What’s Not to Like About Josh Cribbs and Joe Haden?
May 18, 2011Camp Colt McCoy Contest Winner
May 18, 2011
If you’ve read much of what I’ve written here in the last 14 months or so, you know that one of the topics with which I’m constantly struggling is how to separate good (or bad) luck from good (or insufficient) talent.
Baseball is fecund territory for these sorts of examinations because we have so much data to pore over. Every game, every at bat, every pitch comes under our purview, and with all this at our fingertips, all we have to do is check. We can check, for example, that attributes like not making outs (OBP) are fairly repeatable, and normalize for most players around 100 plate appearances, whereas ERA is a bit flukier and takes a much bigger sample (several years) to get a handle of the underlying talent behind it.
It’s one reason that analysts tend to look at “peripherals”—those “mini-stats” that undergird a total performance and tend to suggest talent levels more quickly. For example, instead of ERA, we look at strikeouts and walks. Instead of batting average, we look at ISO and OBP. The peripherals appear to do a better job of isolating a player’s skill and stripping out the context that he can’t control.
Broadly speaking, I think of stats in two categories: skill stats and luck/context stats. Here’s a brief list:
| SKILL | LUCK/CONTEXT | |
| Pitchers: | ||
| K Rate | ERA | |
| BB Rate | Wins | |
| HR/9 | WHIP | |
| GB Rate | Saves | |
| FB Rate | BABiP | |
| IP | LOB% | |
| Hitters: | ||
| OBP | AVG | |
| ISO (Power) | RBI | |
| wOBA | RISP Performance | |
| SB % | Runs | |
| HR/FB | BABiP | |
Because the “skill” stats have been more repeatable than the “luck/context” stats over the course of baseball history, I’ll sometimes make the claim that a player is getting particularly lucky or unlucky based on how those two sets are correlating.
And sometimes when I write about luck versus talent, I try to make it seem as though I know what I’m talking about—as if I know what’s really going to happen. Let me be clear: this is nonsense. I know nothing of the sort. Looking at the peripherals helps me try to forecast what I think will happen. It doesn’t remotely tell me what will happen.
Which brings me to Josh Tomlin. Here are his numbers from 2010 and 2011, using some of those stats from both columns:
| 2011 | 2010 | |
| IP | 52.2 | 73.0 |
| K/9 | 4.61 | 5.30 |
| BB/9 | 1.54 | 2.34 |
| HR/9 | 1.37 | 1.23 |
| ERA | 2.56 | 4.56 |
| Wins | 5 | 6 |
| BABiP | 0.178 | 0.274 |
| LOB% | 86.2% | 70.0% |
At the end of 2010, I thought we’d started to see the real Josh Tomlin: a back-of-the-rotation guy whose best skill was his control. I thought then (and still think) that Paul Byrd makes some sense as a comparable pitcher.
But looking at those 2011 numbers can make a boy dream a little. Sure, he’s still not striking anyone out, but he’s walking NO ONE. (For reference, he has the sixth lowest walk-rate in baseball, after allowing no free passes again on Monday night.) And while he lets up more home runs than is normal, his league-leading WHIP (0.85) means that not only one of those eight dingers came with men on base. Consequently, his 2.56 ERA ranks ninth among qualified AL starters.
And while the analyst in me wants to say that Tomlin CANNOT continue to post a .178 batting average on balls in play and that there is NO WAY he can continue to strand 86% of baserunners, I have to remind myself to be humble. I have to remember that baseball is full of things we’ve never seen before—like 14 runs off a relief pitcher. Freak-occurrences happen in nearly every game, all season long, and we’ll never be able to predict them.
And who’s to say that just because no pitcher in the history of baseball has been able to sustain what Tomlin has been doing, that no pitcher can? Sure, I’m tempted to try to explain it all away—after all, that’s what I’ve been trained to do for the better part of my academic and professional career. But new stuff happens all the time in baseball. Precedents are great because they tell us so much, but they’re also limited because they can’t tell us everything.
So every time Tomlin racks up another quality start, every time he induces a weak pop out to foul territory, every time he contradicts what we expect from him, he moves the needle a little bit. We start to allow—if ever so slightly—the possibility that he is like nothing we’ve seen before. This is what happens when sample sizes begin to get bigger. You weigh them a little bit more than you used to, and regress a bit less. It’s the same thing that has happened with the 2011 Indians as a whole: the more they win, the more we believe that they aren’t just a fluke.
More than anything, Josh Tomlin’s season continues to remind me to make room for the blips and oddities in the game. After all, that’s where most of the fun stuff happens anyway.
