Scoring for Pitchers

[Dan Wood]

I would like to chime in here. For starters I do think we need some change in the ways that pitchers are scored. Yes Masterson(I use him since he was brought up earlier) has been a bit unlucky this year. But what is his annual BABIP as a starter? If it is generally in the 330's then he isn't unlucky this year, it is his statistical norm. Plus he gets smoked by lefties, pretty much all the time. Groundballs tend to become hits more often than flyballs - see Aaron Hill, hitting more fly balls, very few grounders, and very few line drives, and is batting .189. Flyballs will just hurt you  more if they leave the yard (Park Factors). I think it would be a good idea to institute either FIP, xFIP, etc to the scoring system come next year. Because really right now, we are valuing pitchers on their ability to not walk people and not give up home runs. James Shields, and Ricky Nolasco are both very valued pitchers in this league, but if you watch the games they pitch, the infielders should be wearing flack jackets. If we are only going to count GB, K, BB, HR, then we should also have LD or LD% to counteract. A double should be a negative impact on a players performance just as a home run is. Of course then we are getting into park factors, etc. A double at Metco, is a homer in Philly 7 times a week and twice on Sunday. This of course is IMHO.
 

[Mr.TradeKing]

 

I would like to see the cream of the crop in real life, be the same in this league. (Not saying that Shields and Nolasco aren't)

~MTK

[lp815]

I checked out the pitching rankings for this year, and feel pretty comfortable with it.  Yeah, there might be a couple anomalies, such as Masterson, but the ability to induce ground balls is a very important statistic, and Masterson has induced at least 70 more ground balls than the likes of Josh Johnson, Tim Lincecum, and Jered Weaver.  That seems pretty significant for a pitcher, regardless of his ERA or WHIP, and should warrant a higher ranking.

As it stands now, I'll side with keeping the scoring system as is.

[bridgestone]

I would go for a tweak to the scoring as Dan suggested by adding LD.  The points setup took a lot of time and has proven itself to work well.  The thing about the pitchers is that they have four countable stats contributing to their score whereas the batters have a couple dozen.  :

The only viable categories that stick out to me are Doubles Allowed (not wild on this one because of park differences), Fly Balls Allowed, Pickoffs, Triples Allowed, and Wild Pitches.  Triples can be due to defensive gaffs but for the most part these are balls in play that are definitely hits (2B turns into a 3B or flat out 3B).

[Mr.TradeKing]

I checked out the pitching rankings for this year, and feel pretty comfortable with it.  Yeah, there might be a couple anomalies, such as Masterson, but the ability to induce ground balls is a very important statistic, and Masterson has induced at least 70 more ground balls than the likes of Josh Johnson, Tim Lincecum, and Jered Weaver.  That seems pretty significant for a pitcher, regardless of his ERA or WHIP, and should warrant a higher ranking.

As it stands now, I'll side with keeping the scoring system as is.

I don't feel too strong one way or the other. If Masterson is having a good year, then he is having a good year. However I just don't want a average pitcher who does well in the categories that we do count to become a top pitcher in this league.

~MTK

[bridgestone]

I don't feel too strong one way or the other. If Masterson is having a good year, then he is having a good year. However I just don't want a average pitcher who does well in the categories that we do count to become a top pitcher in this league.

~MTK

To do well in our scoring system the pitcher is truly having a good year.  The scoring points system takes luck and team defense out of the equation and focuses on the player's contribution to the team.

[Canada8999]

The current scoring setup was defined to correlate closely to FIP - I encourage you guys to both take a look at the original thread where we came up with the scoring as well as compare our rankings with a sorted FIP list (try www.fangraphs.com).

For BABIP, it has been shown that very few pitchers have any effect and will normalize to ~0.300 over enough IP - even if Masterson had a historically high BABIP (his current career BABIP is 0.311), it is highly unlikely that will continue in the future.  There are some cases where elite pitchers can have a slightly lower BABIP over their career, but this is the exception not the norm.  For LD, again almost all pitchers regress to ~20% over enough IP and have very little control.

[Dan Wood]

My point with LD is that the pitch is hit hard. We are taking fielding out of the equation, which I completely agree with, but adding LD, whether caught or not caught, would be a good barometer if a pitcher is getting hit hard or not. Again I want to reiterate that I do agree very much with the scoring, but on occasion Jamesian darlings have good peripherals yet are not good every year (Dave Bush comes to mind). Ricky Nolasco, James Shields, and the afore mentioned Justin Masterson are not having good years, but are having great years in this league. Now I am not trying to pick on anyone's players, I happen to like Masterson a lot. But just because a guy doesn't walk anyone, and K's a decent amount, that does not make him a good pitcher if he is giving up a lot of hard hit balls. They could be directly at someone though. Therefore I would like to further discuss adding LD to the scoring. It is like the opposite of a GB, which are generally hit weakly, meaning the pitcher is changing speeds very well. It isn't like there is a huge discrepancy in good and bad pitchers in this league by comparison to standard fantasy leagues, but there has to be a non defense involved way to measure if a pitcher is getting hit hard or not, outside of giving up home runs.

Plus I do realize that you guys spent a lot of time discussing the scoring, and I am not trying to take away from what you have accomplished, but this league is still transforming, and we are attempting to make all facets of it better and as life like as possible. A pitcher can have his ass handed to him and still not give up a home run or walk anyone. I should know, I watched Steve Trachsel pitch for several years.   

[Dan Wood]

And just FYI Randy Wells has the highest LD% according to Fangraphs, and James Sheilds is in the top 10, or bottom 10 I guess you could call it. Both are very similar pitchers, with poor 5 by 5 stats, but with good scores in this league. More to the point, I think something is there, and I think we should explore it further.

[h4cheng]

The short answer is these categories are those that the pitcher controls, and everything else is out of his hands - ERA and WHIP are products of these categories, but they also include a significant about of luck.  For that reason, if you're going to pick statistical categories to rate your pitchers buy you might as well stick with the ones that they actually control and represent their true skills/performance (and for the record, this was one of Colby's founding principles for the league)

If you're interested in learning more about where all of this research comes from, I suggest researching things such as DIPS, BABIP, FIP, xFIP, tERA, etc.

Some sites that come up:
http://www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=878
http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/batted-balls-and-dips/
http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/pitcher-win-values-explained-part-two

and not that ESPN has anything to do with generating these findings, but just to show that they are referenced by major sports sites:
http://sports.espn.go.com/fantasy/baseball/flb/story?id=5260306

I understand there is a strong correlation between GB and run prevention, but is producing GB (or preventing LD) a sustainable skill or is there an element of randomness? If it's sustainable skill, then I am all for using GB as a scoring category. If there is an element of randomness, then our scoring categories should try to compensate for this.