And, as I noted, the one run he gave up in that game was a lucky shot because it was a come-backer that deflected off his glove and into right field, scoring the runner from second.
How about that. It’s interesting, and again, it suggests that he will not continue to win 13 out of every 14 games with an ERA just over one. But, again, did anyone REALLY need to know line drive percentage to know he wasn’t going to keep winning 13 out of every 14 games? The claim that Jiminez is being lucky here is based on the assumption that pitchers lack control over balls hit into play, which is (largely) true. But his performance is what it is.
If a guy hits six home runs in a week, we all acknowledge that it’s a flukey run and he’s not actually going to hit six home runs every week. But you don’t deny the fact that he hit six home runs and that those six homers actually helped his team win ballgames, do you?
There’s this funny confusion that seems to happen between performance that isn’t repeatable and performance that isn’t VALUABLE. It’s like clutch hitting. I think most people who’ve looked into the facts know clutch hitting is not a sustainable ability. Players who have huge clutch hitting years, like David Ortiz in 2005 or Paul Molitor in 1993, show no propensity for doing it again. But it certainly is possible, and absolutely has happened, that players have had years where they hit much better in clutch situations than normal, and that had real value in helping their teams win.
Were Jiminez to continue this, it absolutely WOULD be a season for the ages. It’s no different than if a guy was hitting .420 right now. We wouldn’t expect him to keep doing it because hitting .420 into mid-June would require an ass-pile of luck. But if he ended the season hitting .420 it would be a season for the ages, wouldn’t it? Even if he hit .295 in 2011?
I guess it comes down to there being some amount of luck involved in what it is that Jimenez has done so far – both good (drawing an umpire with a larger strike zone on a particular day, for instance, insanely strong defense behind him, Mother Nature deciding to rain down on Denver for 72 straight hours) and bad (**Asimovian’s **aforementioned deflected comebacker) – the point is, he’s pitching in the same conditions and using the same variables – umpires’ whims, defensive positioning at a particular time, the weather – as every other starter in MLB has ever faced. Ever.
I don’t know what value the ability to drill down into statistics like line drive percentage in high-leverage situations (I swear, there are two or three new stats in baseball every year, and I’ve been watching since 1984) has on something so concrete as two age-old stats: W/L and ERA.
There’s absolutely no guarantee that he will be able to keep this up. If he doesn’t, I really doubt it’ll be because his line drive percentage in high-leverage situation stats go all to hell. There’s absolutely no guarantee that he won’t keep it up. Just enjoy watching the man pitch.
The Tigers are a half game back of the Twits. The race is on again. The Tigers and Minn. both get fat off the NL teams.
Jesse Litsch pitches seven shutout innings in his second start coming off TJ surgery as the Jays blank the Jints 3-0.
Marcum tomorrow, trying for the sweep.
That “cite” is plainly ridiculous, or would you have me believe that Coors Field turns the average lineup into Rogers Hornsby?
Here’s ESPN’s take on park factors. They’re single year only, and thus subject to fluky bumps
, but they show the order of magnitude we’re talking about here- plus 20 odd percent at Coors, minus 6-10 percent at Safeco.
But you forgot that Lee pitches in the tougher league and, being lefthanded, faces the platoon disadvantage the majority of the time. Factor all that in and it’s pretty close, with Ubaldo holding maybe a 1/10 of a run disadvantage, roughly 1/4 run without the platoon.
And frankly, I didn’t understand the rest of your post.
I don’t understand the obsession with value here. I never said luck wasn’t valuable, only that I object to given Ubaldo Jiminez (full) credit for the ass-pile of luck that has befallen the Rockies when he’s pitching.
No doubt that many of the great milestones seasons are littered with luck. But +5% is lucky and +10% is damn lucky. So how do you respond when a trusted stat belies true value by 50% or more, as Ubaldo Jiminez’s ERA currently does?
I don’t fault you a bit for not liking the proliferation of stats; 90% of them are shit. But W/L is wrongheaded from the outset, since it’s a team stat applied to individuals, and ERA, while much better, especially over long time frames, can still be off, say +/-15%.
I had a long geekgasm of a post typed up comparing Ubaldo’s 2010 to Randy Johnson’s 2002, but the board ate it, so here are the broad strokes.
Unit’s 2002 strand rate was 82%, which is very high (historical average is 74%, and Maddux, Roger Clemens, Pedro and RJ only broke 80% in a season 8 times between them.) Ubaldo’s 2010 strand rate is 91.6%-the highest I’ve seen by 5 points.
