Perspective.
peter · August 10, 2005 at 1:02 pm · Filed Under Mariners
Jamie Moyer – 22 starts, 134.1 innings, 20.0 VORP
Ryan Franklin – 20 starts, 132.2 innings, 16.9 VORP
Felix Hernandez – 2 starts, 13.0 innings, 6.5 VORP
Jeff Harris – 1 start, 10.2 innings, 4.0 VORP
Gil Meche – 23 starts, 128.1 innings, 0.1 VORP
Joel Pineiro – 20 starts, 123.2 innings, 0.0 VORP
Aaron Sele – 21 starts, 116 innings, 0.0 VORP
Sample size, schmample size. In just two starts, Felix is now the M’s third best starting pitcher on the year.
Comments
63 Responses to “Perspective.”
My favorite Felix stat through two starts? His groundball/flyball ratio is 5.4 to 1. How crazy is that? The highest G/F rate in the majors among starting pitchers is Brandon Webb at 3.91. Felix’s G/F rate is 38 percent better than the major league leader.
By the end of the year, in less than half the starts of these guys, he’ll probably have the best VORP if these two starts are any indication.
It’s also funny to see Jeff Harris after “1 1/2″ starts is 4th best.
How is Pineiro not in negative territory? I must review how VORP is calculated…
Even “funnier” to see Ryan Franklin at numero dos.
This was probably hinted at in another post…
I was at the game last night, and what impressed me most (well, ok maybe besides the 97 mph’er) was his defensive skills. He’s not just going to rack up Cy Youngs, he’s going to get some Gold Gloves. The 5th inning, when he fielded the sacrifice bunt, spun around and nailed the lead runner at 3rd was sweet! The cardinal rule of fielding is never let the pitcher go for the ball, but looks like we don’t have to worry about Felix. (I guess that’s a really good thing given his ground ball ratio.)
He fielded 4 ground balls and covered first on another one. The best was the one just after Beltre’s error to load the bases. “If you can’t get something done right, DO IT YOURSELF!”
Funnier still that Campillo ranks in the top 5 (1.3).
Pineiro & Meche… ouch!
As this shows, Franklin is a lot more valuable than many fans think.
Campillo’s in the top 5? What?
Actually, no it doesn’t. Franklin’s still a bad bad bad major league starting pitcher. VORP is unable to seperate out what Franklin is responsible for and what his defense is responsible for.
And, when a rookie is threatening to pass you in a counting stat even though you’ve pitched 5 times as many games (it should take about 3 more starts for Felix’s VORP to catch Franklin), you’re not doing well.
Franklin has been the second most productive pitcher on the team so far. Given his competition, that’s not saying much.
I was really interested in how this could be the case, so I cracked my BP books to figure out what VORP for pitchers really means. Now that I understand (somewhat), I am less excited about Felix as I am appalled at the rest of our pitching staff. Everyone knows they’re bad, but…ouch.
Felix is so good that I’m going to drive to Safeco from Spokane on Monday to catch his start. On top of that I’m going to drive home the same night so I can go to work Tuesday morning. I’ll gladly go on 4 hours sleep to watch the King.
I even heard him called King Felix on a Spokane radio station and it was NOT a sports channel. The King has now taken on it’s own life.
It’ll be interesting to see the season’s calculation for “Win Probability Added” for Franklin, and how that measures up against his VORP. I’m not by any means a stats guy, but the WPA is an interesting one I’ve been following at Lookout Landing.
A quick summary of the season so far, according to Win Probability Added (aka Win Expectency) can be found in the game recap for Monday’s game over at Lookout Landing.
Forgive me if this is repeated but i just didn’t have time to read all the comments. But after two outings by Felix, one including an outstanding one giving him a win. Let’s hope he doesn’t get worn out much like the careers of Piniero and Meche seem to be going. And for love of god, get this kid more run-support!
Now if we can just get the monkeys on KJR to drop the whole “Felix the Cat” bullsh*t and call him by his real nickname, we might have something.
Well, I’d hate to see “Felix the Cat” stick, but if it did he would be a “wonderful, wonderful cat.”
The only problem with the “The King Felix” nick name is the “King James”….but either way, I still like it.
Last night, watching the MLB webcast of the game here in NC, was one of the more enjoyable baseball experiences of my life.
But we are going insane.
This kid has to overcome a mountain of precedent which says, almost unequivocally, that pitchers break, especially 19 year old pitchers who throw 100 MPH. The ancient Greek word for happiness was ‘eudaimonia’ and they thought that you could not count someone ‘eudaimon’ until he/she had died, given how we are often subject to unpredictable disaster. I hope that we will be able to look back 25 years from now on a happy and long career for this amazing kid. But until that time, I’m just going to treasure each and every start this kid makes as if it were his last.
I mean…F…we already had Felix Fermin who was “el gato”. Isn’t that enough?? A manchild of Felix’s talents deserves something much more…something of royalty.
