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September 24, 2009

Fab Fours

Picking the Best Playoff Rotations

by Christina Kahrl

Using Support-Neutral Winning Percentage to describe which team's starters have done the most to produce victory for their teams makes ranking the best playoff rotations a relatively straightforward exercise. Here are rotations ranked by unit-wide performances on the year, using the expected 2009 playoff teams, and ranked by SNWP and SNLVAR, which adjusts for lineup variations and value-added over replacement level.

Team        SNWP    SNLVAR
Cardinals   .535     22.5
Dodgers     .534     22.5
Rockies     .515     19.8
Phillies    .511     19.5
Tigers      .511     18.4
Red Sox     .503     17.7
Angels      .499     15.8
Yankees     .492     15.5
Twins       .492     14.8

However, the postseason's a very different animal from the full season's marathon; depth gets you to October, but in theory sheer quality—or the convenient, random great game from an Anthony Reyes or a Jeff Weaver—propels you to a title. In the post-season fifth starters go to the bullpen, so whomever the club's four likely picks wind up being for their playoff rotations, that quartet winds up being the men who matter. Then there's the question of whether or not the Rockies will have the benefit of Aaron Cook, for example; if injury knocks him out of action for the post-season, are the Rockies anywhere as good as the full-season numbers suggest? Keeping all of that in mind, let's simplify things by looking just at the combined SNWP mark for the probable front fours of each of these nine teams:

Team        SNWP   The Front Four
Cardinals   .575   Chris Carpenter, Adam Wainwright, Joel Pineiro, Kyle Lohse
Tigers      .562   Justin Verlander, Edwin Jackson, Rick Porcello, Jarrod Washburn
Red Sox     .561   Josh Beckett, Jon Lester, Clay Buchholz, Tim Wakefield
Phillies    .558   Cliff Lee, Cole Hamels, Joe Blanton, Pedro Martinez
Dodgers     .545   Randy Wolf, Clayton Kershaw, Chad Billingsley, Hiroki Kuroda
Rockies     .527   Ubaldo Jimenez, Jason Marquis, Aaron Cook, Jorge De La Rosa
Angels      .524   John Lackey, Jered Weaver, Scott Kazmir, Joe Saunders
Yankees     .520   CC Sabathia, A.J. Burnett, Andy Pettitte, Joba Chamberlain
Twins       .514   Scott Baker, Nick Blackburn, Carl Pavano, Brian Duensing

Essentially, that just tells us what we already sort of expected—the Cardinals are the class of the field, the Tigers, Red Sox, and Phillies make a tightly grouped second tier, and the Angels, Rockies, and Yankees are all roughly equal. Admittedly, this exercise credits fourth starters overmuch—they'll only ever start one game in any post-season series, after all. However, that said, some notes about some of the teams, and to explain some of the selections and identify the impact of alternates:

• Tigers: Whether or not Jarrod Washburn's knee holds up actually ends up mattering very little, if only because a healthy Nate Robertson has been as effetive in his September spin in the rotation as Washburn has been on the entire year.

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