My New Endeavor

I am extremely pleased to let you guys know that I have been asked to write on a very serious SABR slanted website called Beyond the Boxscore.  I thank every single person that has ever read anything I've written on this blog for their time and effort.

Anyways my first post is up and for all you Mets fans out there, it's about Ike Davis' struggles at the plate.  Enjoy.

A Closer Look at Pitchers Who Consistently Underperform their Peripherals

As I started preparing for the fantasy baseball season, I found myself wondering which pitchers would maintain their low ERA despite their higher peripherals and which pitchers I should shy away from even though they have great peripherals. I couldn't help but think that there is some missing piece, a systematic flaw, in the peripheral metrics like FIP and SIERA. I then started thinking about what that flaw could be. For a few weeks I made no headway at all, until it just came to me. I thought back to this article I once read on Johan Santana consistently outpitching his peripherals. The article hypothesized that Santana's success in undeviatingly overperforming his peripherals had to do with his changeup inducing weak flyballs. The reason something like this would lower Santana's ERA while not effecting his FIP or SIERA is because peripheral based metrics cannot differentiate between flyballs. All flyballs are looked at the same in a stat like SIERA, which is obviously not true, but does not make any quantifiable difference to the vast majority of MLB pitchers. Apparently it does for changeup artists like Santana.

I used the same concept about changeups to try to understand the opposite, pitchers who underperform (ERA wise) their peripherals. I went to Fangraphs to check if pitchers with an ERA consistently higher than their FIP, tend to throw their changeups less often.

Name		Team	ERA	FIP	ERA-FIP	CH/FS %
Ricky Nolasco		Marlins	4.74	3.58	1.16	8%
Felipe Paulino		- - -	5.18	4.04	1.13	7%
Jake Peavy		- - -	4.36	3.37	0.98	7%
Luke Hochevar		Royals	5.28	4.35	0.92	7%
Francisco Liriano		Twins	4.74	3.87	0.87	19%
Kevin Slowey		Twins	5.01	4.16	0.85	8%
Kyle Davies		Royals	5.55	4.73	0.82	17%
Brandon Morrow		- - -	4.5	3.73	0.77	8%
John Lackey		- - -	4.8	4.06	0.74	5%
Derek Lowe		Braves	4.57	3.89	0.68	11%
Charlie Morton		Pirates	4.88	4.22	0.66	11%
Jonathon Niese		Mets	4.29	3.71	0.58	5%
Jason Hammel		Rockies	4.63	4.07	0.56	10%
Paul Maholm		Pirates	4.43	3.93	0.5	15%
Gavin Floyd		White Sox	4.17	3.68	0.49	5%
Chris Narveson		Brewers	4.62	4.15	0.47	26%
Zack Greinke		- - -	3.3	2.84	0.45	9%
Derek Holland		Rangers	4.73	4.33	0.4	10%
Homer Bailey		Reds	4.47	4.07	0.4	8%

These are all the pitchers who from 2009-2011 underperformed their peripherals

As you can see, out of the 19 pitchers only four threw their changeups over 11% of the time. This shows that the pitchers who have most recently been underperforming their FIPs, tend not to throw a lot of changeups, which is exactly what I was looking for. Wanting to take my analysis a step further, I then took all qualifying pitchers from the years 2009-2011 and correlated their changeup usage to their ERA-FIP.

Though not incredibly steep, there is a downward trend correlating pitchers who throw less changeups to higher than anticipated ERAs. The R is close to .2, which does not even come close to explaining the entire ERA to FIP discrepancy, but it does tell us that the less you throw a changeup the more likely you are to have a higher than expected ERA.

The real question is why. Why do pitchers who throw fewer changeups consistently underperform their FIP? To this I have no answer. We do know that changeups depress ERA and by not utilizing one you'll probably have a higher ERA than expected, so we now know the importance of a changeup.