I love when people in the media feel a need to answer every question posed of them as if they are some expert. Yesterday a local SLC TV personality referred to Ryan Franklin as “a rising star for the Mariners.†I would hate to hear his thoughts on “The Igniter.â€Â
PositivePaul, BP tracks a statistic that is very similiar to what Jeff at Lookout Landing is doing. It judges players on each individual game rather than thier overall numbers and considers a whole bunch of different factors (like the quality of opposing hitters). It’s called SNLVAR, and measures how many wins a player is worth above replacement. Here’s how the M’s starters rate:
Moyer 2.8
Franklin 2.5
Sele 1.7
Meche 1.4
Piniero .7
Hernandez .7
For reference, the best AL pitcher is Roy Halladay who is worth 6.2 wins and the best pitcher in baseball is Roger Clemens at 7.9 wins.
They also have stat for relievers that does the same thing, and not surprisingly Guardado leads Mariner relievers (and all our pitchers) with 3.7 wins above replacement.
Re: 20, the Greeks were undoubtedly right, but on the other hand what else do we M’s fans have to do backflips over besides a 19 year-old Venezuelan kid who can throw a baseball through the side of a Bradley AFV (at least he can *this* week)?
Management ought to print out some of these threads and bury them in a coffee can in the back yard for about 5 years and see how all this euphoria (dang those Greek roots get around, don’t they?) looks in retrospect.
#23 — thanks for sharing. I can certainly see some of the limitations of WE/WPA, and it’s nice to know that similar, more contextual measurements exist.
Would someone mind outlining how VORP is calculated? or point me in the direction of the description? Thanks!
I realize this is probably a wacky idea, but here goes. If the team can manage to keep The King healthy, they should look at how they handled him (versus all his predecessors) and, I don’t know, maybe…copy it with future prospects? I realize this is a totally wacky idea, like that Spiderman 2 promo on the bases, but still…..
That does seem like a conservative number cited in post 23 — if I understand it correctly, if you had a starting rotation of 6 Roger Clemens you would expect 48 wins more than if you had a ‘replacement’ level rotation? Or put another way, if you had 6 Clemens, you would expect your starters to have a combined total of 38 more wins than the current M’s staff (my gut feel is, the gap should be much wider)? Or do I not understand how the thing is supposed to work or is my gut just wrong?
#20:
What is that “mountain of precedent”.? How many 19 year-old pitchers have their been, total, who have thrown 100 MPH? And of those, how many “broke”? And how does that breakage rate compare with 19 year old pitchers who throw 95 mph?
I ask because I am not aware of any mountain of precedent. In fact, if you look at history, pitchers who debut in MLB before age 21 are far more likely to have productive careers than pitchers who debut in their mid-20′s.
I don’t know why you say 6 Clemens because teams use a 5-man rotation. But right now Clemens is on pace to have an SNLVAR of 11.3 which would be the fifth best since 1972. Our best pitcher, on the other hand, is on pace be worth 4.1 wins. That’s just over a third as valuable as Clemens. That seems like a big difference to me.
It’s a bit more abstract than that. Those 48 wins assume league-average run-support and fielding.
But, if you want to add 48 wins you’re adding them to the accepted total for a fully replacement level team, which is 49. So, if you had a team that was entirely replacement level and added a rotation of Roger Clemens, you’d have a team that still managed fewer than 97 wins, because Clemens wouldn’t actually get all those wins due to his replacement-level fielding, bullpen, and run-support.
You’d probably want to look at something like WARP if you wanted to work out how many wins a pitcher was worth on his own.
Evan, your first two paragraphs are right, but I don’t get your last sentence. SNLVAR is specifically meant measure a pitchers value on his own merits (although like most pitching stats, it doesn’t do a good job of separating pitching from defense). I would say it’s better than WARP because it relies on play-by-play data.
ESPN looked at this a few days ago, and the record of the last wave of teenage pitchers, from the sixties and seventies, was not good.
Personally, I know the odds are in some ways stacked against Hernandez, but that isn’t going to stop me from hoping he beats the odds and taking joy in his performance as long as he’s doing it.
I don’t believe either of those stats incorporates play by play information.
“I don’t believe either of those stats incorporates play by play information.”
The Support Neutral stats do.
It was my understanding that the Support Neutral stats use play by play information at least as far as what the base-out situation is when a starter exits a game, to determine how many of his bequeathed runners “should” score. Beyond that, though, I don’t remember any other use of play by play information in the support neutral stats, and I guess some might not even consider that to be play by play information.
Sorry, should have been clearer. To measure the effect of defense, though, rather than game situation, neither SN stats or WARP use play-by-play information.
I think Support-Neutral stats do, too.
I’ll admit I got a bit muddy, there. What I was trying to say was that adding SNLVAR to a replacement-level win total was problematic because it assumed league-average support from fielding, bullpen, and offense, and yet it’s calculated as AR – above replacement – which necessarily precludes anything league-average.
So, by adding the full SNLVAR total you’re mangling the whole replacement level baseline. Adding Roger Clemens to a replacement-level team doesn’t get you 7.9 wins, but Clemens does provide 7.9 wins worth of pitching (assuming league-average support).
I find the support-neutral stats are most useful for constructing objective win-loss records, but it’s too ugly a stat to just add win totals together.
