May cowers, hits April showers
Darrell May sucked yesterday. There is no gentle way to say it. He threw 87 pitches - only 43 of them for strikes. He allowed 12 baserunners and 7 runs in five innings. Two of the ten fly balls hit against him left the yard, several others drove the defense back to the warning track. May is now 0-2 with a 9.90 ERA. There is nothing to like about May’s performance so far this season. But before we give up on Darrell just yet, let’s consider a few factors.
First of all, it’s only two games. Second, the starts have both come against Chicago. As I’ve said before, the Sox are probably the worst matchup for this year’s pitching staff, especially for the soft-tossing trio of May, Brian Anderson and Jimmy Gobble. Third, consider that May got off to such a slow start last season, that we were ready to run him out of town. Of course if you look back at the numbers, he wasn’t as bad as he has been so far. Still, let’s give May a few more starts before we hit the panic button.
From today’s game: In the pregame show, John Cumberland spoke glowingly (of course) about Jeremy Affeldt and his chances for having a great game today against Chicago. A tweak in his delivery, a new sinker – he’s ready to go. Starting off, I couldn’t see a difference. His velocity was good, consistently topping out at 93-94 m.p.h., but he was up in the zone, when he hit it, and getting behind every hitter. Affeldt drilled the first hitter, Juan Uribe, in the shoulder and I have to wonder if it was calculated move considering May’s complete inability to pitch inside yesereday. A caught stealing and a double play rescued the first.
More of the same in the second. Affeldt missed with his high pitches and walked Frank Thomas. Carlos Lee came up and the count ran full. Then, it came. A sight for sore eyes – the signature hook, freezing Lee, strike three called. Affeldt’s first K since before the NCAA’s Sweet Sixteen. Hallelujah! Thomas then inexplicably ambled towards second and Santiago gunned him down easily. At that point, with the caught stealings and the double play, Affeldt had accounted for only two of the five outs himself. Konerko walked – more command problems. But then he got Joe Crede looking with a 91 m.p.h. fastball at the knees. Two K’s! Two innings and Affeldt has thrown 16 pitches. Not bad, especially considering the two walks.
I told somebody last night, if I was Tony Pena I would have told Affeldt to come out today with the mindset that he had to strike everybody out, pitch count be damned. To me it was more important for Affeldt to recover the ability to make batters miss than to go deep into the game. So that second inning was enouraging and if he can lasso his command, he could still have that breakout game that he needs to desperately.
Now, beginning the second, Aaron Guiel has butchered a fly ball and Affeldt was charged with a throwing error off a bunt on a horrible call – the ump said Graffinino missed touching first when he clearly did. NOW would be a good time for some more K’s. Nope – a wild pitch. A gift run, still nobody out. Excuse me a second….(X$!&8!#!!!!!)…thank you. So much for lassoing that command. Then a soft base hit into left and Guiel, who probably wouldn’t have been able to gun down Olivo at home, overran the ball. No advance from first but the run scored easily. Still no outs. The defense is cracking. As Affeldt tries to get control of his pitches, his fastball has dropped off to 91. He’s got two strikes on Valentin. There is no excuse for not striking him out here. Anything off-speed will do the trick. A hook. A change. Anything. Throw to first. Runner goes. It’s a curve, 75. Valentin is ready for it, rips it towards first. (OK, I was wrong.) Sweeney grabs it, steps on first. Sometimes it’s good to be lucky. Ordenez grounds out, inning over. It was ugly but only two runs (one unearned) scored and Affeldt burned only 14 more pitches. Through three, that’s 46 pitches. At this pace, he could go seven today. All right, enough of this play-by-play. What am I gonna do, chronicle the whole season. Sounds like something I’d try to do.