The Jason Bay Power Outage

As all of you have witnessed to this point in the season, Jason Bay hasn't been, well Jason Bay this year.  He has only six homers thus far in 2010, a little less than a third of the amount he had last year at this same time.  There are a few elements in Jason Bay's game that are uncharacteristically different this season and might be attributable to a new team philosophy focusing on putting more balls in play equating to fewer strikeouts and fewer walks.  The Mets have a paltry team wide BB/K rate of .44 (9th worst in the majors) and an O-Swing rate (swinging percentage on balls out of the strike zone) of 31.9% good for second to last in the majors.  When plate discipline becomes a team wide weakness one should attribute such failures to non other than the hitting coach.  Swinging at balls is not the right approach if the Mets want to win baseball games.  Anyways, back to Jason Bay. 

When you compare Jason Bay's 2010 stat line to that of his 2009 one, you'll find three big differences.  His homers, his walks and his strikeouts.  Jason Bay has altered his hitting program (I'm looking at you Mr. Johnson) which entails him putting many more balls in play instead of being the high walk and high strikeout rate power hitter he has always been.  While watching Saturday's Mets game against the Dodgers I noticed something about Bay I had never noticed before.  Both his singles were groundballs pulled through the 5-6 hole.  It dawned on me.  Had Jason Bay been hitting lots of groundball singles to his pull field and fewer fly balls?  I quickly went to the invaluable FanGraphs website and checked if I had gone crazy or if my gut was onto something.  Lo and behold my gut was right.

Season	Split	BB%	K%	BB/K	OBP	SLG	OPS	ISO	BABIP	wRC	wRAA	wOBA	wRC+
2009	as R to Left	0.0 %	0.0 %	0.00	.441	.912	1.353	.466	.363	61.7	38.3	.566	254
2009	as R to Center	0.0 %	0.0 %	0.00	.342	.670	1.011	.322	.294	23.0	9.0	.421	159
2009	as R to Right	0.0 %	0.0 %	0.00	.267	.533	.800	.267	.214	7.7	0.4	.337	103

Season	Split	BB%	K%	BB/K	OBP	SLG	OPS	ISO	BABIP	wRC	wRAA	wOBA	wRC+
2010	as R to Left	0.0 %	0.0 %	0.00	.360	.439	.798	.079	.354	15.8	2.5	.351	120
2010	as R to Center	0.0 %	0.0 %	0.00	.406	.681	1.087	.266	.394	21.7	10.5	.460	193
2010	as R to Right	0.0 %	0.0 %	0.00	.196	.531	.727	.327	.146	4.7	-1.3	.293	81

 If you look at his numbers to each field you'll notice that the only big difference is to his pull field, while centerfield and rightfield have essentially stayed the same.  Jason Bay's wRC+ has dropped an astounding 134 points while his wOBA is also down a ton.  While the drop in OBP is nothing to sneeze at, the drop in ISO (Isolated Power) is frightening.  Let's look at Jason Bay's batted balls to try to get a better picture.

Season	Split	GB/FB	LD%	GB%	FB%	IFFB%	HR/FB	IFH%	BUH%	Pitches	Balls	Strikes
2009	as R to Left	1.65	22.6 %	48.2 %	29.2 %	3.5 %	42.1 %	9.6 %	0.0 %	629	216	413
2009	as R to Center	0.29	13.7 %	19.7 %	66.7 %	9.0 %	10.3 %	8.7 %	0.0 %	375	118	257
2009	as R to Right	0.15	9.8 %	11.5 %	78.7 %	20.8 %	8.3 %	0.0 %	0.0 %	224	82	142

Season	Split	GB/FB	LD%	GB%	FB%	IFFB%	HR/FB	IFH%	BUH%	Pitches	Balls	Strikes
2010	as R to Left	3.35	23.7 %	58.8 %	17.5 %	0.0 %	5.0 %	16.4 %	0.0 %	359	109	250
2010	as R to Center	0.45	19.8 %	25.0 %	55.2 %	1.9 %	3.8 %	4.2 %	0.0 %	313	106	207
2010	as R to Right	0.04	7.8 %	3.9 %	88.2 %	22.2 %	6.7 %	0.0 %	0.0 %	174	59	115

