So are my Nats off to a great 2nd half start. The scrubs are hitting as well or better than the injured starters. Plus they have two shiny new relievers in tow.
Cubs’ getting Quintana might turn out to be a huge, season-altering transaction. Might take some of the pressure off of Lester and Arietta, especially if the Cubs lineup can figure out how to hit again on a more consistent basis. In the few games I’ve seen them play, it really seems like the biggest problem for the Cubs might be the lack of a reliable catcher. We know about Montero’s inability to slow base runners and his post-game meltdown and minor league assignment. But it also seems like there’s been miscommunication between pitchers and the current slate of catchers as well. Maybe some of that is just pitchers not trusting their own stuff and calling off pitches they seem uncomfortable throwing.
Be cautious of putting a lot of value in higher K rates. Remember, strikeouts are incredibly high right now. A lot of pitchers are setting new marks. Note that going into his first Cubs start Quintana’s K/W rate was the WORST of his career except for his rookie season.
Years ago when I was a kid, the K/9 ratio (if you even thought about that at all) you were looking for was 6 per 9 innings. That was quite good. In 1982, Dave Stieb was the best pitcher in the American League and he struck out 4.4 men per 9 innings. He got over 6 the next few years, still basically the best pitcher in the league, and he never topped 7. Today that would be terrible. The American LEague AVERAGE now is 7.4, which in any year from then up to the mid 90s, at least, would have landed a pitcher in the top 10 in that category; by 15 years ago it was good but not top 10, and now it’s just average.
Conversely, walks have not increased as much. In the Rickey Henderson era, if you will, a typical K/W ratio was 1.5 to 1. A pitcher who averaged 6 Ks and 4 BBs per game was normal. Today that would be dreadful; the AVERAGE is now 2.64 Ks to every walk. Relief pitchers are more extreme but even for starters, more than twice as many strikeouts as walks is simply an expectation; the ratios of the past would not even get you to the majors today. In 2016, 40 American League pitchers qualified for the ERA title. Only 11 of them had K/W ratios WORSE than 2.5 to 1, and almost all of them were bad; only Chris Tillman and CC Sabathia had ERAs under 4.00.
30 years ago, in 1986, most qualifying pitchers were under a K/W ratio of 2, and some had good years. Only eight men beat 2.50, and all were good. Nobody had the gaudy ratios you see today, like five and six Ks per walk.
So the thing is, everyone’s striklng out lots of guys and they don’t walk guys any more than they used to, so you have to be cautious of K/W numbers that look good at a glance; in fact, they’re often just the new normal.
Good analysis.
I think the K/BB ratio is reflective of the Randy Johnson and Curt Schilling effect, valuing pitchers with freakish velocity who can simply overpower a hitter who knows a splitter is coming and still can do nothing but whiff.
We can debate the most meaningful stats all day long. In the past a pitcher’s W-L record was probably over-stated, as it was subject to a lot of other factors besides just how a particular pitcher performed. I still see W-L as indicative of how well a pitcher can manage a game, even if he walks a batter and gives up 2 or 3 runs over a 6 inning stretch. A starter’s job is to put his team in a position to win the game. Baiting a hitter to swing at a bad pitch and hit into a DP is just as much of an important quality as being able to strike out the side with the bases loaded and it is more efficient. A W-L can (though not always) be a good indicator of how a pitcher approaches a game and manages a game across the myriad situations a starter will find himself in throughout the course of 5-9 innings.
It’s interesting how MLB is starting to come around and appreciate the off-speed pitches more and more. Hitters are getting better at sitting on pitches and making contact with the fastball. The small ball approach has, to some degree, neutralized the effectiveness of the power pitch, which was valued mightily when juiced players, tweaked balls, and small strike zones favored the hitter even with just moderate power. If a team has three or four guys who can reliably make contact and move from 1st to 3rd and 2nd to home, simply putting the ball into right or left-center is enough to do damage. It also means a power pitcher has to make better pitch selections up and down the entire lineup, which becomes harder to do once they’ve gone through the batting order twice. There’s a greater premium now on guys who can toss 7 innings and get, say, 3 or 4 Ks while scattering hits and avoiding the meltdown inning.
