A few thoughts on topics I missed while I was away:

~ Barry Zito continues to pitch like a man reborn. Part of Zito’s early season success has been his control. He’s only walking 2.8 per 9 right now as compared to a career BB/9 of 3.70. Zito has never been a pitcher that’s pounded the strike zone but he has put together a few average to above-average BB/9 years during his career (from 2001-2004 he was either right around league average or below for walks). He’s been throwing strikes this year and it’s helped. It’s way too early to state that Zito has returned to form, but he’s looked good. I can’t recall him pitching as well as he is right now at any time in his Giants career. Selective memory? Very possible. But he’s been impressive.

~ We all knew that the Giants should have solid pitching, but by FIP, the team is 2nd best in the majors right now. The Giants’ FIP of 3.34 places them right behind the Cardinals (3.30) and in front of the Twins (3.67). If you examined starting pitchers only, the Giants rank first in baseball, coming in with a FIP of 3.09. And that’s with Todd Wellemeyer in the mix. Yeah, they’re good.  The Giants currenly have 3 SP with sub-3.0 FIPs: Lincecum (1.98), Zito (2.66), and Sanchez (2.10). Cain just misses the cut-off with a 3.05.

~ Besides the ability to take a walk (BB% of 11.1%) Mark DeRosa has struggled. The most shocking issue with DeRosa is his power, or lack of. He’s had 15 hits on the season, 12 of which have been singles. His ISO currently sits at an alarming .071. Because it’s early, we can console ourselves just a little bit, but for a player coming off a wrist surgery, his complete evaporation of power is startling.

~ Tim Lincecum is still really, really, really good. In 20 innings pitched to start the season Tim has quickly put to rest any concerns over his ST performances. A brief check of some of his stats — 10.80 K/9, 1.35 BB/9 — indicate that he’s still giving hitters fits at the plate. Of course, it’s just 20 innings pitched, but Lincecum has been one of the best pitchers in baseball for 2 years running and as long as he can stay healthy he’ll be a major asset to the Giants.

~ Bengie Molina is making Brian Sabean look smart. I still think that catcher was one of the main positions that the Giants could have easily upgraded at, but they chose not to turn over the job to Posey and shocked (well, mildly shocked) us all when they re-signed Molina. Molina has been red hot to start the season. He’s posted a wOBA of .401 and has already drawn 2 walks! Two! In 2009, Molina didn’t draw a walk until game #32.

~ The Giants bullpen has not been good. In 2009 the Giants had one of the better bullpens in baseball. Collectively, the bullpen posted a 3.86 FIP in ’09 — which is excellent. So far this year, the bullpen has posted a 4.48 FIP mostly on the backs of Medders, Affeldt, and Joaquin. Relievers are mercurial by nature, so we should reserve some judgment for now, but the Giants will need a strong bullpen if they want to contend in ’10.

~ Barry Zito is still throwing his slider a bunch. A major change for Zito last year was the usage of his slider which doubled in usage from the previous year. Zito isn’t throwing his slider as much this year as last, but he’s still throwing it 13.3% of the time.

Comment Starter: Your favorite SSS stat of 2010

Terrible, no-good highlights:

• Do you like bases-loaded walks? Because this game had two of them. Zito walked in a bases-loaded run in the 5th when he couldn’t find the strike zone and, maybe the worst, was when Justin Miller walked Adam Eaton (a pitcher) to force in a run in what proved to be the fatal 14th inning for the Giants.
• Sandoval left the game early with a calf injury. The Giants can’t hit, but when you take out Sandoval from the lineup, they really can’t hit. Consider this, the 2nd best hitter on the team next to Sandoval is Aaron Rowand. After Rowand, it’s Fred Lewis, who doesn’t even start anymore. The Giants 3rd best hitter doesn’t even start half the time. That’s quite the production cliff to fall off of.
• Freddy Sanchez is still too hurt to play baseball. What’s with the Giants resistance to putting veterans on the DL? Sanchez hasn’t played in a game since August 17th. If you’re too hurt to make a pinch hit appearance, why are you still active? We’ve seen the same thing with Aaron Rowand. He’s sat on the bench for days and days while trying to GAMER-out an injury, but in the end, he just eats up a bench spot while being unable to play. We call that being gritty. I’ve always wondered, why is it all the gritty, gutty, and gamery traits that baseball players seem to get praised for — seem selfish?
• Merkin Valdez serving up the walk-off slam to seal the deal. What’s the best spot for your lowest leveraged reliever? Why a bases-loaded scenario, of course. Valdez owns an average leverage index of just 0.57 — meaning that he’s mostly pitched mop-up this year. The Giants fell victim to the end of their bullpen. Miller and Valdez have been two of the worst regulars in the bullpen this year and it cost the Giants a game. Valdez is frustrating to watch because the stuff is there. He can run his fastball into the mid-90′s but he’s had control problems all season (5.10 BB/9) and, despite his velocity, hitters haven’t had a problem with his fastball. Valdez pumps heat (82.7% of all his pitches are the fastball) all the time. Maybe it’s time to start working on a secondary pitch. Grant Balfour, he isn’t.

I’m probably missing out on a few of the low points, but you get the idea. This game stunk. The question is: where do we stand now? It’s not that much different than where we were 1-2 weeks ago. The Giants aren’t a playoff caliber team. They’ve played well this year, and better than a lot of us expected, but competing in the Wild Card seems like a stretch.

If Sandoval has to miss a significant amount of time, shut your eyes because things are going to get ugly.

Giants Baseball =

Barry Zito hurled 7 innings of 3-hit, 1-run baseball for the Giants while striking out 6 batters and walking 5. The bottom of the 4th inning was particularly weird when Zito did the following:

Martin Prado walks. None out.

Chipper Jones called out on strikes. One out.

Yunel Escobar walks. Martin Prado to 2nd. One out.

Matt Diaz called out on strikes. Two out.

David Ross walks. Martin Prado to 3rd. Yunel Escobar to 2nd. Two out.

Casey Kotchman called out on strikes. Three out.

That’s the definition of walking a tightrope. Despite some unintelligent chatter about the Giants cutting Zito, he’s still around an average pitcher in the National League. Grossly overpaid? Most definitely. But there are worse pitchers (Bronson Arroyo, Livan Hernandez, Jeff Suppan) in the NL who are starting once every 5 days. Zito’s current WAR of 1.2 wins, puts him on pace for a season in the neighborhood of +2 wins — ie: an average pitcher in the NL.

In fact, since Zito joined the Giants, he’s actually pitching some of his best baseball this year.

Let’s check out a few of his peripherials:

A few encouraging signs for Zito. First, he’s striking out almost 7 hitters per 9 innings — a high mark since he joined the Giants. Second, after walking 5.1 hitters per 9 in ’08, he’s back to his career average for BB/9 of 3.71. Zito’s not a control pitcher, but you just can’t survive with marginal stuff when you’re walking 5+ per game.

Maybe the most important of all is that Zito is incuding infield flyballs at 11% this year — again, another high mark since he joined the Giants. It’s been proven that Zito’s IFFB% was a important indictator of his success in previous years. During his best years in Oakland he was posting rates between 13-16%. Why are IFFB’s so important? They are easily turned into outs. It’s an encouraging sign for Barry that while he hasn’t returned to his IFFB% to his Oakland days, it’s in the double-digits for the first time since he put on a Giants uni.

Zito is also leaving a few more runners on base this year and his FIP is at 4.47. FIP has never liked Zito all that much, but if he can rattle off a few 4.50 run seasons for the Giants while throwing 200+ innings a year, he’ll have some value.

—

The contract the Giants gave to Zito is still a gross overpay, make no mistake, but you really can’t cut him loose without replacing him with a pitcher that can match his +2 win per year contributions. Bumgarner and Alderson are great prospects but there’s little reason to believe that they could step into the Giants rotation, right now, and throw 200 innings while being an average pitcher in the NL. And, there’s no reason to start their service clocks now when they might not be a clear upgrade for the team. You’ll be paying them in arbitration sooner and without the added bonus of getting solid production in the present.

