Let’s maybe throw something other than a fastball every so often.

(via Fangraphs)

They’ve both thrown 8-inning, 2-hit shut outs. Blackburn threw an 8.2 inning gem in Seattle yesterday afternoon, walking two and striking out six, getting yanked after walking Chone Figgins to put the tying run on with two outs in the ninth. Brian Fuentes came in, made Russell Branyan look like a doofus, and the Twins now have a 4.5 game lead in the AL Central. Johan Santana, well, Johan set a new franchise record for strikeouts in a single game with 17, though he only lasted eight innings (Joe Nathan pitched the ninth, recording two more strikeouts). Santana’s performance was more masterful, with a game score of 95 (Blackburn’s was 84), and it came against a much tougher lineup than the 2010 Mariners, who may have the worst offense of all time. Blackburn’s performance is still pretty impressive though, especially considering how awful he’s been up to this point and how unlikely it is for Blackburn to 2-hit anybody. Blackburn’s ERA has now dropped to 6.02, and he’s given up more than a hit per inning in each of his three major-league seasons. He lead the league in hits allowed last year, with 224, and is on pace to do it again this year, with 158 in just 119.2 IP. The fact that he held his opponents to just two hits is pretty remarkable, whether they are historically inept or not.

Perhaps Blackburn’s performance is more meaningful than Santana’s when put into context. The Twins are in the midst of a tight pennant race and needed a good performance from one of their worst starters in order to put some distance between the second-place Sox. They now have an 88.4% chance of clinching their sixth division title in ten years (according to Coolstandings.com). When Santana nearly no-hit the Rangers, the Twins were barely clinging to a .500 record and all but eliminated from post-season contention, trailing first-place Cleveland by six games. This game would turn out to be the highlight of an otherwise lost season. The Twins would finish with their first losing record in six years, 79-83, nearly eighteen games out of first place. Blackburn’s performance, while not as dominant and not of any real historical significance, helped his team increase their lead in the division by a game. Obviously, it’s not Santana’s fault that the 2007 Twins weren’t any good, and this year’s team has been succeeding despite Nick Blackburn, rather than because of him, for most of the season. All of this only proves that baseball is a crazy game.

No, Manny isn’t a Southsider yet, but it seems to be just a matter of time. The Dodgers sit 10 games out of first place, and 4.5 games out of the wild card, and they’ll need to sweep the Rockies this weekend and hope the Padres, Phillies, Giants, and Cardinals collapse and, yeah, they’re not going anywhere. Manny will be in Chicago by Tuesday. What this means for the Sox and the pennant race, after the jump. Continue reading this post »

By now you’ve probably heard the story that yesterday ESPN’s Buster Olney tweeted about Trevor Cahill and his chances for the AL Cy Young and Keith Law’s replies about Cahill not being worthy based on advanced stats. Today Buster, who is generally a pretty smart guy, made some interesting strawman arguments comparing Cahill to Roger Maris and some other things that really don’t mean anything.

The obvious question is: since FIP and xFIP are mainly predictive, what role do they play in awards vs. stats that are more results based?

Personally, I think they all have semi-equal roles to play. Wins and ERA are thrown out because they both have a huge amount to do with either luck or how good the team is. As Phil Mackey pointed out in a tweet tonight, Matt Capps’s ERA gets penalized because Delmon Young kicked a flyball in Tampa, but his xFIP remains unblemished. At the same time, FIP, and more to the point xFIP is more of a “this should be what happened” stat. Francisco Liriano is leading the league in least home runs given up at .18/9 innings. xFIP normalizes his home run rate to the league average, making his xFIP 3.00. While Liriano’s great home run rate is not sustainable (or at the very least not very sustainable; I think it’s probable that pitchers have at least some control over their HR rate), the fact remains that Liriano has not given up many homers this year. He shouldn’t be penalized for the fact that he “should have” given up more homers than he has.

To put this a better way, let’s examine an analogy. Let’s say I am in a class of 50 people and I am taking a 100 question multiple choice test, which is amazingly difficult. I know roughly 75 of the questions, but have to guess on the final 25. By some sort of magic, let’s say I guess 24 of the 25 right and get a 99% on the test, whereas other people, some who might know 70 of the questions, some who might know as many as 80 or 85, guess horribly. I end up with the best grade in the class and should absolutely get credit for that, but at the same time there is no way I am smarter than the people who knew the answers to 80-85 of the questions, and in no way am I the smartest kid in the class.

Cahill is a very good pitcher. In time he could be one of the best in baseball, but for right now he is more like the kid who gets 75 questions right and has to guess on the final 25 and for whatever reason he is guessing correctly this year. It’s not going to happen again, but at the same time he should still get credit for doing so.

Last year I thought Franklin Gutierrez should have gotten some MVP votes because his WPA was 3.79, one of the best in baseball. Obviously clutch hitting is not sustainable (he’s at -1.28 this year), but it does happen, and people should get credit for that.