Well, things came unhinged for Affeldt in the fourth. More walks. More pitching behind batters. More elevated fastballs. With two outs and the bases juiced, Miguel Olivo doubled into the gap in right-center on an 0-2 count. The pitch registered at 93 but it didn’t appear to be a fastball. Whatever it was, the starting pitching threatens to demoralize the whole team. Meanwhile, the Royals haven’t been able to do anything with Jon Garland, except ground out to short and fly out to right…Affeldt is through after just four innings. It couldn’t have gone worse, I suppose. And as the Royals continue to get throttled, their Pythagorean profile takes a beating. They’ve now been outscored 45-33 – that translates to 55-107 record! It’s too early for that kind of projection nonsense. But the team is clearly lucky to be 4-4.
I notice it’s another quality start for the Redbirds today. I love the refurbished Gameday application at mlb.com, especially the new function that let’s you see the balls-in-play distribution.
And then there was the ninth…Unf***ing believable. After another game of bad pitching and, in this case, a lot of shaky defense, the Royals find themselves tied again. Billy Koch has coughed up another lead to the Royals as Beltran thumps his second dinger of the game to dead centerfield. Now Sweeney hits a moonshot into left field! This is getting to be old hat. The 12 people jamming the stands at The Cell have erupted in a chorus of boos. There is till only one out. First dinger for JuanGone in the offing?...Then there was slow death. Two walks. An error. A pop fly that drops. A right-fielder with range would have made the play. Where was Rich Thompson? It’s 9-9, the bases are loaded, Curt Leskanic has been yanked. The Royals crappy play continues to skirt the edge and today it appears they will tumble over. The second walk, to Carlos Lee, came after Leskanic was ahead 0-2. So the Royals implement the gimmick of a 5-man infield but Crede hits a ground-rule double and it’s over.
Some notes on ‘The Stat Guy’…The feedback I received on the first installment of my new column was positive. Most of the readers who sent me messages liked it, some didn’t see the point, a few thought it was too facile. My editor liked it and that’s pretty important. The piece didn’t play well with the stathead crowd, I fear, but that is something I anticipated. I did receive a nice congratulatory e-mail from the Primer’s
repoz, but he didn’t mention the column itself.
I don’t mind criticism. I don’t mind it at all. Without it, I can’t get better and, let’s face it, I’m still an unknown quantity when it comes to this stuff. One thing to keep in mind, however, is the target audience for these columns. In a nutshell, they are written for the casual baseball fan who has more than likely never trolled Clutch Hits over at Baseball Primer. They aren’t meant to break new ground in sabermetrics nor are they meant to hammer the readership of
The Star with sabermetric truisms. The idea is simply to write timely, topical articles about the Royals and use statistics to propel the discussion, whatever the topic may be.
To be sure, I will work in the best of sabermetric analysis whenever possible but this will have to be done subtlely. If I get too pedantic or arcane, no one will read it
in print. We write for our print subscribers, not for those who may link to our work from Internet portals. This is a metro daily newspaper, not a Baseball Prospectus newsletter.
At the same time, I hope that regular readers of the column who haven’t been to Primer or don’t get the B.P. newsletter may eventually find their way there. For this first piece and with only a week’s worth of data to work with, the most pressing issue related to the Royals was clearly the lousy starting pitching which belied their fortuitous 4-2 record. Now, I heard more than one person suggest that if the bullpen kept pitching so well, then maybe they could get by with a lousy rotation. Clearly, in the long run, they can’t – the way pitching staffs are constructed, starting pitchers throw most of the innings. If they pitch lousy, they’ll give up too many runs for the team to win consistently. This seems pretty straight forward.
But we’re not used to good starting pitching around here so I used the opportunity to point out just how long it has been since the team had pieced together so much as a decent rotation. This won’t be the last the time ‘The Stat Guy’ throws out some anecdotal numbers to call attention to an area of weakness – or strength – on the Royals. But there will be other times when the analysis is more biting. It depends on the what the Royals are doing. All of this said, I do hope that the column will appeal to everyone.
Now when you use even anecdotal numbers, you better not use them to mislead and Max over at Primer pointed out in a thread where I might have succumbed to a pitfall, though it was not with the intent to mislead. In the article, I pointed out that 265 times over the last six seasons has a starting pitcher reached the 200-inning plateau. The Royals have accounted for ‘only’ 8 of these occurrences. As Max points out, 8 of 265 is roughly 3%. There are 30 teams in baseball. One of thirty is 3%. Thus, the Royals have been right on average.
