The Big Three for Pitchers

Limit walks, avoid home runs and strike batters out. If pitchers excel in those three areas over time, they will succeed. It is easier said than done.

All three areas are controlled primarily by the pitcher. He does not depend on his fielders for success in them, although home runs can get impacted by his home ballpark.

Sabermetric theory holds that pitchers have limited control over the batting average on balls put into play against them. On these plays, pitchers with a strong defense behind them have a huge edge over those that don’t. Pitchers who perform well in the big three can usually offset poor fielding. And when helped by a strong defense, they can dominate.

Our research shows that very few pitchers shine in all three of these vital areas. For both relievers and starters, we chose levels about 10 percent better than league averages. For relief pitchers, that was 8.5 strikeouts per nine innings and fewer than 3.0 walks and .75 home runs allowed per nine innings in at least 250 career innings pitched. Four active pitchers made the cut: Joakim Soria, Jonathan Papelbon, Mike Adams and Takashi Saito.

The criteria for starters proved even tougher: 500 innings pitched, 7.25 strikeouts per nine innings, and fewer than 2.5 walks and .8 home runs allowed per nine innings. Roy Oswalt stood alone at these levels. Two young starters – Daniel Hudson and Madison Bumgarner – join Oswalt if we drop the innings requirement to 250.

Incredibly, the groups expand by just one player apiece with non-active pitchers included. Reliever Tom Henke and starter Pedro Martinez join them.

Several elite pitchers miss these lists by falling just short in one category, such as Mariano Rivera, C.C. Sabathia and Felix Hernandez.

Prior to free agency and arbitration, we will update this research and vary the criteria to identify other pitchers who stand out in the big three. Why is this important for baseball agents? Because success in these areas makes pitchers more likely to sustain excellence when changing teams.

Relievers and Consistency

Are relief pitchers more volatile than starters? While that seems to be the case, relievers also get evaluated in much smaller sample sizes.

Statistics usually get expressed in terms of seasons. That works great for starters, but not so well for relievers. Starters throw approximately three times as many innings as bullpen pitchers in a typical season, which gives them far more time to work through their struggles.

For this reason, we compared starters in one-third of a season timeframes to relievers in full seasons. This evens the playing field to help determine which group maintains more consistency.
We identified all relief pitchers that pitched 150 innings or more from 2008 through 2010 and posted an earned run average between 3.00 and 3.50. The starters had to pitch 150 or more innings in 2010 alone with an ERA in that same range. Nineteen relievers and 17 starters met the criteria.

The starters group included CC Sabathia, Cliff Lee, Chris Carpenter and Tim Lincecum. The relievers had pitchers like Francisco Cordero, Huston Street, Brian Fuentes and Jonathan Broxton. The two groups accumulated a comparable number of innings: the bullpen group totaled 3510.2 innings versus 3602.1 for the starters. Both groups had an identical ERA of 3.25.

Based on inspection, the starters appeared slightly more volatile. None of the relievers posted an ERA over 5.00 in any of their annual timeframes. However, two starters did so in their two-month periods: Max Scherzer (6.42) in April/May and Jon Garland (5.16) in June/July. The starters failed to post a single ERA below 2.00, while the bullpen group had three: Jeremy Affeldt (1.73) and Ryan Franklin (1.92) in 2009 and Chris Perez (1.71) in 2010.

The best way to measure consistency is through standard deviation, which simply measures how much figures differ from the average. The standard deviation for the starters (.635) was slightly lower than the relievers (.677). Basically, there was very little difference in consistency between these groups.

The starters also had one huge advantage. While the relievers had an entire offseason in between their seasons, the starters flowed directly from one two-month period into the next. In several cases, the relievers changed teams and/or leagues during the offseason, making it even harder to sustain consistent performance.

Before making any conclusions, more data should be examined beyond this rather small study. It would also be valuable to examine statistics like OPS allowed, since ERA does not account for how relievers pitch with inherited runners.

Nonetheless, it appears that what some perceive as lack of consistency has more to do with the limited number of innings relievers pitch per season.