9 responses to “Simply Irresistible”

  1. daveinexile

    Would it profit any to compare BB & K rates of Giants pitchers promoted out of the minors vs. averages in the league they left ?

    Reason I ask is it could give a larger study group and use of other organizations pitchers as a control. Of coarse it could be too unwieldy or the data just not available.

  2. fireplacetv

    Why are you limiting your study to pitchers’ post-Giants stats? Couldn’t you also use, say, Schmidt and Morris’s pre-Giants stats as well? How about pre-Righetti stats?

  3. delorean

    My cat’s breath smells like cat food.

  4. obsessivegiantscompulsive

    THT had a study earlier this year where the author split players up by first selecting only pitchers with over the 2.0 K/BB goodness, then spliting them up by whether they are high walk pitchers and some other that I can’t remember (I think it was around spring training, sorry I can’t remember back that far; but his name might have been Carty or Derek).

    What he found was that when you have plus strikeout totals, you can have a horrible walk rate and still your ERA would be better. It makes sense. The less balls in play there is, the less hits there are, balanced by the walks. But walks don’t normally drive in runs, probably resulting in the lowered ERA relative to other good pitchers. That’s basically Cain’s thing thus far in his career, low hits balanced by extra walks.

    So, what I would add to your graph would be K/BB, probably both ranking in the league so that it goes onto your nice graph, plus an array below showing what the actual number was each year. K/BB is a better measure of how good the pitching talent is; BB/9 is just part of it.

    And I just noticed that you just ranked by total walks; for many of those years, the Giants were good and thus we had to pitch the 9th, but not the other team, meaning we might have more IP than other teams for some of those years. I would calc BB/9 for each team, then rank; it could still be the same as you have now, but it would improve your methodology. Same for K/9 (or BB% and K% if you prefer them) vs. total strikeouts.

    I would also add, yes, small samples is involved, plus Tomko pitched in LA and SD after us, two of the most pitching-biased parks in the majors, so his numbers might be skewed by playing there, though the parks have not reduced walks as much as AT&T has in the past three seasons (according to Bill James Handbook’s stats), in fact, LA inflated by 10% vs. the road.

    If anything, I think the Giants try to discourage the starters from nibbling. I don’t know how many times I’ve seen Giants managers say “just throw strikes” to the starters in print. Particularly with Matt Cain, he has always insisted on nibbling when his stuff is filthy and each year around now, he finds religion and starts throwing strike one with the first pitch, instead of fooling around, and suddenly he is untouchable.

  5. fireplacetv

    speaking of small samples, are the drops in walk rates that you have found even statistically significant? It’s been a few years since my last statistics course, bu I think you should be able to use a simple t-test to see if those are significant drops instead of just random noise.

  6. obsessivegiantscompulsive

    THe Baseball Cube has a nice collection of minor league stats plus provides k/9 and bb/9 as well as H/9 and one other stat that I cannot remember. But you have to remember that stats in the minors don’t translate directly to majors (as I am sure Chris already knows). It’s a bit slow loading, though.

  7. Wednesday Web Whosit « A San Francisco Giants Minor League Blog

    [...] minor related, but Chris from Bay City Ball has a nice article analyzing the Giants’ propensity to walk batters.  A question that has plagued me, [...]

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