In actuality, if you burrow into those numbers a little deeper, the Royals have accounted for 3.01% of the 200-inning pitchers. Leaving out the Royals, the rate for the rest of baseball was 3.44%. So the Royals were a hair beneath the league’s average, but that is nothing to make an argument from. There was another paragraph were I noted that the rate for playoff teams over this span was 6.42% (I didn’t use percents in the argument, but you get the idea) and this was meant to sharpen the point. The Royals are being discussed locally as a playoff contender and for the time being, when I evaluate them it will be as a team playing for the postseason. But that paragraph ended up on the cutting room floor. I made the cuts – I can’t and wouldn’t blame a copy editor. I just did a poor job of self-editing. The story was copy-edited but when it comes to the numbers presented in my work, the onus is upon me to be accurate. Here I was accurate, but the numbers - as presented - were misleading. And when I do that, I expect to be called out every time.
While I don’t play Bud Selig and respond to every bit of criticism or disagreement that I stumble across, I do plan to respond in this space to the more interesting messages I receive. As such, I present the following:
Josh writes –
Seems to me that you create an artificial distinction between "bullpen" and "starters" in your most recent (first?) Star article.
Doesn't it all boil down to: How effective are a team's pitchers? And, how frequently do they pitch in order for their efforts to have a (negative or positive) impact?
As you point out in your article, of course there's not much correlation between bullpen ERA's and team winning %, due to the fact that bullpens typically pitch fewer innings.
But, what if on some hypothetical ballclub, the bullpen actually ended up averaging, say, 4 innings per game? That's virtually 1/2 of the team's innings pitched. That bullpen's performance must have some bearing on the club's winning %. After all, it shouldn't matter (much, if at all)whether the innings are pitched at the beginning of the game, or at the end of the game.
You write in your column that one of the "warning signs" a K.C. fan should look out for is whether the starters are being yanked before the 7th inning. But *what if* K.C.'s bullpen is, as a group, better than, or equal to, its starters? In this case, it might be a *good sign* that K.C.'s starters are being pulled early, as it would keep pitch counts down, thereby helping to prevent injuries and increasing starting pitchers' effectiveness (less fatigue; fewer opportunities for the opposing batting order to get a "lock" on them).
I'm not arguing this is actually the case with the '04 Royals, although it *might* be. I haven't done a historical comparison of our relieving corps vs. our starting rotation to see which might be expected to perform better over the course of the season. But *if* the relievers are better, and if they were to pitch lots of innings, *why* couldn't the Royals be expected to win?
Josh, I understand what you’re saying. When I am putting together my preseason projections, I don’t calculate a bullpen ERA for a team and a starters’ ERA and then attempt to blend the two by giving more weight to one or the other. I just project ERA’s for each pitcher, project innings pitched and add it all up.
However, I’m not the one who created the artificial distinction between starters and relievers. Big-league managers did. Starting pitchers and relief pitchers don’t pitch X amount of innings. Starters pitch as long as they are effective and as long as they aren’t fatigued. Relief pitchers are employed according to base, out and score parameters. Bullpen ERA has a low correlation to win% but there is correlation - .33 if I remember right. As you suggest, if a bullpen averages four innings per outing, that correlation would increase. But what would happen to the effectiveness of the relievers? Even if a team had a 12-man staff, that would average out to about 93 innings per reliever? You could employ more pitchers, but competent pitchers, relief or starters, are a finite resource.
Even if a team’s relief staff is superior to that team’s rotation, they have to be employed sensibly for this differentiation in performance to matter. Lower pitch counts for starters is a worthy goal but if starters are continually being yanked in the fifth and six innings, it will invariably be because they aren’t pitching well, not because of any premeditated notion to cap pitch counts. I do think this year’s relief pitchers are better as a group than the starting pitchers. Not to the degree that has been displayed so far, but I think there is a difference. But if they are overused, this difference will erode until it doesn’t exist at all.