The Giants will have Zito under contract until 2013 (a $7M club buyout for 2014 exists). If he can continue to pitch like an average pitcher, the Giants won’t cut him. He’ll be overpaid. But, like it or not, the Giants won’t cut him.

In today’s post, I wanted to look at Giants pitching in terms of those who are underperforming vs. those who are overperforming. I did a similar post back in December that will utilize the same graph-types for today’s post. The basic premise is that I’m comparing a defense neutral runs allowed stat (tRA) vs. how many runs a pitcher has allowed in total (RA/9) with a league average adjustment between the two. We”ll sort the pitchers into two groups. Underperformers = those with tRA’s lower than their RA/9′s. And overpeformers = those with tRA’s higher than their RA/9′s.

The Starters

Thoughts:

• Despite some velocity concerns, Tim Lincecum is still having a truly dominant season. He’s posted the largest differential between his RA/9 and tRA (0.90 runs). He’s raised his K% this season — 30.66% this year to 28.71% last year — and he’s also cut down his BB% — 6.93% this season to 8.80% last season. Just amazing stuff. Tim Lincecum is, and continues to be, the engine that drives the Giants.
• Randy Johnson is technically an underpeformer — his tRA says he should be closer to a 5.05 run pitcher — but he’s still struggled at times this year. It’s no secret that RJ has been up-and-down in his performances but he’s still got some very positive underlying numbers. He can still punch out batters with the best of them (24 K%) but his control has been problematic at times this year (8.44 BB%). Once Johnson’s HR/FB% settles down — it’s still a very high 20% — and his control shapes up, you should see his overall numbers improve.
• tRA doesn’t buy the Barry Zito comeback story. Zito is firmly placed in the overperforming category. In fact, his differential of -2.12 runs edges out Matt Cain as the biggest overpeformer on the starting staff. Of course, most defense neutral pitching statistics, historically, haven’t liked Zito. The key for Zito has been his control. It’s gone from horrible (12.47 BB% in 2008) to just slightly worse than average (9.92 BB% in 2009). The Giants should just leave him in the 5th rotation spot for the rest of his contract and be done with it.
• Matt Cain has been brilliant this season but tRA thinks his underlying peripherals aren’t indicative of a pitcher with a 2.40 ERA. Cain, behind Barry Zito, has the 2nd largest differential between his RA/9 and tRA. What does this mean for Cain? He’s been slightly lucky in some regards (BABIP, a lower K rate this season) but if Cain can continue to keep the ball in the yard at his previous career levels, he should beat that tRA a little.
• Jonathan Sanchez, by tRA, is pitching almost exactly as well as his RA/9 indicates. Which is to say, not that great. Sanchez has been a little like Randy Johnson this year — inconsistent. He’s still posting a strong K% (21.99) but his control has been terrible. In 43 IP he’s walked 31 hittters. His BB% (16.32) is nearly 6 points higher than his 2008 BB%. A Sanchez improvement starts with a reduction in walks.

The Relievers

Thoughts:

• Brian Wilson has had some tough outings this year, but tRA still thinks he can be an above-average reliever. He’s got the biggest differential between RA/9 and tRA of our reliever group. Wilson has been hurt by a low LOB% of 63.8. That’s the 7th lowest LOB% for relievers that have thrown at least 20 IP in all of baseball. If Wilson starts to strand a few more runners, his RA/9 numbers will look better.
• Bob Howry also has a pretty large differential between his RA/9 and tRA. Howry has been shaky at times but he should probably be given a few more chances to work things out.
• The rest of the bullpen comes down on the overperformers side. Brandon Medders is the biggest overperformer in the bullpen. His RA/9 of 3.15  is 2.31 runs under his tRA of 5.46. Ideally when Romo is activated Medders would get bumped out of the bullpen but I can’t see the Giants dropping a guy with a 3.05 ERA no matter how poor his underlying numbers are. Justin Miller, Merkin Valdez, and Jeremy Affeldt will all probably see some correction in their RA/9′s.

