey inking a major league deal for $7.5M clams, but as it turns out, Posey didn’t actually sign till the end of the deadline. The down-to-the-wire nature of contract negotiations surely had many Giants fans in full panic mode. As it happens, Posey didn’t get a MLB deal but he did get a $6.2M straight signing bonus, the largest in baseball history for a bonus. Welcome to the fold, Buster. If you’ve seen my previous posts on the Giants Top-10 Prospects, I have Posey ranked as the #2 talent in the G’s farm system.
2. After watching Brad Ausmus — The Evil One — slam a line drive off of Tim Lincecum’s leg in his last start, I was waiting and watching with bated breath for his next start against Atlanta. Would he be OK? Would the knee hold up? I’ll let his pitching line do the talking:
7.2 IP, 3 H, 1 R, 1 ER, 4 BB, 10 SO
I’m not thrilled that he ended up throwing 119 pitches in the start. For PAP believers, Tim ranks #5 and Matt Cain ranks #8 for starting pitchers in the majors. The Giants seem semi-cognizant of the idea of pitch counts, but I’m not sure how cognizant they are.
The hilarity evaporated when Escobar walked and Jones singled with two outs in the eighth, ending Lincecum’s afternoon. He had thrown 119 pitches, which was enough for Bochy. Although Lincecum leads the staff by averaging more than 106 pitches per outing, the Giants remain wary of taxing his arm. Had he elected to leave in Lincecum for the ninth inning, Bochy said, “you’re looking at 135, 140 pitches. We still don’t think that’s worth it.
I know because of Lincecum’s style of pitching — lots of strikeouts with some walks mixed in — that his PC will get pumped up sometimes before the 6th or 7th inning, but my god man, I’ll say it until I’m blue in the face: Please, protect the young arms. Please. As I demonstrated in my post on Wins Above Replacement, Lincecum is by far the best player on the Giants, and the amount of value he provides for what he’s being paid is astronomical. To ensure that he can continue to pitch well isn’t only good baseball sense, it’s good economic sense.
Blogmates RMC drop some Lince-knowledge on us after his 13th win on Sunday against Atlanta:
- 13-3 is the second best start in SF history (5 occurrences). Only a couple hacks named Perry and Marichal were better at 14-2. I venture to guess they had better teams playing behind them, ya think?
- With his sixth double digit strikeout game this year (8 in his career), he ties Marichal (1966) for number 4 on this all time list. Only Schmidt (9 in 2004), Sadecki (8 in 1968), and Montefusco (7 in 1975) are above him. With at least five or so starts left, Tim has a good shot at taking over the lead of that list.
- The Enchanter has limited opponents to 3 or fewer runs in 40 of his 49 career starts, including 21 of 25 this year. The Giants are 26-14 in those forty games. Tim is 17-0 (29 starts) when the Giants score at least three runs for him.
Yeah, he’s OK.
3. Speaking of protecting our young guys, Sanchez is on the 15-day DL with a strained throwing shoulder. Sanchez has blown past any previous innings total in any season for his career and his 2nd half has been bumpy. A result of his workload? Maybe. If the Giants are smart, they’ll shut down Sanchez for the rest of the year. There isn’t much he can gain by trying to continue to start. If the Giants shut him down now, he would miss about 7 starts, which in the big picture, seems pretty insignificant. The Giants have called up Sergio Romo and Matt Palmer will probably take Sanchez’s rotation spot for the near future. Palmer struggled in his first start, but the Giants should give him a few more chances. He has no upside, but if he could just eat some innings from the back of the rotation, the Giants would be happy.
4. Travis Ishikawa hit his first major league HR on Sunday. Since his promotion, he’s 5-13 with 2 2B’s and a HR. Ishikawa should start against all RHP in the majors and the Giants can push Sandoval over to 1B when a lefty is on the mound. Sandoval’s versatility is nice because he can get time in at catcher when Molina needs a break and the occasional start at first when a southpaw takes the hill.
Not a bad weekend.
August 18th, 2008 at 11:32 am
Lincecum is officially ridiculous.
More Pablito, please.
August 18th, 2008 at 2:13 pm
I’m all for keeping young arms safe, but at some point people are going overboard on it. BP (or perhaps their supporters) makes PAP out like it is proven but it is not, it is all theory at the moment.
Finally found Bill James and PAP attack. While it appears he attacked the first generation version of PAP and BP had already brought out version 2, I still agree with is thinking there. He thinks people are going too far the other way on the pendulum. He adds that underuse can be just as bad as overuse because your body is then not prepared for more work:
“Well, it’s the same thing here. Most (italics) injuries to pitchers are not the result of chronic overuse; some are, particularly to young pitchers, but most are not. They’re catastrophic events, just like a heart attack or a torn muscle. They happen suddenly, and they happen when a pitcher goes outside the envelope of his previous conditioning.
Backing away from the pitcher’s limits too far (italics last two words) doesn’t make a pitcher less (italics) vulnerable; it makes him more (italics) vulnerable. And pushing the envelope, while it may (italics) lead to a catastrophic event, is more likely to enhance the pitcher’s durability than to destroy it.”
And this jibes with the work that former Atlanta pitching coach Leo Mazzone did with his pitchers, he had them work their arms and build up strength.
