One of the more noticeable changes in the Nationals pitching this season is that the starters are going deeper into games. Last season, the starters were 29th of 30 teams in innings pitched per game, on average recording only 15.5 outs per game. So far this year, they are averaging 18.2 outs per game (almost an additional inning per game), ranking 13th in MLB.
In general, this is a very positive development. It’s certainly good to have starters go deeper into games and place less stress on the relief staff. Jim Riggleman has accomplished this without ever running up large pitch counts.
Despite my general support for this change, I do think there are a few situations where it would have been better strategy to not try to keep the starter in quite so long. One example was in last night’s game, in which Tom Gorzelanny pitched against the Mets in New York. Although he allowed only one run in the first five innings, he had not been sharp—having allowed four walks and six hits. He had faced 24 batters and his pitch count was up to 99.
In the bottom of the sixth, trailing the Mets 1 to 0, he allowed a lead-off single to Scott Hairston, who advanced to second on a flyout by Ruben Tejada. Niese then struck out, and Gorzelanny faced Jose Reyes, who was two for three against him. This is where, in my opinion, it was time to go to the bullpen. The important consideration is that pitchers tend to pitch significantly worse the fourth time through the opposing lineup, as batters have become accustomed to their pitches.
To illustrate, so far this season opposing batters have hit .270 against Nats starters. In the fourth time through the lineup (admittedly a small sample of just 25 plate appearances), they’re hitting .333. Over larger samples, we see the same effect. Over Gorzelanny’s career as a starter, opponents have hit .267, but in the fourth time through the lineup, they’ve hit .288. For Liván Hernández‘s career (a much larger sample), opponents have hit .284 when he’s started, but .302 the fourth time through the lineup. The Book (by Tango, Lichtman, and Dolphin) documents that this is a systematic tendency.
Instead of lifting him, Riggleman had Gorzelanny issue an intentional walk to Reyes (a topic for another post sometime), and he then gave up a double to Justin Turner that scored both runners. Riggleman then lifted Gorzy, but the damage was done as the Nats now trailed 3–0. Of course, since the Nats ultimately were shut out, an earlier pitching change wouldn’t have made a difference. Nevertheless, I think it’s better strategy not to press a starter to continue when he’s allowed a baserunner and has started his fourth time through the lineup.
A similar situation took place in Hernández’s May 3 game against the Phillies, when he was left in the game after giving up a lead-off single to Victorino in the seventh inning (and fourth time through the lineup), trailing the Phils 2 to 1. Victorino advanced to second on an out and then scored on a single by Howard, before Riggleman lifted Liván. Another close game slipped further out of reach.
I’m not saying to never let a pitcher stay in for the fourth time through. I’m just saying—especially in a close game where the starter isn’t pitching sharply—to have a reliever ready and be ready to yank the starter at the first sign of trouble. Also, late in a close game, be willing to send in a pinch hitter for a pitcher (except maybe for Jason Marquis and Hernández, who seem to hit better than most of our bench). For example, in John Lannan‘s April 30 game against the Giants, he was allowed to bat in the bottom of the sixth of a 1–1 tie. In the seventh, he got into trouble and gave up the winning run (after another infamous intentional walk, this time to load the bases). I think the smart strategy would have been to lift him for a pinch hitter.
Ben Goessling of MASN on Sunday’s game against the Marlins:
By the time Jason Marquis took the mound for the second inning on Sunday, he had a six-run lead to play with against the Florida Marlins. That was in part because of an offense that hustled its way into a few runs in the early part of the first inning. But the biggest reason Marquis had a comfortable lead – and one of the main reasons the Nationals had done enough to beat the Marlins by the end of the first inning – was the pitcher himself.
His at-bat in the bottom of the first was a display of savvy hitting; he took two breaking balls from Javier Vazquez, knowing he’d get a fastball on the third pitch of his at-bat. And when Vazquez left it up in the zone, Marquis slapped it down the left field line against an outfield shifted well away from it. The double scored two runs, and though Marquis was thrown out trying to advance to third, the inning ended with Washington up 6-0.
Although NL pitchers don’t bat a lot, they do bat a couple of times per start, and their at bats count. A pitcher who can swing the bat, like Marquis or Liván Hernández, can add as much as half a win per season. WAR statistics—that is, “wins above replacement”—purport to be comprehensive measures of player value and should capture pitcher batting. While both fangraphs and baseball-reference sites show WAR for pitcher batting, there are problems with these data that render them less useful than they should be.