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AP Photo/Mark Duncan
18 Comments
Good comparison on Paul Byrd. But can we hope for a Greg Maddux type in the future?
I actually checked this earlier for fantasy, one of his HRs had a guy on base – which means 60% of his ERs came on HRs. If he can cut those HRs down he could be sick despite few Ks – somewhat similar to a later-in-his-career Greg Maddux (i.e. very good and frustrating but not dominating).
What are his GB and FB rates?
great read thanks.
i’m still all fired up from keith law’s podcast where he didn’t see the tribe as a top 12 team in his power rankings. one of his touchstones was the K rate of our pitchers. what was glossed over was the walk rate.
i dont know why the skill metric of ‘BB rate’ is overlooked in evaluating our pitchers (or any pitcher). we lost the 2007 ALCS because sabathia and carmona couldnt throw strikes. tomlin is 5-1 because he’s maddux-esque at 1.5 BB/9.*
*in maddux’s 4 straight cy’s his BB/9 were 2.4, 1.8, 1.4, 1.0 while his K/9 were 6.7, 6.6, 7.0, 7.8.
tomlin’s BB/9 fits with maddux and his average of 5 K/9 isnt there, but it doesnt suck. ahem, keith law.
Interesting. Seems like K/9 doesn’t really matter as much so long as you have a low BB/9 and a low BABiP. In other words, it doesn’t matter so much if a guy is grounding out or flying out instead of striking out when there is rarely a runner on 3rd base to drive home. Conventional wisdom says that some of those ground balls will start to find holes and some of those fly balls will drop in for hits, but the chance of that is lessened by a sweet defense, which the Indians undoubtedly have. It seems pretty reasonable to me to say that Tomlin could keep up this pace. I guess the way I’m seeing it is: Tomlin’s stuff isn’t great, but he throws all of it on the corners for strikes. Plenty of guys have had successful careers doing just that.
BABIP is odd to me, because, rationally, wouldn’t it need to be lower for pitchers who aren’t strikeout machines, and it could be higher for strikeout guys.
I mean, there have been very good pitchers who had good ERAs for an extended period of time who didn’t strike out many batters….its not an anamoly by any sense, however their BABIPs would be below average, just based on the fact that more balls are put in play.
The reason k-rate is relevant is because of Jon’s previous explanation on babip. Almost every major league pitcher falls into the .290-.310 range on baseballs that guys put between the foul poles. Since this rock solid truth is, well, rocky and solid-ish, the best thing any pitcher can do is increase his k’s, because BAK (batting average on strikeouts, invented 10 seconds ago by me) hovers very steadily near .000 throughout history. No baserunners advance, no throwing errors occur.
The frightening thing to me about Josh’s babip is his hr rate. There’s more chance to field a homer than a strikeout. Which means his banhrbip (ba non homer bip) is even more freakishly low. Tomlin’s hit pitches fly only straight at infielders and outfielders. For his next act they’re going to flood the infield and he’s going to walk on the water to the mound.
However, if Jon’s training is right and josh’s babip is going to normalize, something like twice as many of his balls in play are going to result in hits, and his ERA will climb, probably substantially, if this occurs.
I, for one, am hoping for a freak as well.
I guess it just bugs me because BABIP essentially implies that if you don’t strike people out, you aren’t going to be a good pitcher because your BABIP will be abnormal.
Byrd’s a good comp, and Bob Tewksbury may be another fit, although he didn’t seem as homer prone while pitching into the teeth of the steroid era.
@believelander – HRs are not included in BABIP because they are ‘not in play’
@Sam – BABIP is only ‘batted balls in play’ it doesn’t matter if you strike people out or not to have an abnormal or normal BABIP.
example:
pitcherA strikes out 12 and has 20 batted balls that end up in play. if 5 of those result in hits, then it is a .250 BABIP (5/20)
pitcherB strikes out 1 and has 20 batted balls that end up in play. if 5 of those result in hits, then it is a .250 BABIP (5/20)
I am a big believer in GB% with a good infield defense. If you have a greater GB% with a good ranging and fielding infield defense, then I think logically, the pitchers BABIP should be lower than average.
“BABIP is odd to me, because, rationally, wouldn’t it need to be lower for pitchers who aren’t strikeout machines, and it could be higher for strikeout guys.”
If you’re basing “need” on success, yes. Jon touched on this very topic last summer. https://waitingfornextyear.com/2010/07/sabr-toothed-triber-josh-tomlin-rainy-day-parades/
I want to be positive, but I can’t look at Tomlin’s success as anything other than a very low, unlikely-to-last BABIP.
@3 – Q: And what were Maddux’s hr/9 in those four years?
