To be honest, I’ve been pretty disengaged about the fight for home field advantage in the AL East. According to our research in Baseball Between the Numbers, the home team wins a whopping 51.5% of the time in a 5-game series, and 51.3% of the time in a 7-game series, assuming that it is of equal quality to the road team; that’s what the Red Sox and Yankees are fighting for. All of the interesting baseball left to be played in the last ten days of the regular season resides in the National League.
Usually, not watching a particular team’s games is a disadvantage to a baseball analyst. At other times however the 30,000-foot view can be helpful. Take for the example the case of Eric Gagne, who from reading the blogosphere and a couple messages in my inbox, would seem to be the worst idea in Boston since the Big Dig.
Here is a breakdown of Gagne’s key peripheral indicators in Boston and Texas:
Team K% BB% GB/FBQERABABIP
Texas 21.8% 9.0% 1.19 3.76 .236
Boston 21.4% 10.0% 0.67 4.35 .468
In the two most reliable indicators of pitching performance — strikeout and walk rate — Gagne has been exactly the same pitcher in Boston that he was in Texas. And that is a pitcher with decent but unremarkable talent. The 2002-2004 Eric Gagne was incredibly good. The 2007 version is — I don’t know — a rich man’s Ryan Dempster.
Now, it’s not like Ryan Dempster is great shakes. But Gagne is not nearly as bad as his ERA suggests. His GB/FB ratio has deteriorated in Boston, leading to a somewhat higher QERA, but he’s faced all of 70 batters since moving to Beantown. Essentially the entire reason for the rise in his ERA is that his BABIP has increased from .236 in Texas to .468 in Boston.
I’m fairly certain that if I were a Red Sox junkie, watching the team play every day, I’d come up with a way to rationalize the BABIP jump away as something other than a statistical fluke. Maybe Gagne is tipping his pitches, or maybe curveball isn’t breaking very much, or whatever. But more likely, his opponents are simply doing an unusually and unsustainably good job of hitting it where they ain’t. There may be scouting evidence that Eric Gagne is not the same pitcher in September that he was in June. But there is little or no statistical evidence based on an informed reading of his numbers.
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