Okay, so he’s having a great year, leave him be, watch him pitch. But if you look at all his peripherals, you see that he’s pitching his worst in high pressure situations. His K rate and BB rate both plummet with men on, suggesting that he’s taking something off the ball; his ground ball % decreases slightly and his line drive % spikes from 12.7% to 15.8% with men on to 28.6% in high leverage . Basically he becomes much much more hittable with men on, and all those trends continue/worsen in high leverage situations.
Okay, now Johnson’s 2002. His K rate is drops slightly across all situations, showing that he didn’t compromise his stuff much. His BB rate is up a bit, probably from elective walks to reinstate the force. His GB % spikes, showing that he’s keeping the ball down to induce DP’s/avoid HR’s. And his LD % decreases with men on and is nearly halved in high leverage situations.
So the Unit shows signs of tactical pitching, and thus I conclude that he’s earned most of his aberrantly high strand rate. Ubaldo Jiminez on the other hand-well, let’s just say that the more critical the situation, the more likely he is to do his Charlie Brown impersonation.
And people are saying it’s some kind of historic season when, in actuality, he’s getting his tits lit and his fielders are coming up triple 7’s behind him, apparently in self defense.
The quality of opposition obviously is worth noting, but why should Lee get any credit for being lefthanded? Tough shit. It’s part of his ability as a ballplayer.
Someone has to get credit for it. Logically, the Rockies’ aggregate amount of success has to be credited to the members of the Colorado Rockies. If the luck happens to take place when Jiminez is pitching, well, he seems like the common factor.
Perhaps his defense has just been unbelievably astonishing when he’s pitching. I haven’t seen that concept proven, though.
I have no problem using your cite as the standard. lets go with that. You say 26% [minimum] as though it doesn’t matter. Do you as a stat head, try to claim that 26% is irrelevant? Lets see your answer on that before going further.
For the record 26% is the difference between 60 HR and 75 HR, same damn thing I guess, you seem to be claiming.
In doing those numbers, I tried to take as many external forces that might influence the numbers into account as I could. Handedness, being mostly innate (an possibly 100% innate where major league pitchers are concerned) is an example of just such an external force. I also foresaw that someone would raise precisely the objection you’ve just raised, which is why I gave you the number with and without the platoon advantages. You’re welcome.
You’re serious? 91.6% stranded versus 74% historically doesn’t tell you something? .232 BABIP versus about .300 historically, .283 for Ubaldo’s career means nothing? Hell, I just showed you that he is pitching worse in critical situations, but getting better results. Alright, I’ll throw one more stat at this unbelievable obtusity.
Using this cite to derive expected BABIP based on batted ball trajectory, Ubaldo breaks down like this-
Expected Actual
Bases Empty .312 .310
Men On .341 .148
High Leverage .419 .000
Note that in the same cite, Nate Silver holds that about 7% of BABIP can be influenced by a pitcher’s skill, and Ubaldo would seem to possess that skill at a very high level, so those expected numbers are high for him-but even adjusting them downward 15% (more than twice Nate’s estimate), still leaves him outperforming expectations by 50% with men on, by .356(!) points in high leverage situations.
It sure looks like his defense has been unbelievably astonishing when he’s pitching, with men on at least.
And Wolfman, no I’m not turning my nose up at +26%-but according to the cite you put forward, Coors Field would be something like +300%. And remember that a player only plays at home half the time, so 26%/2=13%.
In doing those Park/Competition factors, I looked at runs scored for each team each player had pitched against-minus those games the aces had pitched in-and adjusted for each park (home and away) they had pitched in. The result was nearly 4.8* RPG for Ubaldo, 4.5* for Lee-a 6.67% disadavantage for Ubaldo. That certainly needs to be accounted for, but it is not 26%, not 13% and certainly not whatever percent your original cite spat out.
*I’ve misplace the sheet that I calculated all this in, so I rounded Ubaldo up, Lee down.
Jays couldn’t pull off a sweep today, falling to the Giants 9-6.
But John McDonald hit a home run today. Satan is freezing his balls off.
I really hope the Dodgers rally.
You are, I must against point out, assuming as a central truth that pitchers cannot control the results of balls hit into play. That is, I agree, generally true in the sense that pitchers cannot demonstrate much repeatability in this skill. However, you haven’t proven Jiminez isn’t doing a good job THIS YEAR. Perhaps it just happens that he has. That happens.
Rather than telling me what Jiminez’s BABIP in different situations is and then just saying “Look, he’s lucky,” you’d have to prove to me that the results are entirely due to specific defensive players’ performances. Otherwise, I’d have to conclude Jiminez just happens to have gotten a lot of guys to hit into outs in key situations - which I again agree is not a sustainable ability, but he’s done it so far in 2010.
