Little relievers ain't like little starters. You don't get the same feedback by counting the number of pitches thrown by a reliever. As my man Witherspoon pointed out, these guys might throw 50 pitches on any given night, they just tend not to. But I do count relievers' pitches, and this gives me an opportunity to talk about one of my favorite subject -- optics.
If you owned an insurance company (and I don't) you'd care about growing profitably. But profits are a fickle mistress. No hurricanes? Extra profits. One bad car accident can erode several months' worth of profit. So rewarding profits leads to rewarding luck over skill.
The same thing can happen in baseball. What you care about is wins (or, in this case, saves). But saves are equally luck driven. Even ERA, for relievers, isn't that useful. Even for an entire season.
Optics are a way that Insurers, and Baseball types, can get a quicker read on quality. They tend to be metrics that
And therein lies pitch count. If you only expect 2-3 runs per nine innings, you'd have to wait for 30 to 40 appearances before you had some sense of whether a pitcher was living up to expectations. But after just a handful of appearances, you have a sense of how many pitches your reliever has to throw. So "gather more quickly?" Check.
A single hung pitch, driven into the stands, adds 0.10 to 0.15 to an average relievers' seasonal ERA. If there are runners on base, even more. But you aren't likely to have a quick inning on luck alone. Most hitters are somewhat patient and single digit innings are really rare. So "less prone to luck?" Check.
Alas, on "correlated with..." I only have intuition. I don't think that there are many pitchers out there who throw 25 pitches an inning, but dominate. The best pitchers dominate quickly.
A single game from last year (sorry, I don't remember the details) will help explain.
The Sox were facing a good team. Maybe the Rays. And Papelbon came in to save the game in the ninth. He retired the side, with two K's. If you just read the line the next day, you'd have said "maybe he's turning it around." If you watched the game, you weren't fooled.
The first batter struck out on 4 pitches. No complaints there. But, things went down hill from there.
The second batter ran the count full before putting the ball in play. I can't remember what the out was, but it was prosaic. A lazy pop-up to center, or a standard-issue 6-3. It wasn't the play that bothered me. It was the 6 pitches. Papelbon had thrown 3 balls trying to nibble the edges and the batter wasn't fooled. But it gets worse.
The last batter took 9, count 'em 9 pitches to go down. Again, he ran the count to full. And then Papelbon needed 4 more pitches to finish him off. Now, full count scenarios are special and deserve their own post, so I'm not going to go into details here. But conventional wisdom (with which I agree) says that the longer the at bat, the higher the probability of success. Yeah, Papelbon won the at bat (on a foul tip) but he kind of got lucky. One mis-fire and the batter was walked.
So what does a good season look like? In 2010, Rivera had a pretty fine season, albeit, not one of his best. Looking at the 53 appearances which were exactly one inning, he kept it
Those numbers are pretty close to Mo's 2008 (65% and 78%). Consistency -- less driven by luck.
Okay, fine. Papelbon doesn't need to be compared to the greatest closer ever. How about Jenks in 2010?
Our boy Papelbon?
(Down from 56% and 60% in 2007...) If you want to get a sense of whether Papelbon has bounced back in 2011, it will only take a little pitch counting to know. They say it ain't over until the fat closer sings. It may be time to break out the flowers.
Cheers,
jg
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