So, uhh, what’s left? He’s not preventing hits. He’s not preventing home runs. He’s not stranding runners. How is Mark Buehrle keeping so many runs off the board?
The answer might be that he’s not, and a real part of the explanation for Buehrle’s gap between his ERA and his FIP/xFIP is actually a bias in how ERA is calculated. As you know, Buehrle is a ground-ball pitcher, and pitchers who put their infielders to work see a larger share of their balls in play result in errors. Errors result in unearned runs, and unearned runs don’t count against a pitcher’s ERA.
In fact, if we look at Buehrle’s career, 10.1% of all the runs Buehrle has allowed have been labeled as unearned. For starting pitchers since 2002 with 1,000+ innings pitched, that’s the ninth highest ratio of unearned runs in baseball. Some of the pitchers ahead of him include Brandon Webb, Felix Hernandez, and Derek Lowe, which illustrates the point of how ground-ball pitchers tend to have ERAs that are driven down because many of the runs they actually do allow are counted as unearned.
...This doesn’t invalidate Buehrle as a good pitcher, as his durability and consistency are still intact, and even if you judge him by something like FIP-, he still comes out as one of the better pitchers in the league. However, it’s at least worth noting that ERA is overstating his ability to keep runs off the board, and if a team is going to pay for Buehrle’s services, they should adjust their expectations of value down slightly from what ERA says he is worth.
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1. Tom Nawrocki Posted: November 10, 2011 at 08:59 PM (#3990507)I was surprised, as I expected it would be precisely in his strand rate that Buehrle excels, but I guess not. Or something's not right.
I think something must not be right. Buehrle's been a 3.5-5.5 WAR pitcher most seasons of his career. That's based on runs allowed, not ERA. Cameron's (partial) explanation of Buehrle is that he's giving up runs which aren't showing up in his ERA, but his RA-based value numbers are really good, too. So how is Buehrle putting up all-star quality runs prevented numbers?
Is strand rate LOB% or RWRBBDS%?
If it's LOB%, as Dave refers to it in the article, then it wouldn't include CS and pickoffs. But if it's runners who reach base but don't score, which would include those retired on the paths, then I don't know where the discrepancy is.
Maybe it's just that guys who work really, really fast are blessed by the baseball gods to outperform their peripherals.
If I were a deity, that's exactly how it would work.
Take that, Trachsel, ya slow-moving knob!
A difference in BABIP of just .005 has an effect on ERA of about 0.12. So just beating expected BABIP by a small amount matters. Pretty similar effects can be seen with strand rate and the rest.**
Buehrle is better than league average by a small amount at pretty much every one of these numbers. I can't get the "show averages" thingy at fangraphs to work, so these numbers are from B-Ref.
BABIP: .294 vs .298 league average
XBH%: .31 vs .34 league average
HR/FB: .073 vs .078 league average
His strand rate is also just a little better than league average. My guess is you add together all of these small effects - fewer hits on balls in play, fewer XBH as a percentage of hits, fewer homers on flyballs, fewer runners on base coming around to score - and you get Mark Buehrle's value above his FIP/xFIP "expected" value.
**This is the "new DIPS" logic. Voros found something real - single season BABIP is a poor measure of underlying BABIP skill, and a single season outlier BABIP is probably just random variation or "luck". It takes a very large sample of pitcher-innings to estimate pitcher skill. However, the effect of BABIP skill difference, though it is hard to identify, is still quite large because very small differences in these numbers have large effects on runs allowed or runs prevented.
In fairness, Cameron is legitimately terrible at analysis.
And saying that guy looks like Leiter/Zito/Wolf/Washburn than Sheets/Pettitte/Greinke/Beckett isn't terribly instructive (the former group has as many Cy Young awards as the latter), especially when you're using unadjusted ERA to make the comparison. Having an article like this which doesn't tell us his RA- or give us his ranking in RA- vs. ERA- seems like it's leaving out a key piece of information, or at least one which I'd like to see.
Then of course there's the issue of Buehrle's pitching versus his fielding. For an evaluation of Buehrle specifically, that's not important but it is important when talking about the greater aspects of DIPS and pitching.
The problem is evaluating a regular fielder is hard enough to begin with, evaluating the pitcher would be even harder.
The one interesting thing I found was that taller pitchers tended to have higher BABIP and at a level that was statistically significant. This one has always puzzled me and as best as I can guess, this could actually be a fielding related issue in that you'd probably guess the smaller guys would be better fielders as a group (for example Maddux versus Randy Johnson). This effect was mentioned in the DIPS 2.0 article way back in the day (had to be prior to October 2002).