When you look at these graphs remember that for some of the relievers we are dealing with some pretty small sample sizes. Same thing for the starters. The highest IP by a Giants’ starter is Lincecum’s 65.1 innings pitched. We’ll revist these graphs in a couple of months to see how things have changed.

My first random though, and graph, is about Zito’s last start. If you were watching the game on TV, Zito’s velocity did appear to be slightly better than what we’ve seen before. Let’s check the PFX numbers to see if they are in agreement.

Zito’s velo was pretty poor at times last season — his average FB velocity in 2008 by PFX was 85.1 mph — but he mostly worked between 85-88 mph in his very-good start against the Padres. He almost reached 90 mph which was something he rarely did in 2008. Again, it’s one game, so you should treat it as such, but Zito was throwing a little harder in his last start than we’ve seen in recent times.

There’s been some discussion on how effective certain Giants’ starters are the 2nd or 3rd time through a batting order. Thanks to BB-Ref’s handy pitching splits page, we can shed some light on the matter.

(Remember, these numbers are from 2008)

A sOPS+ score of 100 means that during that particular PA — ie: 1st, 2nd, or 3rd — that the batter was an average hitter in that situation as compared to league average. Batters hit Zito no matter what time they faced him. Tim Lincecum ruined a lot of hitter’s days. Jonathan Sanchez was better than league average for most of the time — he was slightly over during his 3rd PA against. Matt Cain was very good against hitters during their 1st and 2nd PA against them, but he posted the worst sOPS+ score among our starters for the 3rd PA faced against — is he running out of gas? And, Randy Johnson was quite good at any point during his starts.

Part of my inspiration for this graph is the perception that Sanchez falls apart during his 2nd time through the order. By this graph, it’s just not true. Sanchez beat the league aveage sOPS+ score during both the 1st and 2nd PA a batter took against him last season. The 3rd time was above league average, but not hugely so. Anyways, an interesting idea to think about. It’s really amazing how well Lincecum did last season.

The low scoring trend continued today when the Giants defeated the San Diego Padres 1-0. Zito hurled 7 innings of shutout baseball while striking out 5 and walking none. Very nice to see from Zito, but if you watched today’s game, my favorite moment was in the 8th inning when the Padres had a runner on third base with 1 out and the Giants brought in Jeremey Affeldt to face the Padres top hitters — Brian Giles and Adrian Gonzalez.

This happened:

(The 2 sliders are most likely curveballs. Affeldt doesn’t throw a slider to my knowledge.)

.2 IP, 2 SO.

And then, in the 10th inning with Molina at the plate, this happened:

Molina whacked a low changeup off the left-center warning track for a game-winning walk-off ground rule double. An all around solid game from Zito, the bullpen, and a few Giants’ hitters.

Because OGC asked nicely in the comments section of the Zito FX post, here’s two velocity plots for Zito’s 2008 season with the Giants. The first is his overall average fastball velocity — as identified by PFX — month-by-month. The second plot is his velocity by home start. The 2nd plot should be more accurate, since we’re removing any stadium bias from his velocity readings.

Zito’s velocity from March (which you should note, the sample size is small because it’s just one start) to May was really, really below average. The average fastball in the National League last season was between 90-91mph. In the early months of the season, Zito was struggling to get past 84mph and he dipped below 82mph more than once. From early July to the end of the season, Zito did see an overall increase on his fastball velocity. His average was much closer to 85mph — an increase in +1 mph from earlier in the season — and he touched 87 a few times but he mostly worked in the 85-86mph range. Still a below average fastball.

You should realize that these graphs only deal with velocity on Zito’s fastball and not other important things like his ability to control the pitch or what happened when batters swung at the pitch. So, keep that in mind before you trumpet Zito’s return to form. If I get the time, I’ll examine those things in the near future, too.

(FC stands for a cut-fastball. The MLBAM algorithm stinks at identifying cut-fastballs, so you can basically ignore the small group of cutters that PFX thinks Zito threw last season. They mostly look to be sliders. I didn’t remove them because I’m lazy.)