Pitching
Pitching constitutes half our starting lineup and four of the nine fantasy innings. The statistics pitchers generate can be broadly separated into four groups: Production (includes metrics like appearances, innings pitched, wins and losses), Relief (saves, blown saves and holds), Effectiveness (earned runs, quality starts, walks and hits allowed), and Dominance (strikeouts, complete games and shutouts).
These groups reflect the different strengths of a pitcher’s repertoire. No pitcher will be able to be great at all four categories, mainly because of the distinction between starting pitchers and bullpen pitchers. One can be dominant without being effective, and vice versa. One can be productive and look horrible doing it. For our league, we wanted to pick statistics to represent each of these groups while still being easy to follow in the stands or the game boxscores.
Wins + Quality Starts
The most important stat to a baseball team is the Win (W). At the end of the season, it doesn’t matter how the club managed to get each win, as long as it accumulates a sufficient number of them to keep playing in October. Every game is guaranteed to assign a win to someone, and pitchers are the ones who get the statistical credit.
Wins are one way to tell if a pitcher is having a productive season, but even a poor performance can earn a W. That is why in 1985 Philadelphia sportswriter John Lowe came up with the Quality Start (QS): a starting pitcher completing at least six innings and allowing no more than three earned runs. There are several examples of great games not garnering a quality start (and quality starts awarded for mediocre performances), but overall this stat tends to reflect a stellar game. In 1992, David Smith calculated the average ERA for quality starts is 1.91, considerably lower than non-quality starts.
By tracking these two stats together, quality wins are worth double the cheap ones. This might make Sandy Koufax happy. In his final season — in which he went 27-9 with a 1.73 ERA — Koufax dubbed teammate Phil Regan “The Vulture” for picking up 14 wins in relief.
Saves
Our league has a requirement to include at least one reliever in the starting lineup. With a 20-team league, that most often will be a bonafide closer, someone whose main contribution to the game is the Save (SV). A good closer will get 2-3 saves in a week of MLB games.
“I hate saves, but you have to do it or relievers don’t mean anything [in fantasy leagues],” says Winston.
The Hold (HLD) was invented in 1986 by John Dewan and Mike O’Donnell to give middle relievers credit for their contribution to a win. The Hold is not an official statistic tracked by MLB, however, and the criteria to qualify varies from one service to the next. The inclusion of this stat could help deepen the bullpen options for a fantasy league and add value for quality setup players like Mike Stanton (266 career holds, the career leader). The top setup pitchers are awarded 30 holds a year, compared to 40 saves for the best closers. That could give too much depth to a position that doesn’t need to be diluted. For the GDS, we’re sticking with saves.
WHIP
One interesting baseball statistic — Batting Average on Balls In Play (BABIP) — describes the percentage of the balls hit into the field that become hits. According to Winston, BABIP appears random from one season to the next, an indication there is a lot of luck involved when a pitcher has a good year or a bad one.
“The way to evaluate pitchers, because there is a lot of luck involved in pitching, is the defense-independent statistics,” explains Winston. “These are walks, strikeouts and home runs allowed. It’s the best predictor of future success of a pitcher.”
That is why the GDS went looking for a replacement for Earned Run Average (ERA), a cornerstone stat for pitchers since 1912. Sabermetricians tend to consider Walks plus Hits Per Innings Pitched (WHIP) as the single most important statistic for evaluating a pitcher’s effectiveness. WHIP incorporates the first of those three defense-independent statistics, the walk, and it considers each pitcher-hitter outcome, even those coming after an error erased the third out (when ERA stops tracking runs). Pedro Martinez (0.737 in 2000) boasts the best single-season WHIP ever recorded, while Cleveland great Addie Joss has the best career WHIP (0.968). WHIP also wins out over the ERA because it is easier to calculate.
Strikeouts
The Strikeout (K), the next defense-independent statistic, is one of the most exciting outcomes for an at bat. There is something visceral about watching a pitcher throw the ball hard (or expertly) enough to force a strongman to swing and miss. One of Kerry Wood’s 1998 rookie wins netted a record-tying 20 strikeouts and remains my favorite game to date. Crash Davis may think strikeouts are fascist, but the stat is easy to understand and count, making them exciting for fans to watch.
Strikeout artists are perceived as dominating pitchers. Other stats that share that cachet, but they occur too infrequently to be of much value in a weekly head-to-head league like the GDS. Home Runs Allowed (HRA), the third of the defense-independent stats, equates to about one-third of the total walks given up by major league pitchers and one-tenth the number of hits. As a result of its relative infrequency, HRA was relegated to an extra-inning tie-breaker category for us.
Two other metrics to consider are complete games (CG) and shutouts (SO). A century ago, only one game in nine did not end in a complete game. By the 1950s, the rate of complete games was down to about one-third of all starts. Tony LaRussa’s use of his bullpen in the 1980s — which includes bringing in pitchers to throw just a couple pitches — combined with greater attention to arm abuse started a downward trend that now sees pitchers finish what they started about 3 percent of the time. In 2011, there were only 173 complete games out of over 5,200 opportunities.
Shutouts are even more sparse from week to week. The all-time career leader is Walter Johnson, a Senators pitcher from 1907-1927, who finished with 110 shutouts. Grover Alexander had a whopping 16 shutouts in 1876. Current leader Roy Halladay barely has more shutouts than seasons pitched. Although the shutout appears on the rise, it just isn’t enough to be considered a practical statistic for weekly fantasy leagues.