The whole thing crosses over into that unfamiliar territory of just how much all great athletic performance contains within it an aspect of good fortune. I look at Buehrle's .294 to .298 advantage and I couldn't begin to tell you whether that's Buehrle's arm, Buehrle's glove, nothing at all to do with him, or some sort of combination of them all. All three by themselves or in any combination could explain such a difference. Who knows? But as pointed out, there's real runs off the scoreboard because of that difference. You're free to credit them to Buehrle (I suppose it's better him than anyone else), but do so knowing the uncertainty of just how much he really had to do with it.
By rights, Buerhle maybe should probably have a higher BABIP than average like Andy Pettitte does (though Buehrle isn't as much of a groundballer as Pettitte), and he doesn't strike out a ton of guys, so that advantage for him might be more significant than you'd first guess. It might not be .004 less than you'd expect but more like .010 less than you'd expect. Pitcher BABIP is really quite a swamp when you dig down into it.
Is it just me, or does Cameron seem like the kind of "analyst" that really does sit in his basement with his nose in a spreadsheet? His proposed Votto-to-Seattle trade last week was...well, Keith Law called it "delusional". If you (1) put 100% faith in fWAR as the true value of a player; (2) put 100% faith in the $/WAR free-agent calculation AND assume it is relevent to pre-FA players; and (3) assume every player involved is likely to perform over the next 2 seasons similarly to the last 2 seasons the trade made sense. In other words, you can't actually know anything about the human aspects of baseball.
I don't think that's fair. My guess is he's pretty good at analysis, but his arrogance prevents him from questioning his own conclusions, and especially prevents him from accepting criticism/questioning from others.
Basically, if your starting assumption is that you are 100% correct all the time, you're going to make a lot of mistakes, not through stupidity, but through blindness to the holes in your argument.
Is it just me, or does Cameron seem like the kind of "analyst" that really does sit in his basement with his nose in a spreadsheet? His proposed Votto-to-Seattle trade last week was...well, Keith Law called it "delusional". If you (1) put 100% faith in fWAR as the true value of a player; (2) put 100% faith in the $/WAR free-agent calculation AND assume it is relevent to pre-FA players; and (3) assume every player involved is likely to perform over the next 2 seasons similarly to the last 2 seasons the trade made sense. In other words, you can't actually know anything about the human aspects of baseball.
He's an ideologue. His faith in his ideology taints his analysis.
It's the exact same mistake he made in the Danks/Jose Lopez howler.
It's common behavior among people who are pretty smart, but think they're really smart. They've found "the way" and the rest of us are just too dumb to see it.
We also know he works very fast. I have heard numerous times that working fast keeps your defenders on their toes and helps. Is it possible that this is a meaningful thing? Could this be evidence of the truth of that cliche?
I would be curious if someone could run the same numbers for a similar guy from back in my day - a LHP that worked very fast, and seemed to do better (from my terrible memory) than his low K-rate and high HR-rate would indicate: Tom Browning. I'm sure there could be other candidates as well.
It's a data point. Just one though. Trachsel's was .288 to a .298 average according to BBref. Browning was actually a flyball guy (hence the home run problems) but his was .273 to a .288 average according to BBref.
The day I discovered how weird his name is was the same day I first tried to spell it.
OBP .335
AVG .268
SLG .427
ISO .159
If we wanted all of those over 2001-2011, they would probably be 2-4 points lower for each of them. I think Buehrle looks pretty good then considering that he pitches in a relatively good hitter's park and has not had the best defense behind him. He has had 6 top 10 finishes in WAR (from Baseball Reference).
R/G = 16.04*OBP + 11.595*SLG - 5.52
based on the years 2007-2009 (I had one based on 2001-03 that had similar values). Plugging in the values for Buehrle and the league average, I get Buehrle allowing 4.04 runs per game and the league average being 4.73. So he is .69 runs better than average. That comes out to about 15.87 runs if you have 210 IP (23.333 games) or maybe 1.6 wins over average. Maybe 3.6 WAR.
Was this height/BABIP thing also adjusted for groundball rate? I don't know if this is statistically true (or studied) but taller pitchers seem to be more groundball oriented, due to the extra downward plane they can throw from, and groundballs turn into hits more often than flyballs.
Only in so much as home runs are an imperfect proxy for that (home run rate were adjusted for). Remember that we've come quite a bit data wise in 10 years and even now ground-ball/fly-ball data only goes back so far and we're trying to pick up tiny bits of info here.
It only took them 20 years to be proved right.
Ah, I completely missed the "October 2002" bit when I wrote that comment.
Warren Spahn worked very quickly, was not really a strikeout pitcher, gave up lots of dingers... and he did all right, averaging 20-12 in 278 IP over 17 years.
Using my equation and a .420 SLG, Buehrle would give up 4.40 runs per game. His DP rate is 15% vs. the MLB average of 11%. That might help
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