A: Vastly different from Tomlin’s – 0.24, 0.47, 0.18, and 0.34.
In ’94, Maddux gave up 4 homers over 200+ innings! That said, comparing anyone to Maddux is unfair. I’ve seen more than one stathead call him the best ever. If Tomlin ends up somewhere between Maddux and Byrd then I’ll be more than happy.
Again, not trying to rain on the parade. Just saying you get wonky results over only 130 innings.
if we REALLY wanted to slice this, i wonder what normalized BABIP looks like with 1st pitch strike vs 1st pitch ball. 50 point delta, i’ll bet.
if that existed, it might nudge tomlin’s crazy BABIP closer to the skill column and thus offer some hope that it can be maintained.
@mgbode: good lookin.
@2 (also @10): tomlin’s gb/fb AND go/ao (groundout/airout) are 25% lower than the league average; he gets notably more balls in the air and for outs than the league average.
His alarming hr rate is about 60% above league average, but his hr/fb% is less dramatic. Maybe his combination of high-control corner pitching and the action on his stuff means that while guys find it easy to hit, they find it hard to hit it well. Of course, when you -do- hit that 90mph fastball well….home runs will occur.
Re: strikeouts.
Yeah, they’re important. K-guys don’t really have to suffer the inherent randomness associated with batted balls, so they get an advantage. If there is ONE statistic that I’d use it would be K/BB rather than straight K-rate(Aroldis Chapman should explain this to you). You want that ratio north of 2.00–better still to be above 2.50 (Tomlin is at 2.99). That way, you can see that you can be good without a lot of strikeouts, so long as you’re EXCEPTIONALLY stingy with walks.
His FB-rate concerns me, in that I’d prefer for more groundballs. But his HR/FB is not anything to be concerned about per se.
And @jimkanicki: That’s a great point about BABiP by count, though I don’t think it’s true. Check this out: http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/fantasy/article/how-much-do-counts-affect-babip/
I would just like to point out that today is May 18 and the Indians not only have the best record in MLB, but they are guaranteed to have the best record in MLB no matter what happens tonight or tomorrow night (2 game lead over the Phillies)
actually, we hold a 2 game lead over the Phillies for the best record in MLB. do you know how many teams have a bigger lead just over their divisional opponents?
Zero. And, only Tampa Bay can equal that mark.
@Jon: yeah, that’s basically what I was trying to get at about strikeouts. So while a K will have an inherently lower ERA (0), per se, than a GB or FB exposed to babip, where runners can advance/score, you can make up for those extra runs by taking away BBs that lead to free runs for the bad guys. And yeah, I noted that his HR/FB was above average but not by much and was trying to expound on the reason his HR% is so high is because his FB rate is so high, not because guys are crushing him.
@Vengeful Pat: The rub is that Tomlin’s BABIP is more luck than skill. That being said, there is evidence that a pitcher can have consistent BABIP deviation from the norm, but we’re talking something closer to .15 from the .300 norm, not Tomlin’s absurd 1.70 or -1.30 difference.
Expect Tomlin’s hits against to rise through the remainder of the season. A higher K rate would reduce that, but that’s not Tomlin’s game. If he can sport a 5+ K rate and a sub 2 BB rate, he can be a “good” starter (I’m ignoring GB% here for the moment).
@SAM: Strikeout rate and walk rate have no impact on BABIP. BABIP measures only the batted balls in fair play. I think you are thinking that strikeouts are included in the “batting average” part of BABIP, but they are not included. BABIP removes at-bats that result in strikeouts, homeruns, and sacrifice flyballs. Walks aren’t included because BABIP uses “at-bats” not “plate appearances”, so walks are already taken out. The expected BABIP for all pitchers is roughly .300 regardless if they are high strikeout guys or not.
@mgbode: Groundballs turn into hits at a higher rate than flyballs. A guy like Fausto Carmona will have (assuming a neutral defense behind him) a higher BABIP than the .300ish level. A good defense could mitigate that, but someone like Tomlin with the same “good defense” would have a lower BABIP than Carmona (over a large enough sample size). The key to batted balls in play is the one’s that go over the fence. You don’t want those one’s when you a pitcher. A high flyball % will result in more home runs than a low flyball% based on another league near constant (similar to BABIP and LOB%), HR/FB%. Tomlin is actually a little unlucky so far in this account. His HR/FB% is sitting around 14%, which is higher than what is normal (10% which may go down with the lack of power hitting the past couple years across the game). So expect fewer homeruns (but still more than average) and more two and three run home runs (due to BABIP regression) over the remainder of the year for Tomlin.