At fangraphs, the issue seems to be computational. Batting WAR for pitchers is not centered at zero, so pitchers who hit better than the average pitcher still have negative WAR. At this point in the 2011 season, only 10 pitchers have positive fWAR (led by J.A. Happ at 0.3), whereas 71 have negative fWAR. The total pitcher batting fWAR for the league is –14.0, or about a win per team. Conceptually, I think this should be zero—an NL pitcher is helping his team with the bat if he hits better than his average opposing pitcher. I don’t see how the fWAR numbers can be meaningfully interpreted—if they are added to the pitcher’s pitching WAR, NL pitchers would be at a big disadvantage to AL pitchers.
Fortunately, the other site, baseball-reference, seems to have pitching batting rWAR correctly centered around zero. My complaint there is that most table and leaderboards show pitching rWAR and a pitcher’s batting rWAR separately, without showing their sum, so batting WAR is often overlooked. For some uses of rWAR, this is a serious omission.
For example, if you just look at pitching rWAR, Walter Johnson (127.7) is third on the career leaderboard, behind Cy Young and Roger Clemens. But if you add in their batting rWAR, Johnson—an excellent hitter—moves up to 139.8, easily surpassing Clemens and nearly catching up with Young.
Pitcher batting should be routinely included in measures of pitcher value. The measure that excludes pitcher batting should be a supplementary measure, not the main measure.
According to Dave Sheinin of the Washington Post:
On the day Bryce Harper walked into the eye doctor’s office, he was, he would say later, “blind as a bat.” Keith Smithson, the Washington Nationals’ team optometrist, asked Harper to read an eye chart, then looked at him with astonishment and said, according to Harper: “I don’t know how you ever hit before. You have some of the worst eyes I’ve ever seen.”
That was on April 19. The next night, fitted with a new pair of contact lenses, Harper, batting just .231 at the time for the low-Class A Hagerstown Suns of the South Atlantic League, had a double and a single against the visiting Hickory Crawdads. The next night, he homered. And the night after that, he singled, doubled, homered and drove in six runs.
“It was like I was seeing in HD,” Harper said.
Suffice it to say Harper’s hi-def vision is a huge upgrade over standard-def. In 20 games since his visit to the eye doctor, Harper is hitting .480 (36 for 75) with a .547 on-base percentage and an .893 slugging percentage — with 7 homers, 10 doubles and 23 RBI.
Harper added:
“I needed [the contacts] in college,” he said. “But I tried them for a while in high school, and they gave me headaches really bad. So I just got by without them. But these are a new kind [of lenses], and they really help. The difference [in vision] is huge.”
Which has me wondering… The Nationals, like other major league teams, give players physical exams on the first day of spring training. That seems pretty obvious for a professional sport where the players are expected to engage in daily strenuous physical activity for a period of nearly eight months.
But don’t the exams include eye tests? Can they really be investing tens of millions of dollars in some of these players without doing regular eye exams? Come on, now.
The Nats lost last night’s game 6–5 in the tenth inning. Doug Slaten, pitching his third inning of a tied game, gave up the winning hit to Brian McCann. Why was Slaten, a LOOGY who normally works an inning or less, pitching his third inning? Jim Riggleman had already used Sean Burnett (who gave up the game-tying grand slam in the eighth). Todd Coffey had thrown 25 pitches the previous night, and both Tyler Clippard and Drew Storen had worked the last two nights and Riggleman wanted them to be available for Friday’s game.
There were, however, two other pitchers in the Nats bullpen who were well rested (both had last appeared on May 8, giving them three days of rest), but whom Riggleman did not consider using—Henry Rodriguez and Brian Broderick. Riggleman hasn’t been using either of them in high—or even medium—leverage situations. (The leverage index is a measure of the importance of the situation, where higher values usually represent late innings of close game, especially with runners on base. Riggleman has never brought Rodriguez into a game with a leverage index higher than 0.62; April 9 was the last time Broderick has been brought in with a leverage index higher than 0.72.)
While a team may be able to afford one pitcher in the bullpen who’s reserved for low leverage situations, having two pitchers that the manager doesn’t trust for close games isn’t tenable. Because Rodriguez is out of options and Broderick is a Rule V draft pick, the Nationals can’t move either player off the roster without potentially losing him.
Unfortunately, the situation has been predictable since the final 25-man roster decisions were made coming out of spring training. Two decisions, in particular, didn’t make sense to me.
