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December 13, 2012 In A PickleWinners and Losers of Winning and LosingPsst. I've got charts. You want charts? C'mere. Look. Look at this chart.
You like that? Oh, you don't know what that is? I should have put axis labels. Each dot represents a starting pitcher who pitched for just one team in 2012. (The restriction is because I'm bad at doing spreadsheets and databases, not for any research design reason. As you'll see, I'm not doing rigorous work, so this doesn't really matter.) On the x-axis is the overall win percentage of that pitcher's team. On the y-axis is the win percentage of the pitcher's team in his starts. (I would be happy to hear your arguments that I should have flip-flopped these axes. I mean that. I couldn't decide which of the variables I was treating as the dependent one.) It's kind of a stupid chart, though. Why is it a stupid chart? Mainly because it includes a bunch of pitchers who only started once or twice or thrice, which junks things up. Let's try this again.
That's better! That's pitchers with at least 10 starts on the season. Look at that r squared—I almost tripled it! That's a nice, attractive fit (as baseball fits go) between whether your team wins games and whether your team wins games that you pitch. Here, have one more before I get to the actual point.
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Terrific article, but I'm not sure how much of an outlier Jaime Garcia really was. His home-road splits are dramatic: 3.01 xFIP at home, 3.40 on the road.
I don't know how that translated to wins and losses for the Cards, but it was something the fans and media talked about every time he lost on the road.
First, this depends on your choice of metric. Garcia actually had identical FRA at home and on the road.
Second, I think dramatic oversells it. The league put up a 3.90 xFIP at home and 4.14 on the road. An extra 0.15 runs (or "runs" I guess since we're in estimator territory) doesn't strike me as a big deal.
In any case, a 3-8 road record vs. 5-4 at home does explain, in a sense, why his team's record was so bad when he pitched, but limiting him to the road still makes him an outlier -- a 3.40 xFIP is excellent! You'd expect a very good team like the Cardinals to go more than 3-8 when their starter gives them a 3.40 xFIP.
Thanks Jason. You're right that I wasn't considering league-wide context. Still, if you were a Cardinals fan who watched some of those games ...