Baseball fans love their stats. And why not? Stats allow fans to remain engaged with their favorite or most despised players long after the game has ended. But, do we follow the right stats. Up until a few years ago most fans thought that batting average was the best way to judge a players performance. We now know better, as BA does not take into account such important attributes as how many times one gets on base or how many bases they acquire on their hits.
Fielding statistics seem to be getting better by the day, with Ultimate Zone Rating (UZR) leading the charge at the moment. But, what about Pitching? We used to believe that ERA was the be all end all, however recently WHIP (or walks plus hits per innings pitched) has taken over as the best stats with which to rate a pitcher.
WHIP is a fine statistic, but it has some inherent problems. Most of all it relies too heavily on defense. We should try to take defense completely out of the equation if we are trying to create a true pitching metric. Pitchers can control three different outcomes. A strike out, a walk or a ball put in play. Now, most good pitchers, this side of Randy Johnson a few years back, are not trying to strike every last hitter out. They are trying to keep hitters off balance by moving the ball up and down, from side to side and changing speeds. The goal of which is to get the batter to hit the ball weakly, popping it up or grounding out.
Not all ground balls are created equally however, and thus a simple ground ball/fly ratio doesn't really suffice. A hard ground ball can and often does do more damage than a weak fly out. But, what a pitcher really can and really wants to limit are line drives. Line drives are hit hard, occasionally right at defenders, but more often to a gap or a spot where defenders can not get to quickly enough, usually resulting in a hit.
This is why I believe that NLD+K-W is the best way to mathamatically judge the success of a pitcher. It is a simple equation that will you give you the best possible statistic with which to evaluate pitchers.
This formula is set up as follows:
Example: Zach Grienke 2009 season
Take LD% (Line Drive percentage) 19.4 and subtract from 100= 80.6. Move the decimal over two spaces= .806. Now we have his NLD or not line drive percentage per inning. Now calculate Grienke strike out rate per inning (not per 9 innings) 1.06 and Walk rate per inning (not per 9 innings) .22. Add the K rate to the NLD rate and subtract the walk rate. Greinke ends up with a NLD+K-W of 1.72 per inning.
Greinke .806 + 1.06 - .22 = 1.646
Felix Hernandez: .833 + .91 - .3 = 1.443
Tim Lincecum .808 + 1.16 - .3 = 1.668
Joel Pineiro .843 + .49 - .13 = 1.203
Javier Vazquez .764 + 1.09 - .2 = 1.654
After calculating a few more premium pitchers from the 2009 season, we find that Tim Lincecum actually has a higher NLD+K-W than Greinke.
What do you guys think?
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