Broderick may have impressed in spring training, but his minor league record didn’t suggest that he was ready for the majors. The Rule V draft may seem like a bargain, but the requirement that the player spend a full year on the 25-man roster often means that it’s false economy. In Broderick’s case, it was particularly baffling because there was only room for him on the roster due to Rodriguez going on the disabled list. Broderick was able to remain when Rodriguez came off the DA because Chad Gaudin replaced him, but when both Rodriguez and Gaudin become healthy, Mike Rizzo‘s plans for Broderick remain a mystery.
The other decision that didn’t make sense was carrying Matt Stairs on the 25-man roster. After allowing for a seven-man bullpen and a second catcher, there’s only room for four bench players. If one of them can’t field and can’t run the bases, then he’d better hit. And Stairs hasn’t been hitting. I don’t understand what Rizzo was thinking. Maybe he was hoping that Stairs would get hot and could be flipped for prospects. I suspect that the clock is already ticking and if he doesn’t start hitting soon, he’ll be released.
Rizzo has made some good moves as GM—the trade for Ramos looks brilliant and I really liked last year’s draft. But one of the most important responsibilities of a GM is to manage the25-man and 40-man rosters, and by signing marginal players who are out of options, rule V draftees, or otherwise unmovable, he’s been putting pressure on the rest of the team and, like last night, may have cost his team wins. In addition, good prospects, like Collin Balester and Cole Kimball are held back.
Roster spots are like valuable property that should not be wasted. Unfortunately, the Nationals seem to be wasting several spots, and it’s hurting the team.
Update: I notice that Ben Goessling and Adam Kilgore make some of these same points.
In Friday’s game, the stories were about strikeouts. Tyler Clippard nabbed the headlines, by striking out all six Marlins that he faced in the seventh and eighth innings, keeping the Nats alive in a tied ballgame and allowing them to win it in the tenth. Starter Jordan Zimmermann made some history himself in the second inning when he became the 42nd pitcher in MLB history to fan the side in nine straight pitches. On the other side, Ricky Nolasco struck out 11 Nationals, as the Nats struck out 17 times altogether in the 10-inning game. Altogether, 30 strikeouts were recorded by the two teams, representing half of the game’s 60 outs.
Elsewhere that same evening, Cliff Lee struck out 16 in a losing effort, as the Phillies fell to the Braves 5–0.
On Sunday, Washington’s lineup again swung their bats in futility, as Anibal Sanchez struck out 11, and the Nats whiffed 13 times. In this morning’s Nationals Journal, Adam Kilgore wrote about the Nats’ proclivity to strike out and their lack of home runs.
Among major league teams, only the Pirates (25.3%) have a worse strikeout rate than the Nationals (24.6%). The Nationals pitchers, on the other hand, have the lowest strikeout rate in the NL and rank 27th of the 30 major league teams. The strikeout problems of the Nats batters are certainly hurt by the other pitching they face in the division, with the Phillies pitchers ranking 1st in the majors in strikeouts, the Braves 6th, the Marlins 11th, and the Mets 17th.
I’d like to take a closer look at strikeouts to see if striking out is associated with some of the Nationals’ offensive woes. That’ll be part two (and maybe three or four) of this series. In this one, however, I thought I’d just take a look at what the distribution of batter strikeouts looks like and where the Nats players fit in that distribution.
From a long-run perspective, the most important Nationals story of the first few weeks of this season is that Bryce Harper is tearing up the South Atlantic League. Through 26 games, Harper’s batting line is .368/.466/.724, with 17 of his 32 hits going for extra bases, including 7 home runs. His 1.190 OPS leads the league, ahead of players most of whom are two to five years older.
The title of this post is a bit misleading, because I don’t have much to say about what needs to happen to get him to the majors. He needs to see more advanced pitchers and to work on his strikeouts. (16 walks and 20 strikeouts in 103 plate appearances isn’t bad, but those ratios generally get worse as a player moves up the ladder.) While he’s not ready for the majors yet, I don’t think he’s that far away.
When should a top prospect advance to the majors? If factors like years of team control and eligibility for super two arbitration didn’t weigh in, I’d say the prospect should advance as soon as he’s demonstrated that he’s better than the player he’s replacing. In Harper’s case, that’s Michael Morse, which isn’t too high a bar. In reality, though, the team has a strong incentive to slow the process down, hoping to extend a year of eligibility or at least to avoid super two arbitration.