Lastly, here is what BP themselves said in rebuttal to Bill James, but is pertinent here as well: “Second, it’s clear that pitch counts are only one factor in determining a pitcher’s injury risk… So there is clearly a danger in relying on pitch counts as the sole arbiter of a pitcher’s risk.”
Then here’s a good part that shows how much their work is theory and not proven: “… sole arbiter of a pitcher’s risk. For instance, we are not (italics) particularly concerned about Mark Prior’s arm - even though he had the third-highest Stress score in baseball last season - because his pitching mechanics are as close to drop-dead perfect as anyone has ever seen.”
Later in their rebuttal, BP used 125 pitches in reference to CC Sabathia (none thrown over that, implying he has thrown 125 before) and 127 pitches to the A’s trio of Hudson, Mulder, Zito, (total of three over) which implies that they believe that pitch counts up to 127 is OK with them (at least at the time of that book publishing in 2004).
Let’s examine your two examples given BP’s 127 pitch count threshold.
* Lincecum has zero starts over 127 in his career; in addtion, only two starts in 2008 over 120 pitches (one 122 early in the season, one 121 recently).
* Cain has one starts over 127 in his career (one of 131 in 2006 under Alou); in addition only two starts over 120 total in 2007 and 2008, under Bochy. In 2006, under Alou, he had 4 starts 120+ pitches. So Bochy has toned down the over 120 pitches games that Cain had under Alou greatly, going for four in total in 2006 to only two over 2007 and 2008 (so far) and hasn’t pushed him over the 127 threshold yet and only twice over the past two seasons.
Based on what BP feels is a proper threshold (albeit in 2004), Bochy has not used the two pitchers any worse than the examples BP gave in the book as good examples of how to use your starting pitchers, and he has never pushed either of these two beyond 126 pitches, Cain max 126, Lincecum max 122.
Thus, while pitch count is just one piece of the puzzle, even there Bochy is doing what BP feels is best practice for managers, keeping his pitchers under 127 pitches in a game.
August 18th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
And I think the Giants understand it is both good baseball and economic sense, they just have a difference of opinion with you about where that threshold is.
Bochy appears to read and understand studies of pitcher usage so if you can bring up studies showing and proving your point of view, that could sway him, assuming Giants personnel pass this study along to him.
August 18th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Pitch counts are a proxy, not a complete tool.
From June 28th, last 10 starts: 116, 111, 103, 116, 121, 111, 114, 117, 76*, 119
* denotes the Astros game
That’s a pretty decent workload over 10 starts.
I don’t think you’ll be able to spin it to me in any fashion that having Lincecum throw 119 pitches after coming off his early exit in Houston is necessarily a good thing. He might have felt great, but it’s August, the Giants are terrible, and there isn’t much reason to pad pitch numbers for our guys right now.
So, basically the way the Giants have handled Sanchez?
I think the only pitching study Bochy has ever read was DEFINED ROLES: THE GUIDE TO USING TYLER WALKER IN THE 8TH INNING, NO MATTER WHAT.
August 18th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Hey Chris, how useful is the WHIP stat?
I was checking out Zito’s stats from July and August: 3-3, 5.20 ERA, about a 1.50 average WHIP. That includes a WHIP of 1.34 so far for August (not including today’s contest, which, as of the beginning of the fifth, would probably improve it). Is this a decent WHIP? I’ve heard that anything below 1.00 is considered pretty good. That said, are there any shortcomings related to this stat? (i.e. How accurately does it measure a pitcher’s real worth?)
August 19th, 2008 at 7:31 am
WHIP is walks + hits / IP
WHIP is semi-useful but not great because it doesn’t tell us what’s happening underneath the surface in how a pitcher is pitching. It judges walks (which is good) because that’s something under a pitchers control but the hits (which is bad) aspect of it isn’t so good because all hits are treated the same, that is, they’re all considered singles and the type of hit isn’t weighted.
You would do much better to look at things like: GB%, FB%, LD%, BB%, K%, LOB%, FIP or xFIP, and BABIP to get some idea of how a pitcher is doing.
I’m a big fan of linear weights, so maybe something like tRA would be helpful to you. You can find tRA scores updated daily at Statcorner.com, it’s a link in the essentials link section of BCB.
Most starters average between 1.30-1.40 for WHIP, and anything under that is pretty good. Anything under 1.00 is amazing.
You can find the single season WHIP leaderboard on bb-ref.
http://www.baseball-reference.com/leaders/WHIP_season.shtml
So, WHIP is an “OK” tool but there are much, much better alternatives out there. I wouldn’t use it for anything more than “off the cuff” reactions when looking over some numbers.
August 19th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Chris,
Regarding WHIP, as you point out, all hits are equal, it does not differentiate between a home run and an infield single. Also, it aggregates hits for the time period that you are looking at. Zito’s last start: 7 innings, 5 hits, 2 BB = WHIP of 1.00. 7th inning (his last), 1 hit, 1 BB = WHIP of 2.00. Clearly, spreading hits, and particularly singles over a few innings is not as damaging as bunching them up. It is a stat with meaning, but unsatisfactory. Maybe OPS/IP, although that has some conceptual problems, too. I have been thinking about this lately and will try to post some thoughts at RMC when I can crystalize them and apply to Giants pitchers.
Meanwhile, congratulations on the upcoming nuptuals. I see that you carefully plotted a time when there is no chance that it would conflict with Giants baseball. Perhaps you might start a thread for marital advice?