I was planning a simple blocking and tackling ERA piece that looked at the pitchers with WHIPs that didn’t jibe.

Carlos Villanueva is a waiver target to believe in. (USAT)But nothing is quite so simple anymore. Fortunately, it is better, however. And we only have to add one other stat to get the most likely outliers, i.e., those pitchers whose ERAs currently are most inflated or deflated. That stat is one I’ve trumpeted here regularly since I stumbled upon it last year. Then, I was trying to figure out why Jeremy Hellickson’s ERA consistently was better than his commonly cited peripherals indicated. Instead, I found the reason why Johnny Cueto outperforms expected ERA (and still does). His consistently low ISO was what was driving the low ERA, not his BABIP numbers, which varied widely while ERA held steady.

So what we’re doing with these charts is looking for where the ERA doesn’t agree with the WHIP or the ISO (slugging average allowed minus batting average allowed). We have a good sense of what a good WHIP and ERA are because we play thoseRead More »from Pitching by the Numbers: Believe it or not?

Strikeout math has fundamentally changed and we have to recalibrate for league-wide context if we want to maximize category efficiency.

When it comes to whiffing hitters, Matt Harvey is no Doc Gooden. (USAT)My Wall Street Journal colleague Tim Marchman pointed this out recently in an article that cautioned Mets fans into thinking that Matt Harvey was comparable in strikeout dominance to Dr. K of a generation ago, Dwight Gooden.

In his first full season as a rookie in 1984, Gooden struck out 276 batters in 218 innings, 11.4 per nine innings. The league-wide average in 1984 was 5.37, not even a rounding difference better than the 30-year low of 1985. So, in 1984, Gooden was 111% better than the league average. This year in MLB, the average pitcher strikes out 7.72 batters per nine innings. For someone to be 111% better than the league average like the 1984 Gooden requires a K rate of 16.3 per nine innings. Not even Yu Darvish is coming close to that. And Harvey’s K rate of 10.3 per nine is just 33.4 percent better than the major league average.

I question Read More »from Pitching by the Numbers: Special Ks

In last week’s Pitching by the Numbers, we looked at the best pitchers (who qualified for the ERA title) according to a pitching model I have used for projection purposes.

Anibal Sanchez dominated April. (USAT)We listed the top 20 and noted others, which inevitably led to readers asking me in the comments and on Twitter (@michaelsalfino) about where their specific pitcher of interest ranked. But by then, the rankings had changed. So I hesitated to quote the old rankings.

To address these inquiries, I’ve updated the stats through April 29 and listed all qualifying pitchers below. These pitchers all had at least one inning pitched per team game played. Also, note that this is a bonus Pitching by the Numbers. Regularly scheduled PBTN programming will resume on May 3.

The reason why I like this model is that it correlates so well with actual fantasy performance. Why not just use fantasy stats then? Because then we have no outliers. Ideally, we want to use a model like this to find a handful of cheap buys and another handful ofRead More »from Pitching by the Numbers: Model ranks

We’re about through with the first month of the season. I’ve always believed that the top players generally reveal themselves quickly. That does not mean that they won’t regress from their lofty levels, it just means that they are likely to remain quite good. The key takeaway here is that the most surprising pitchers thus far on the plus side can be traded for at a discount because their owner often does not really believe to the degree he or she should.

Yu better? You bet. (USAT)That doesn’t mean though that we have enough of a sample yet. It is, however, all that we have. I have about a 60 percent confidence level in these numbers now. In another month, I’d have 80 percent confidence. I won’t have much more than that for pitching projection purposes at any point during the season.

Let’s look at Matt Harvey, who you all know I loved leading up to drafts, especially if you follow me @MichaelSalfino. Many still insist in coming up with reasons that he will regress to the middling mixed-league starter that most Read More »from Pitching by the Numbers: Analyzing April

One of the ways we can cheat with the small sample sizes in the early part of the season is to look at velocity readings, since all starters have thrown a decent sample of fastballs.

Justin Verlander dip in velocity is, at least, concerning. (USAT)The problem though is that we are not comparing apples to apples, or rather Aprils to Aprils – at least not easily. What a guy is throwing now is most relevant only when you compare what he has thrown in prior Aprils. Cold weather has a small negative effect after the ball is thrown, only about 0.1 MPH with each 10-degree drop in temperature, according to physicist and must Twitter baseball follow Dr. Alan Nathan of the University of Illinois (@pobguy). But the cold has a less quantifiable effect on the limberness of pitchers’ muscles, we can assume. And some pitchers may just be slow starters, irrespective of the weather. There’s no reasonable way to precisely adjust for all these factors, but we at least can look at velocity splits by month.

I’ve been keeping that for the last couple of years, Read More »from Pitching by the Numbers: Speed reading

Watching Matt Harvey’s continued brilliance, what stands out is his ability to make hitters swing at pitches out of the strike zone, as illustrated so well here not just with his slider, but his changeup, too.

Matt Harvey has done well at turning balls into strikes. (USAT)You can’t overestimate, I don’t think, how important it is for pitchers to get hitters to swing at pitches out of the zone. Mainly, there’s a much better chance they’ll miss (we’ve included out-of-zone contact rate, too). But it’s far more difficult to do damage on a pitch out of the zone even if you happen to make contact. You’re not going to see many line drives or homers on pitches off the plate.

And the good thing is that due to advances in technology and tracking, we can now precisely quantify how effective pitchers are at getting hitters to flail at pitches off the plate. The range for starters since 2012 who have logged at least 70 innings is 22 percent to 37percent. That’s a very significant swing. Thanks to Fangraphs for the stats.

A caveat here is that Read More »from Pitching by the Numbers: Out of the zone

You don’t need to be a sabermetric genius to realize that line drives are very bad things for pitchers. And it’s no great leap to conclude that those who give up the fewest have a certain quality, be it velocity or movement or deception in delivery, that makes them less hittable. Conversely, the pitchers that give up the most line drives deliver pitches that hitters can more easily square.

Unfortunately, batted ball types are typically buried deep within the stat profile, well beneath the overall measure that’s now so prominent – batting average on balls in play (BABIP). So while we’re still in last-year mode, let’s highlight the pitchers who were most extreme in limiting liners and allowing them. And we’ll also flesh out the chart with another one of my favorite batted-ball types that unearths hidden value, infield fly balls (because they are almost always outs).

Mat Latos has top 5 upside as a fantasy starter. (USAT)The first name you see below is someone who was on the list of pitchers to avoid last week because he so poorly Read More »from Pitching by the Numbers: Frozen ropes

The difference between a pitcher’s actual ERA and his expected ERA is often cited as the reason why we should seek or avoid him in the coming season.

Matt Harrison is a little things All-Star (Getty)This is usually sound advice. But some pitchers hurt and help themselves in ways that expected ERA does not capture, but actual ERA surely does. These are the small things hidden in pitching performance and mostly ignored. But at the extreme ends of the spectrum, stolen bases against, wild pitches, balks and hit batters result in extra bases or baserunners, or both.

Before we get into our lists of the pitchers who make the biggest deals out of the little things, I invite you all to contact me on Twitter @michaelsalfino with any pitching questions relating to your upcoming drafts. I respond generally pretty quickly, unless you ask me when I’m bowling. It’s a league game, Smokey. Also, we’ve been through my sleepers and busts so far in the 2013 debut of Pitching by the Numbers, parts one and two. But some things have already Read More »from Pitching by the Numbers: The little things