We saw those financial incentives in effect last year with Stephen Strasburg. Coming out of spring training in 2010, I don’t think there was any question that Strasburg was major-league ready—indeed, he was already the best pitcher in the Nationals organization. Nevertheless, the story went out that a stint in the nimors was “needed” for his development (as if Harrisburg and Syracuse could teach him anything that he couldn’t learn in the majors), and everyone winked, knowing that the only real reasons were to give the team another year of service and to avoid super two arbitration.
If we lived in a world where those considerations didn’t matter (like the world that existed before free agency), I think it’s conceivable that Harper could be ready for the majors by late summer. I would have him skip high A and go straight to class AA. If he adapted well and produced, say an OPS of .950+ over 200+ plate appearances at AA without his strikeout/walk ratio deteriorating too badly, I would be ready to move him up to a full-time position with the big-league club. Mike Rizzo has made it clear, however, that Harper won’t be in the big leagues this year. Considering the relevant financial incentives, I don’t think the Nationals will consider advancing him to the majors before June 2012, thereby guaranteeing team control at least through 2018 and avoiding super two arbitration.
Now some blog discussions get a bit carried away with the idea of holding players back for strategic purposes. While sabermetrics may indicate that the “optimal” strategy is to keep Harper in the minors until his age 23 season, even minor league players are not chattel. While the public is willing to let teams delay advancing a player for perhaps half a season, they would not allow a team to keep a major league-ready player down for years.
It’s clear that Harper himself wants to get to the majors as soon as possible. If it could happen without hurting the team, I think almost all the fans would like that too. I know I’d rather have had Strasburg pitch those first 11 games for the Nats than for Harrisburg and Syracuse. Young prospects are exciting, especially for a team with little to root for except a hope in the future. I think that even the team, if the financial considerations could be worked around, would prefer to get their hot prospects up as soon as they’re ready—after all, it means more fans in the seats.
This gets me (at last) to the point of this article. When both parties to a contract (Harper and the Nationals) want something, but can’t arrange for it to happen, there’s an inefficiency. And I think that inefficiency could have been avoided if his contract had been written differently. While I’m not any kind of expert on player contracts, it seems to me that a contract could have been designed to remove the team’s incentives to slow the player’s progress.
Let’s say the team would prefer to keep control over the player until 2019, but the player wants to make the majors as soon as possible. Why not have a contract that gives the team options for the 2017 through 2019 seasons at a pre-negotiated salary. To compensate the player for potentially giving up a year or two of free agency, the team may have to kick in some additional guaranteed money for the player. It seems like some kind of contract along these lines could be mutually beneficial and help the young player get what he most wants—an unimpeded path to the majors.
Why haven’t these kind of contracts been negotiated already? I suspect the reason is that the agents (Scott Boras in the case of Harper) are concerned about how it might look to their other clients. Even though Harper might be delighted to give up a year or two of free agency in exchange for a quicker path to the majors, the agent’s other clients might see it as giving up too much to the team. I think this type of contract innovation would most likely have to come from a new agent, one who can focus on the aspirations of players who’ve been drafted, rather than on the more experienced players.
Wall Street and business schools have a plenty of experts on designing complex contracts to meet the needs of both parties. I hope that some of them can tackle the problem of designing contracts for newly drafted players to avoid baseball’s peculiar incentive to slow the advancement of its most promising young players.
One month into the season, we can take a look at the team’s record and some of the month’s highlights, leaders, and moments we’d rather forget.
Record:
12–14 (.462) – 4th place – 6 games behind in the NL East
Pythagorean Record:
12–14 (3.77 R/G – 4.15 RA/G) – 4th place – 5 GB
MVP for April:
Jason Marquis (3–0, 2.62 ERA, 5 G, 34-1/3 IP, 9.2 H/9, 0.3 HR/9, 6.3 SO/9, 1.0 rWAR, 1.1 fWAR)
Most valuable position player:
Wilson Ramos (.358/.426/.547, 17 G, 61 PA, 19 H, 4 2B, 2 HR, 9 R, 6 RBI, 166 OPS+, 0.8 rWAR, 0.9 fWAR)
This blog will provide occasional analysis and discussion of the Washington Nationals. I’ve been interested in sabermetrics ever since I picked up my first Bill James Abstract in 1984, and I’ve been a fan of the Nats ever since I was privileged to attend that wonderful home opener at RFK on April 14, 2005.
I probably won’t be as prolific as some bloggers (I’m aiming for a couple of posts a week), but I hope that their quality will partly offset the lack of quantity.
Nats Noodles 