Quintana’s first Cubs start was definitely a good one. The K/9 rate going up from last year tells me his velocity and stuff are probably no worse than last year. But generally, yes, every pitcher’s K/9 rate is up compared to years ago because hitters are striking out at ridiculous rates compared to years ago.
Keep in mind that Montero was DFA’d, and subsequently traded to Toronto.
But I think the issue with the battery is that there’s no David Ross type. He was Lester’s personal catcher, and Contreras is only in his second season, so he doesn’t have the experience, and is trying to build a rapport on the fly.
IMO, the K/W ratio is one of the most overhyped meaningless stats in all of sports. There’s no real connection between the two numbers, and no particular reason why one should offset the other. Each is of some value as an independent stat (especially walks) but the ratio is insignificant.
By contrast, the ratio does have some value for hitters, in that it indicates the extent to which a hitter makes contact when they swing. Hitters who take a lot of pitches tend to strike out and walk a lot; freeswingers don’t do much of either. A freeswinging hitter might rarely strike out despite not being a good contact hitter, since his low K ratio is the result of relatively few called strikes, and vice versa. This makes a difference for hit-and-run plays, where the ability to make contact on a given pitch is key.
Dear Brian Cashman:
Please trade Chapman and get what you can before the bottom falls out of the market for him. First base isn’t the problem, Cooper and Choi may well wind up being all that Bird was not. In my opinion, third base is more of a problem and I don’t think Headley will be more than a journeyman.
That is objectively not true. I mean, that is so far from being true I don’t even know where to begin. It’s a stunningly incorrect claim.
The correlation between K/W ratio and a pitcher’s current AND future success is remarkably strong. Pitchers with good ratios are almost always good, and pitchers with bad ratios are almost always bad. If you don’t believe me, look it up. There are season to season exceptions but they’re pitchers who are either just unlucky and get better, or who are lucky and blow up the following season.
Consistently excellent starting pitchers ALWAYS have good K/W ratios. Not some of them; all of them, no exceptions. Madison Bumgarner’s has had a good or great ratio every year of his career. Clayton Kershaw’s ratios are incredible. Max Scherzer, outstanding. Go back… Greg Maddux had great ratios year after year, Roger Clemens had remarkable numbers, everyone. Hey, how was Roy Halladay? Bad in 1999-2000, and he had to go back to the minors and learn how to pitch differently. When he came back he was great, and whaddya know, led the league in K/BB ratio five times.
Hell, even Nolan Ryan, when he was young and walking crazy numbers of guys, actually had better K/W ratios than average.
None of this - even if true - even begins to address the point.
As I’ve said, there is some value in each of high strikeout levels and low walk levels. Each of those will correlate with a high K/W ratio. But the ratio itself is not significant.
The positive of having a lot of strikeouts doesn’t offset the negative of issuing a lot of walks. It’s just that a lot of strikeouts correlates with good velocity (or stuff) which correlates with low hits allowed. But those walks are still out there, and for a pitcher who gives up a specified number of hits, high strikeouts are not going to overcome the damage of giving up a lot of walks too.
It would be like making up a HDL/PSA ratio and finding that it correlates with good health. No doubt it would, since high HDL is good and low PSA is good. But there’s no connection between HDL and PSA, and neither one directly offsets the other.
Pinstripes can be slimming.
But strikeouts and walks are both a function of the same thing, the pitcher’s ability to throw quality strikes. In order to get a high strikeout rate the pitcher has to be able to throw quality strikes. In order to get a low walk rate he has to be able to do it consistently with both command and control of his pitches. Guys who are wild can have high K rates but still issue a ton of walks. Guys who walk no one can still give up a ton of contact. In isolation neither stat tells you half as much as the two together do because the picture it paints is one of the quality of the stuff as well as the ability to command and control that same stuff.
