The Melkman's top three comps? Carlos Beltran, Coco Crisp...and Pete Rose.

Me likey!

No way - 3.39 ERA? I like Joba and think he's going to be a star, but that's a fairly optimistic projection for a guy with no MLB starting experience in the AL East. I guess I would be curious about a SP-only ERA>

I'm an old "Yankee-hater" and far be it from me to talk like a fan boy, but when I look at Wang and wonder that if he has had success with Jeter at SS, does that mean that he's just got some nasty stuff and he's just going to be hard to hit?

Yankkes?

Is that some Yiddish word I am unfamiliar with?

does that mean that he's just got some nasty stuff and he's just going to be hard to hit?

Whether or not Wang is greater than the sum of his (statistical) parts is a pretty big debate among both Yankee fanboys and Yankee-haters.

I lean towards yes, but that's in no small part because I think he's going to end up boosting his K rate, rendering this whole conversation moot.

178 Innings pitched for El Wang? I'll take the over.

El Wang? Shouldn't it be El Wango? Or El Wanque?

El Wang? Shouldn't it be El Wango? Or El Wanque?

It's Arabic.

El Wang is his cousin.

To date, Wang doesn't particularly stand out compared to other "top" BIP pitchers. In his 2.5 seasons, Wang has about 530 IP, a WHIP of 1.3, and an ERA+ of 119. That's all jolly good.

Bob Tewksbury, in what was essentially his first full 2.5 seasons, threw about 560 IP with WHIPs of 1.14, 1.28, and 1.02 (substantially better than Wang) and ERA+s of 109, 113, and 157. He finished his career with a 104 ERA+ and a WHIP of 1.3. Tewk even had a 3rd place CYA finish in that 157 ERA+ year (16-5, 2.16 ERA, 4.55 K/BB tops in the league).

Jake Westbrook hasn't had 3 consecutive years like Wang, but using 2004, 2005 and 2007 he threw 575 IP with WHIPs of 1.25, 1.30 and 1.41 (that's not promising) with ERA+ of 129, 108, and 107. For his career, he's got a 101 ERA+ and a WHIP of 1.39.

Carlos Silva's been up and down too but for 2004, 2005 and 2007, he threw 590 IP with WHIPs of 1.43, 1.17 and 1.31 with ERA+s of 112, 129 and 103. For his career, he's got a 102 ERA+ and a WHIP of 1.37. He's kind of Tewksbury-ish with his low BB rate and good K/BB ratio (over 2) but a higher HR rate.

Jon Garland, the Nolan Ryan of this group with his 4.8/9 K rate, over the last 3 years, has 640 IP with WHIPs of 1.17, 1.36 and 1.33 and ERA+ of 128, 105, 112. For his career, he's got a 106 ERA+ and 1.37 WHIP.

There are others but those will do for now. Of those guys, he's closest to Tewksbury in terms of overall performance but of course Tewk's remaining years weren't so exciting (but not horrible). The main advantage Wang has over all these guys is his miniscule HR rate (.5/9) so that WHIP doesn't hurt him (and it's a solid WHIP anyway) ... also, as such an extreme groundballer, presumably he's getting a lot of DP behind him. In a way, the impact of this appears similar to the impact of Tewksbury's miniscule walk rate -- the man had a K rate of only 4/9 yet still had a K/BB rate of 2.8. Also, as #5 suggests, Wang's K-rate was up last year, nearly into Garland territory!!

Anyway, all this suggests that (1) Wang is not in imminent danger of collapse -- he's likely to be no worse than league average over the next few seasons at least -- but (2) he is likely to have a few nasty bumps along the way. I do suspect we have seen the best of Wang (that's not meant to imply he can't maintain at this level for another year or two, just that I'll be surprised if he ever does significantly better than this).

Like most of his peers (other than Garland), Wang got a fairly late start on his career -- he's already 28. It's not just projection systems that don't like BIP pitchers, it's also hoary old scouts, managers and general managers -- and Wang had a decent minor-league K rate if I'm not mistaken. Given his age, it would be surprising if he got substantially better of course -- how many pitchers see a big uptick in K rate in their late 20s, early 30s?