Holy crap, the last-place-in-the-AL-West Mariners just swept the first-place-in-the-NL-Central Reds in a 3-game series! And they did it by holding the NL’s best offense to only one run in those three games :eek:
Could this signal a turnaround? Maybe not - it was all pitching. Two of those wins were still 1-0 affairs.
It signals the NL’s inferiority, that’s all.
As of today the Yankees (43-26), Rays (42-27) and Red Sox (43-28) are within one game of each other in the standings and have better records than any other team in the MLB. If the playoffs started today the Sox would be left out despite having a better record than 27 other teams.
Also, if the playoffs started today a lot of people would be really confused because the season usually goes through September.
Read about this site on Rob Neyer’s page. It’s pretty cool.
You’ll note that I gave Jimenez more than twice the credit for the skill of influencing BABIP than was recommended by a veritable expert, and his outcomes are still wildly divorced from expectations.
As for the ‘show me the specific performances’ aspect, well that’s not how probability works. If you and I watch someone flip a coin 15 times and it comes up heads every single time, and I say that it was a fluke, you can’t say, “Well show me which times it should have came up tails.” Just because a single event isn’t vastly improbable doesn’t make a series of such events vastly improbable.
Frankly, I’ve spent more than enough time time on this. I’ve shown you that Ubaldo Jimenez is significantly more hittable in critical situations, and thus that his ERA is significantly lower than his skill demonstrated has merited thus far.
Given all that, your last sentence is absolutely spot on, but it’s beyond me how you can give a guy credit for inducing line drives.
The pendulum will swing back, and when it does there’ll be a spate of “What happened to Ubaldo?” stories, when the fact of the matter will be that he’s pitching just as well, only his luck is running against him.
Neat site, Southern Yankee.
RickJay, i’m not sure if i’m understanding your argument here, because it seems to me that you’re being a little odd about all this, especially for someone who is, as far as i can tell, intimately familiar with the benefits and the limitations of statistical analysis in baseball.
Take the last sentence of your most recent post, for example:
But isn’t that a key point of complex stats like BABIP etc., and of using them to form overall impressions of a player’s performance? It’s not to argue that awesome numbers are not awesome numbers; it’s simply to point out that, in some cases, the awesome numbers reflect extremely unlikely outcomes, and that probability will likely catch up to the player in question and those awesome numbers will revert to merely great or good as a result.
It seems to me, in short, that your final observation (that Jimenez’s ability to get hitters to hit into outs is not sustainable in the long run) is agreeing with the substance of what Incensed has been arguing all along: that Jimenez is doing awesome, but he’s doing awesome because he’s a very good pitcher who is also getting lucky with where his batted balls go.
I guess it comes down, in some sense, to whether the question we are seeking to answer is, “How good has Ubaldo Jimenez been this year?” or "Is Ubaldo Jimenez’s performance so far this year likely to be an indicator of his medium- to long-term future performance? It’s possible to answer “Awesome!” to the first question, while still observing that the statistics suggest that the answer to the second question is “Not really.”
I’m not sure if you or Incensed have Baseball Prospectus subscriptions, but if you do, you might be interested in reading this article on Jimenez from last week. If you don’t have access, i’d be happy to post some key bits.
It doesn’t signal anything of the sort.
The AL is probably stronger than the NL, but the result of a single three-game series is, by itself, completely irrelevant in making such an evaluation.
Pretty remarkable race in the AL East at the moment at least.
Team W L Pct. GB Home Road East Cent. West L10 Strk
N.Y. Yankees 43 27 .614 - 25-10 18-17 18-10 10-7 8-4 6-4 L 1
Tampa Bay 42 27 .609 ½ 18-15 24-12 18-9 8-5 11-6 3-7 L 1
Boston 43 28 .606 ½ 26-15 17-13 15-15 10-9 8-2 8-2 W 6
All 3 teams are very good and it Boston is charging hard at the moment. The Yanks still aren’t quite firing on all cylinders but A-Rod and Posada are getting healthy and Teix is beginning to hit.
This should be a fun race and to Seattle’s chagrin I do not think any of the three are in the market for Cliff Lee.
I am thinking the Twins, Rangers & Mets will be in the play for a trade for Lee or Oswalt. I think we are in trade rumor time now. Anyone else?
Yanks will be looking for a stud relief pitcher or maybe a really good utility player. That is about all. The positions and starters are fine. I think a lot of teams will be looking for that reliever though so I don’t actually expect a trade for one by the Yanks.