Yeah, well none of those stats measure how much the Twins’ knees buckled when The Royal Curveball dropped through the strike zone. THAT makes Mariners baseball fun to watch again.
OK, one more useless knowledge-bit:
“Felix” is a Latin word that can be translated as “lucky.”
Just one more point. You could add the totals if you were working from a team baseline that had a replacement-level starting rotation but was otherwise entirely league-average, but I don’t know what sort of record that team would have.
The Royal Curveball
This slays me. Too funny and too true. I think this phrase must be â„¢ as soon as possible.
The Royal Curveballâ„¢
There, I like that.
The Royal Curveball
There, that’s what I really meant.
fingers crossed, hoping html skills have not let me down for the color.
Sorry for the bandwidth sucking multiple posts in a short time period.
forget it.
Nice! The Royal Curve Ball ! That’s as good as “Mr. Snappy”
Once upon a time the Mariners rotation was Randy Johnson and 4 chumps. Hopefully we are not seeing a rotation next year of Felix and 4 chumps.
Isn’t that the rotation right now?
And another and more common translation of the Latin ‘felix’ is ‘happy’. May both senses of the word work out for the young man. And thanks for the illuminating discussion on SNLVAR and related ratings.
Well chit. Delete that one. I’ll do an href instead:
Fear Bucky
Hah. I give up. At least the link worked.
Well, actually, a healthy Felix, one decent player and three chumps will get you into a playoff race, methinks….
““Felix†is a Latin word that can be translated as “lucky.—
He seems anything but. I heard rumors that Ryan actually meant lucky.
“Well, actually, a healthy Felix, one decent player and three chumps will get you into a playoff race, methinks….”
Well, even if Felix wins every time he goes out, we’re only .200
#53, yes … but if Felix goes 15-5 and the rest of the staff can manage to keep it at .500 we’ll have 86 wins. If we can help the rotation with a FA quality starter, that doesn’t seem so far fetched.
ESPN looked at this a few days ago, and the record of the last wave of teenage pitchers, from the sixties and seventies, was not good.
Often times those pitchers were brought up almost straight out of high school and put in the rotation more as a publicity stunt than because they were accomplished pitchers. Felix has been a professional baseball player for more than 2 years now and is up not solely to sell tickets, but is up because he is the best pitcher on the staff. They’re comparing apples to oranges.
#54, why do you think the rest of the lineup is suddenly going to be able to go .500?
26. I have the same question. I have read a lot about this, but still don’t understand it. It posits an average AAA player, and I don’t know how they calculate that.
26. I have the same question. I have read a lot about this, but still don’t understand it. It posits an average AAA player, and I don’t know how they calculate that.
What? No it doesn’t.
About calculating replacement-level. As far as I know, there isn’t a detailed explanation on the web. However, in the 2002 Baseball Prospectus book there is supposed to be an article explaining it. I know that’s not what anyone wanted to hear, but I don’t think there is a better answer.
I’m going to have to add this to the FAQ.
VORP, as a general concept, is
((runs/PA) – (replacement position runs/PA))*PA
You can calculate the runs in whatever way you want, and define replacement level runs in whatever way you want.
Now, as to how BP and, specifically, how Keith or Clay calculates replacement level… that’s another thing entirely.
Wait – I thought “young fireballers” were the type that had the best shot at long careers, and that “young crafty pinpoint control guys” (Meche, Pineiro) were the least likely, as a group, to succeed.
This was a Bill James study from one of the late 80s Abstracts, someone must know what became of it now and whether it needed updating.
Another way of putting this, is look at the Similarity Scores on baseball-reference.com. Look at Meche or Pineiro, and find 10 chumps for most similar pitchers — even before this year. No hall of famers. I remember checking Pineiro after his 16-4 season and being amazed to find nobody really good. A bunch of guys with early promise who fizzled, like Lynn McGlothen, Ben McDonald, Rick Rhoden and Jim Lonborg dot the list. He manages to be ‘most similar’ to Juan Marichal at age 24, but thats it. The only hall of famer in the bunch he resembles. And he fixes that by age 25, he’s back to being more like scrubs.
Meche’s is even worse. He manages to be ‘most similar’ to not one but two awful except for one season White Sox pitchers of the late 70s, Chris Knapp and Richard “280Z” Dotson. I remember Dotson went 22-7 one year but had an awful strat card. I think thats Meche’s high side.
So it’ll be fun by the end of the year to run numbers on Felix Hernandez and watch as a bunch of guys like Tom Seaver and Sam McDowell suddenly show up on his comparisons list. Not all will be hall of famers. Some will be tragic comps. Which of course is obvious, but I think the research I am aware of shows young fireballers have a much greater shot at long careers than young guys getting by on location and timing alone.
Speaking of PERSPECTIVE, as in, “Let’s try to keep things in…”
While thoughts of WALTER JOHNSON and ROGER CLEMENS rumble through my head, I also think of SMOKEY JOE WOOD and DAVE FERRIS.
Here’s SABR’s bio of BILL JAMES (the early 20th Century pitcher).
http://tinyurl.com/ah8kr