Firstly, it’s only the “same thing” because you’re combining two things into one and calling them one thing. “Quality strikes” are quality and strikes. Quality get’s the strikeouts. Strikes avoids the walks.
But even leaving that aside, my point still stands. Because I was commenting on whether the ratio is meaningful in terms of its impact on the game, not whether they might arise from the same type of talent.
I feel like you have just told me the sky is orange and that I am crazy for not agreeing.
Not surprising. It’s an extremely widely used stat.
If the argument that K/BB ration by itself is not sufficiently indicative of a pitcher’s overall value, I could probably go along with that, but it is certainly one indicator, and a reasonably good one. At minimum, it’s a fairly good bet that a pitcher who gets significantly more strikeouts than walks is usually (maybe not always but more often than not) a pitcher with a) good control and b) reasonably good velocity.
Now that same pitcher may also be the guy who gets through the first 4 or 5 innings and gives up 5 or 6 hits in the 5th or 6th inning. When I write this, I’m recalling Lance Lynn a few years ago. He would get through the first 4 or 5 innings with a few Ks before getting singled and doubled to death once the batters figured out what he was throwing. He’s become a better pitcher since then but I’m just using him as an example.
Here’s an example that illustrates the point. You have two pitchers who each give up 9 hits per 9 innings (and the same number of HRs etc.) One guy averages 10 Ks and 5 Ws per 9 innings. The other guy averages 4 Ks and 2.2 Ws per 9 innings. You’re going to say the first guy is better because his K/W ratio is better?
That’s a good point – you can’t just look at ratios alone without looking at the raw stats themselves.
Now the counter to that would be that most people aren’t blown away by a 2-1 K/BB ratio. I think what most posters on here would say is that if you take a starting pitcher with a K/BB ratio of 3, 4, or 5 to 1, then there’s a good chance that pitcher’s going to have double-digit win totals or that he’s going to convert a lot of saves if he’s a closer. And then there’s Kershaw who is capable of K/BB ratios that are just utterly frickin ridiculous.
OK, but the same basic principle applies.
There’s a certain positive value to strikeouts (over other forms of outs) in that runners don’t advance a base. And there’s a negative value to walks in the runners being put on base. I assume the damage per walk is more than the marginal benefit per strikeout, but I couldn’t say the exact ratio. Let’s assume for purposes of this question that it’s 3:1.
What that implies is that for a pitcher with a 3:1 ratio, there’s no difference between if he has 3/1, 6/2, or 9/3 K/Ws per 9 innings. If his ratio is below that level, then lower numbers are better, IOW 4/2 is better than 6/3 is better than 8/4, and so on. If his ratio is above 3:1 the opposite would hold true - 12/3 would be better than 8/2 would be better than 4/1.
Maybe I see where you’re going. RickJay noted above that league average K/BB has been significantly increasing over the years. K’s are way up, BB’s are about the same as always.
It might follow then, that if K/BB is a universal indicator of good pitching, that over the years as K/BB has increased, league ERA would decrease proportionally. However, that’s not the case.
From 1980 - 1989 the MLB average K/BB was 1.625. The average ERA was 3.855.
From 2010 to today, the average K/BB is 2.4875. The average ERA is 4.281.
The missing ingredient above, I think, is the HR/9 rate. It has also risen significantly over the years.
1980 - 1989 HR/9 = 0.81
2010 -2017 HR/9 = 1.038
It could be that a pitcher might have a high K/BB ratio and actually not be that good (See Jeff Samardzija or Josh Tomlin this year). Or a pitcher might have a low K/BB ratio and be quite good (See Gio Gonzalez). We all know there’s no perfect way to measure baseball players. We can only look at indicators. K/BB ratio is usually a decent indicator. Great pitchers will almost always have a good K/BB ratio.