Pitcher, Deconstructed

In the first wave of sabermetrics, back in the days when pencil-necks with bad skin and no friends wiled away their solitary existences knee deep in notebooks, calculators and newspaper sports sections, the emphasis was on deconstructing the statistics we were familiar with -- e.g., RBIs, batting average and pitcher wins -- and demonstrating their unworthiness.

In the next wave, a growing cadre of socially-adjusting statheads examined context, recognizing that a home run hit in Dodger Stadium, or in 1968, or in a tie game, is worth more than a home run hit in Denver, or in 2002, or in a six-run game.

The third sabermetric epoch, which persists, is focused on the deconstruction of each individual play, which is now recorded for posterity in atomized detail for everyone to see instantly and simultaneously, in order to assess credit and blame for every result. How much responsibility do the batter, the pitcher, the shortstop, the centerfielder and dumb luck have for a given play. Clearly, the two fielders bear no responsibility for a home run, walk, strikeout or hit by pitch. But even those bear scrutiny between the hurler and hitter.

For years, we assigned blame to pitchers for walks and offered little, if any, kudos to the batter, who after all, simply lallygagged at the plate with the bat on his shoulders. We have since discovered that batters have very different abilities in that area and deserve vastly more credit for "earning" a free pass. (We've also come to realize that walks are enormously important.)

What about other kinds of plays that involve base runners and multiple fielders? Except for recording errors, the box score gives little notice to the defensive unit, and makes no effort at all to acknowledge luck. But recent research has demonstrated that defense and luck are big parts of the game. In fact, this generation of statheads -- Ivy League literature majors who run marathons and gather around the nation by the hundreds -- has found methods of analyzing every kind of batted ball (e.g., fly balls, line drives, grounders, pop-ups, etc.) and applying 100 years of past performance to determine how many of them should, on average and adjusted for ballpark and era, turn into hits. They then compare defensive units to the average and compute their defensive efficiency. 

Here's where it gets fun. Consider a ground ball hit with medium velocity between first and second. If the second-sacker is a slacker, the ball trickles into right field and the batter gets a hit that the pitcher surrenders. Suppose instead that the keystoner reads the swing and breaks to the ball, snares it, and flips to first for the out. Lousy at-bat, good pitching, even though the interaction was exactly the same.

Over the course of a game, and certainly a season, some infields will turn more of those grounders into outs than other will. Some outfields will run down more apparent gappers than others will. And some pitchers will be the beneficiaries while others will watch their ERAs balloon. Hence a recent development: defense-independent pitching statistics. Sabermetricians have attempted to glean the pitchers' responsibility from things like defense.

We still haven't accounted for luck. If the ground ball is six feet to the left, any second baseman makes the play. Three feet to the right, none does. Batters generally can't (absent the occasional Ichiro) so finely deliver their hits and pitchers are simply passive actors in those sorts of plays.

The recently discovered truth is that pitchers have a limited amount of control over what happens to balls put into play (that does not include fly balls that clear the fences), which is another way of saying that defense and luck are vastly under-appreciated (by the fans, but no longer by front offices, which have teams of SABR members crunching these sorts of numbers into nubby granules.) They've also discovered that since pitchers control home runs, walks and strikeouts (and HBP, for what little it's worth), that measuring those occurrences only is often more descriptive of a pitcher's performance. The math is stultifying, particularly if you're flummoxed by the profound complexities of single-digit addition, but suffice to say that if you want to predict which starter will pitch well this year, find a guy with a high strikeout-walk ratio and few home runs allowed last year, and ignore his W-L record and even his ERA.

Let's take the example of Tim Hudson's five and two-third inning outing against San Diego for the victorious Braves last night. The veteran righty recorded the win, surrendering just two runs, for an ERA of a 3.18. Bobby Cox is happy, no? Well, Hudson walked five batters, fanned no one and served up a dinger. He also got relief help from Kris Medlen when he ran into trouble in the sixth inning, and more bullpen support over the last three innings to preserve the win. He certainly wasn't fooling anyone, and Padre batters managed to hit safely at just a .261 rate on balls in play, much lower than the league average of .300 or so.

It's likely that Hudson benefited from some combination of strong defense behind him and good luck. He allowed 11 baserunners, including a double and home run, and probably should have relinquished another safety or two. The five free passes and the inability to strike anyone out has got to agitate Cox's digestive juices; he certainly can't be counting on a season of .261 BABIP against Hudson.

So? We still haven't completely divorced pitching results from all the extraneous factors at work in a game or a season, and much of the defensive measuring is still guesswork's second cousin. But scientific gains are made slowly and incrementally, and the information we have now about pitcher value is more illuminating than wins and ERA ever were.

b