Tewksbury has always seemed to me the best of the modern BIP pitchers (though I've never done a thorough search) though Garland is giving him a run for his money. But Wang has a chance to be the best if he can maintain that HR rate. Although it is rare for these guys to have super-long careers (i.e. they don't "age well"), IP totals in the 1800 range aren't that uncommon (Tewksbury, Rueter, Garland will most likely get there).

The "disconnect" comes in that if anyone suggested that Garland or Silva or Westbrook were #1 starters or CYA candidates or were just "pitchers of note", they'd be scoffed at. Folks here make fun of teams that give good money to Carlos Silva -- and they're right to. But the difference, especially the long-term difference, between Wang and Silva or Wang and Garland is probably slim (granted Garland has a lot more innings on his arm, he may be nearly done already). But the idea that Wang is likely to start consistently putting up 90 ERA+s tomorrow is also pretty far-fetched.

My best guess, and it's a guess, is that Wang will throw another 800-1000 innings at an ERA+ in the 105-110 range -- damn nice thing to have around -- assuming the HR rate remains low (but probably increases some) and the K-rate doesn't jump again. But in that 4-5 seasons, there's a good chance there will be a real stinker or two (and one or two like the ones he's had). And after those 1000 innings, all bets are off.

As to Silva, he's got less wiggle room I think. The WHIP is too high (too many hits) and the HR rate is too high and he's already at a career 102 ERA+. He'll probably maintain a bit in the 95-105 range, then I get the feeling his ending will be ugly. We've already seen him have some horrific stretches. This is more a high risk, low reward sort of signing seems to me.

Garland's a mystery to me. He's got a lot of innings for this type of pitcher and could be about done. Or he could be Jeff Suppan (2000 IP and counting), a borderline member of this group (5 K/9). That's not likely to matter to the Angels who have him for just one year.

I know being a Suppan-hater is fashionable, but he's now up to 9 straight seasons of 188+ IP and his worst ERA+ have been 93 and 97. Take out his horrible age 20-23 years and his career ERA goes from 4.61 to 4.44 and his career ERA+ from (roughly) 101 to 105. That ain't a bad pitcher given the durability. Of course, how long will that durability last? And his WHIP the last couple years has been kinda scary, though some of that last year was probably Milwaukee's excellent defense. :-)

It's Arabic.

Wouldn't that be "al-Wang"?

As to Wang and projections, I wish Keri had listed the HR and the hits. ZIPS is more optimistic on Wang in terms of ERA (3.91) but then it only mildly regresses his HR rate (from 1 per 18 for his career to about 1 per 15) and dings him a tiny bit on hit rate. I suspect PECOTA regresses one or both of those more.

As to IP ... well, a healthy Wang certainly pitches more than 178. An unhealthy Wang could pitch as few as 0. A Wang who has one of those BIP nightmare seasons and is putting up an ERA+ of 85 or worse (it happened to Tewk, Silva, and Rueter in their "primes") may see his innings curtailed. So, I dunno, 178 sounds about right with 80% of the time he falls into the 200-210 range and the other 20% he comes up far short. So yeah, given even odds, you'd take the over -- doesn't mean it's a bad mean projection just means the distribution of likely outcomes around the mean isn't at all symmetric. For a straight over/under bet, PECOTA would want to use the median, which is probably somewhere around 195-200. (If 178 is the projected median, I'll take the over. :-)

10. That's a great, thought provoking post Walt, but I have one disagreement, and this has always been my contention regarding Wang... his raw stuff is way, way better stuff than all the guys you just compared him to. When people look at Wang's numbers, I think they tend to forget he sits at 93-95 MPH. A sinker thrown at this velocity almost nullifies the defensive liabilities he has to deal with, therefore his performance ISN'T as defensively dependant as people believe*, and his numbers will not fluctuate as many suspect. The fact is, if Wang can develop a plus secondary pitch, which is a big if of course, he could do some incredible things. He'd be Kevin Brown, basically, without as many whiffs via the sinker. Personally, I think he should try developing his splitter. He's further ahead at the moment with the slide piece, but if he had a plus split, it'd just be nasty. Here's a pitch that would look identical to that nasty sinker coming out of his hand, before dropping off the table. It'd be a big boost for him against left-handed hitters.

