So I have this big spreadsheet with all sorts of data from the 2011 campaign for pitchers that I was using for my previous post on the quality starts rule change, and I sit here looking at it and saying to myself, "Is 1 post all that I can really derive from such a wealth of data? So many columns were unused! So many metrics undiscovered and unreported on! There must be something more." Well, it turns out that there is more (yes, I know it is hard to believe that a huge spreadsheet could yield more than a pithy analysis of quality starts). Behold: Your More!
There were a number of times last year when I would be playing one of you punks and I would check out the MLB score before bed and see that a team facing an opposing fantasy team's pitcher put up a monster number of runs. Cheered, I would drift off to a troubled sleep with dreams filled with zombies and awkward moments. It would only be in the morning that I checked the box scores and noticed that, despite giving up 7 runs, the offending pitcher was only charged with 1 as his defense failed him. I understand the rules of earned versus unearned runs (actually, I sort of don't, they seem to shift like the desert's sands), but really, when a pitcher loads them up and then gives an error clears the bases, how can he get so few earned! I feel like those pitchers had their ERAs artificially lowered and are, in fact, worse pitchers than their ERAs say. The pitcher (who played on a team in our league) who gave up the highest percentage of unearned runs was Jaime Garcia (Dykstra), who gave up 100 runs but was only charged with only 77 of them, hanging fully 23% on the defense. Had those runs been earned, he would have been saddled with with a 4.63 uERA (Unearned Run Average) rather than the 3.55 ERA that he posted. The Cardinals, in fact, were the worst defensive team in terms of supporting their starting pitchers with only 87.3% of the total runs given up by their starters being charged to them. Next was Johnny Cueto (Peachz), with 21% of runs on the defense (51 given up versus 40 charged) bringing his uERA to a still-pretty-good 2.94 rather than 2.30. Third was Matt Garza (Bernie) who had 18% of his runs caused by the defense (90 given up versus 73 charged) having a Mendoza-Linian 4.09 uERA versus his serviceable 3.31 ERA. On the flip side, the pitchers who were big earners were Esmil Rodgers (Bernie), Phil Hughes (Ackbar), and Travis Wood (Ackbar) who earned every single one of their runs. In the "actual decent pitchers" category, Cole Hamels' (Ackbar) defense only fudged 1 run for him and Ian Kennedy's (Peachz) only 2. Think about that for a second: those two guys were aces in every sense of the word except for the actual definition, but if 8% of their runs been charged to the defense (the league average), their ERAs would be 2.60 for Hamels (versus 2.79) and 2.71 for Kennedy (versus 2.87). For Hamels, this is to be expected as the Phillies defense was the most supportive of their starters with fully 95.1% of the runs that the starters gave up being earned. Kennedy was another story with the DBack pitchers having a middle-of-the-pack 92.1% of runs charged to their starters. Do you remember when Ian Kennedy came up from the minors? What a mess he was in New York. WTF Ian Kennedy?
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