November 9, 2005

Prospectus Today

Mistake #1

by Joe Sheehan

I'm working on a long report from my trip to the Arizona Fall League and Baseball HQ's First Pitch Arizona, but that's not ready to go up just yet. Suffice to say it was a great weekend, and I'll get the full story to you before this week is out.

Today, though…today, I just want to vent.

Yesterday, Bartolo Colon was announced as the 2005 AL Cy Young Award winner. The vote wasn't unanimous, but it did clearly place Colon at the top of the field; he garnered 17 first-place votes and was in the top two on every single ballot. Meanwhile, the best pitcher in the league, Johan Santana, got just three first-place votes and found himself left off of five ballots, coming in third behind Colon and Mariano Rivera.

Setting aside Rivera--comparing relievers and starters isn't easy, and closers tend to pop up in fractured votes like this one--here are the lines for the two starters:

          W-L   ERA    RA     IP   VORP  SNLVAR   K/9  K/BB  OPS  HR/9
Colon    21-8  3.48  3.74  223.2   51.1     6.7  6.35  3.65  695  1.04
Santana  16-7  2.87  2.98  232.2   73.0     7.6  9.25  5.29  594   .85

There's no mystery here. The reason for the disparity is because Colon was credited with 21 wins, while Santana did everything a pitcher can do better than Colon did. He threw more innings while allowing fewer runs (a gap that expands when you consider all runs scored against the two). He struck out men at a higher rate and walked fewer. He allowed fewer home runs. He allowed a much lower opponents' OPS, a figure only somewhat mitigated by pitching in front of a better defense than Colon had behind him.

Note the phrasing "credited with 21 wins," because that’s the entire ball of wax. Pitcher wins are a scoring construct dating from the late 19th century, when pitchers completed the vast majority of their starts. They haven't been a useful statistic for at least a half-century, maybe more, or ever since relief pitching became a signficant factor in the game. If the relationship between wins and quality of pitching was once close enough to warrant using the former as a metric, it's not remotely the case any longer, as pitchers are almost always subject to the performance of their bullpen.

Even if relievers weren't an issue, run support would be, and there's no longer any excuse for ignoring it. This isn't 1975, when you had to guess; the number of a runs a team scores for a pitcher is public knowledge, and available in any number of places. We know that the infamous "pitching to the score" doesn't materially affect ERA (throwing more strikes may lead to home runs, but the lowered walk rate cancels out the effect), and in any case, neither Colon nor Santana was working with a lot of 7-0 leads. We also know that pitchers on the same team can see vastly different run support over the course of a season, for no reason other than chance. There's no connection between the quality of a pitcher and the support he receives.

The rest of this article is restricted to Baseball Prospectus Subscribers. Not a subscriber? Click here for more information on Baseball Prospectus subscriptions or use the buttons to the right to subscribe and get access to the best baseball content on the web.

Cancel anytime. That's a 33% savings over the monthly price! That's a 33% savings over the monthly price! Already a subscriber? Click here and use the blue login bar to log in.