 Wow.  Jason Bay has morphed into Luis Castillo, pounding 58.8% of his pulled batted balls into the ground.  About 10% of his flyballs to leftfield have turned into groundballs  which is awful and can help explain his loss in homeruns.  The more flyballs a hitter hits, the more extra base hits and homeruns he'll have.  Jason Bay, being a pull hitter, has to raise that FB% to leftfield back up to around 30% if he wants to get his power back.  But something else is also manifesting itself in these numbers.  It looks like Jason Bay just isn't hitting the ball with as much authority as he was last year.  If you look at his HR/FB% you'll notice the crazy 37% drop.  Can this be attributed solely to luck or is there something else going on here?  Jason Bay is probably suffering from some kind of combination of not hitting enough flyballs along with not hitting the ball as far, playing in Citi Field as opposed to Fenway Park and some tough luck.  Here are a couple graphs from TexasLeaguer.com and a couple from HitTrackerOnline.com hat will hopefully help us come to a conclusion. (2009 on left, 2010 on right)

Where the 2009 data has a large cluster of light green (denoting a hit) in deep leftfield the 2010 data has an empty space of dark green (denoting unoccupied space on the spray chart).  This supports Jason Bay's extremely low HR/FB% this season, Jason Bay just isn't hitting the ball as hard as he was one season ago.  Last season, being a power and a pull hitter, Jason Bay hit the vast majority of his home runs to leftfield.  This season three of his six homers have been hit to rightfield.  Also, as shown on Greg Rybarczyk's website Hit Tracker Online, Jason Bay's "average speed of bat" for his home runs have decreased on average by 2.2 MPH.  I don't know if this is siginificant but it still sheds some light on our Jason Bay dilemma.  So now that it is pretty clear that Jason Bay is hitting the ball with less authority this season after hitting 36 homers last season, the question is why'd he change his approach?  After all the famous mantra states "if it ain't broke don't fix it".  So why did Jason Bay try to fix a non-existent problem?  We can theorize all day long.  One possibility is that he was scared he wouldn't be able to produce big enough power numbers given the fact that Citi Field suppresses the home run, or it could be Howard Johnson got to him (see Wright, David 2009), or it could be something else entirely.  The question I want to answer is how did this happen?

Season	Team	O-Swing%	Z-Swing%	Swing%	O-Contact%	Z-Contact%	Contact%	Zone%	F-Strike%	SwStr%
Total *	- - -	20.1 %	63.9 %	42.4 %	51.3 %	81.1 %	74.2 %	50.9 %	57.3 %	10.8 %
2009	Red Sox	20.1 %	63.1 %	40.7 %	48.5 %	79.4 %	71.5 %	47.9 %	57.6 %	11.3 %
2010	Mets	27.0 %	65.6 %	45.7 %	57.8 %	81.0 %	73.9 %	48.4 %	57.6 %	11.7 %

As shown on the graph, Jason Bay has not only increased his O-Swing rate by 7% he has also increased his O-Contact rate by 9%.  So while Jason Bay is making more contact in 2010, he is making weaker and poorer contact. Weak, poor contact generally leads to soft hit groundballs, so this looks to be the reason for the increase in GB% to Jason Bay's pull field, leftfield.  This has led to a lower flyball rate to leftfield, his power field, which has effectively lowered Bay's power production to his pull field, thus leading to many fewer homeruns.  So as you can see, everything in baseball can be traced back to plate discipline.  The difference between the power hitting Jason Bay and the slap hitting Jason Bay is essentially taking seven more pitches thrown outside the strike zone every hundred pitches.  These few pitches afford him the opportunity to wait for a pitch to drive and hit a flyball off of, equating to more home runs, instead of going out of the strike zone and making poor contact and hitting more groundballs.  These slight changes for Jason Bay could be the difference between the power hitting, high OBP monster and the slap hitting 2010 version the Mets got.  So Jason, try to be more patient, wait for your pitches and make sure to hit lots of flyballs to leftfield, even if it means striking out more.  Oh, and for the future don't listen to Howard Johnson.    

REFERENCES

-Fangraphs.com (the tables)

-TexasLeaguer.com (the balls in play spray charts)

-HitTrackerOnline.com (the home run spray charts)