Right now, I see him as a middle-class man's Brandon Webb. Comparable sinkers, but Webb owns him on secondary pitches. Webb actually doesn’t mix it up enough. That's when he's at his best.

miniscule HR rate (.5/9)

Yes, that's because he throws so damn hard. This should always be a consideration when analyzing Wang.


*Because, simply, any Major League caliber infielder can handle a thousand roller. Also, consider this: Jeter is an asset to Wang at times, because one of his main strengths defensively is charging slow rollers and firing to first in a fluid, rapid motion. Wang generates enough bad contact that he probably plays into Jeter’s strengths as fielder [charging]
*

From all the hype around Joba and his "drop" of a projection at 3.39 ERA, I'm expecting him to go out there and pitch like an immortal, with 230 innings and a 1.20 ERA.

The more important thing to watch with Wang is not so much his HBIP (which is good so far, but not abnormally so), but rather that insanely low HR rate. If he keeps that down where he has so far, as long as he doesn't get really wild, he'll be an effective pitcher regardless of his strikeout totals.

I think the big question is whether that will continue. If that jumps up to a still well above average 16 per 200 innings (this is a stat that also tends to fluctuate a lot), a lot of his success will go with it. You can go a long way throwing strikes and keeping the ball in the park, and you don't need much above average HBIP rates to do it. It's just harder to do than Wang's made it look so far.

Just as a note. Wang's HBIP rate last year was 0.295, the Yankees total was 0.299. The year before Wang's was 0.292 and the Yankees' was 0.289. He had a lower rate in 2005 though.

What Voros said.

And for a bit further information, Kevin Brown's was 293. For Garland, I get 281. Tewk comes in at a flat 300 (in many more innings). Silva's at 305 (would have thought it was higher given all the hits he gives up) and Westbrook at 301.

So there may be something to the "fastball hypothesis" though based on Voros' numbers the difference between Tewk and Wang may be defense (i.e. Wang is just average on the Yanks).

But Kevin Brown without the strikeouts might be a good comparison. Brown gave up .57 HR/9 (about 1 per 15.5 IP) which might be where Wang's "true talent" is. They walk batters at about the same rate (2.5/9 for Brown vs. 2.4).

And the young Kevin Brown didn't strike folks out either (4.5/9 through age 26) and had a couple Wang-y seasons (119 and 110 OPS+ at 24 and 25 ... but 92 at 26 ... in about 600 IP total). So yeah, Brown without the strikeouts seems a reasonable comp for Wang ... although Brown without the strikeouts doesn't look particularly different than Garland or Tewksbury or the other guys.

Now if Wang turns into post-26 Kevin Brown, well, then the Yanks really have something special. Though he won't be able to handle the pressure of playing in NY. :-)

Walt, other than knuckleballers, the biggest difference in HBIP I found in traditional statistics was with strikeout rate. Because the data was scarce on the subject, I often wondered if that was a third variable issue regarding pitch velocity (since that seems to correlate well with strikeout rate) that was driving that.

Has anyone with better data ever looked at that?

As I'm virtually contractually obligated to do so in every DIPSish thread, I'll point out again that we don't really care about BABIP (or HBIP or whatever you kids call it these days) but about SLGIP or maybe OPSIP. Or RC or LWTs or ... Flyballers have lower BABIP but more of the hits turn into 2B and 3B. Now the difference may be small and SLGIP may be sufficiently correlated with BABIP that controlling for one pretty much takes care of the other, but BABIP isn't really what we should be after.

Of course the handy-dandy b-r pages don't give us doubles and triples allowed, so don't look for me to ever calculate it.