Olney is wrong thinking that Cahill’s ERA and WHIP make him a viable Cy Young candidate, but people who say only FIP and xFIP should determine who wins the Cy Young are equally incorrect.

The Twins claimed the 35 year-old off of waivers earlier this afternoon in an attempt to replace the
injured Ron Mahay, who will miss the rest of the season with a torn rotator cuff.  Flores has a good 2.96 ERA this season, but ugly peripherals:  a 5.22 FIP, 5.12 xFIP, and 1.38 K/BB ratio.  His career numbers don’t suggest anything more than a mediocre middle reliever, with a 4.60 ERA, 4.36 FIP, 4.48 xFIP, and 1.92 K/BB ratio.  Career-wise, Flores has a pretty decent strikeout rate (7.31 K/9 rate in 246.1 IP), but walks too many batters (3.80 BB/9) and gives up too many home runs (9.7 HR/FB %) to be trusted in high-leverage situations.  Still, the Twins didn’t claim him to pitch in a lot of high-leverage situations, just to retire tough lefties.  Unfortunately, he isn’t all that effective against lefties, who are slugging .460 against him this season (while righties are slugging .375), and .428 over his career.  There are  right-handed relievers in the bullpen right now who have been more effective against left-handed hitters this season:  Matt Guerrier (.356), Jesse Crain (.427), and Matt Capps (.355).  And that isn’t including lefty-killer, and likely September call-up Pat Neshek, who has limited southpaws to a career .202/.283/.399 line.  Sure, Flores gives the Twins another option against the likes of Josh Hamilton out of the bullpen, but not a particularly good one.

The Twins placed Mahay on the 60-day DL to make space on the 40-man roster, but still need to make a move in order to add Flores on the 25-man roster.  No official announcement has been made, but it’s likely either Glen Perkins or Anthony Slama is headed back to Rochester.  Perkins is certainly more deserving of a demotion, but most likely it will be the right-handed Slama.

A little over a week after Ron Gardenhire made the controversial decision to pull Kevin Slowey in the midst of a no-hitter, Texas Rangers manager Ron Washington was faced with a similar dilemma. Rich Harden had held the Twins hitless through 6 2/3 innings, but he was coming off of a DL stint and had already thrown 111 pitches. Harden was dealing, though he did appear to labor a bit: walking five batters while striking out six.* He had just walked Michael Cuddyer, and the ever-dangerous Jim Thome was coming to the plate. In the end, Washington opted to pull his starter rather than risk further injury or losing the lead. The Rangers’ bullpen shut down the Twins the rest of the way, save for a single by Joe Mauer (breaking up your no-hitters: he does that), and Texas has now all but sewn up its first postseason berth in eleven years. More importantly, they trail the Twins for the second-best record of all the division leaders by just a game and a half, and that could determine whether they face the Yankees at Yankee Stadium or the Rays in Arlington in the ALDS. (Continue reading after the jump) Continue reading this post »

I love MVP discussions. Everyone has his own idea of what constitutes the most valuable player on a team. Some people rely on more advanced statistics to evaluate player value, while others believe in intangibles like leadership and grit. Some people think that pitchers should not be included in these discussions, since there is a separate award for the best pitchers in both leagues, but others argue that pitchers do have value like position players and therefore have to be included in the conversation. Ken Rosenthal thinks Delmon Young is the most valuable player in the American League this year, others think it’s Robinson Cano (and I agree), and still others think it’s Josh Hamilton. Anyway, I agree with Nick Nelson: while Delmon is having a nice season, he isn’t the league MVP; he isn’t even the best player on his own team. See where Delmon ranks amongst his own teammates, after the jump. Continue reading this post »

A pain in his elbow and triceps has sent Kevin Slowey back to the DL. One start removed from 7 no hit innings, Slowey threw almost 70 pitches over 3 innings in the Twins loss today. He was placed on the DL after the game.

In his stead, Nick Blackburn is being called back up. Blackburn has 4 starts with AAA Rochester, and although he is averaging less than 6 innings per start, he has a 1.15 WHIP and a 2.91 RA/9. His groundball rate, just 51% in the majors, was 67% in Rochester. He also doubled his major league walk rate in Rochester. If his sinker is working, Blackburn has a chance to be an adequate major leaguer, but I am not betting a ton on it.

Francisco Liriano is coming off one of his worst outings of the season, surrendering five runs on hits through five innings against the White Sox on Wednesday night. It wouldn’t really be worth mentioning, just a blip in what has been a fantastic season, except that Liriano had gone 94 innings without surrendering a home run: from May 20th in Fenway Park until Andruw Jones smashed a 3-run homer in the second inning. Liriano has given up just three home runs all year, and his 0.18 HR/9 rate is the lowest of all qualified starters in baseball, with Josh Johnson’s 0.38 mark a close second. He’s also the first American League starter to pitch more than 140 innings and surrender fewer than 5 home runs since Ken Brett in 1976. Liriano is on pace to surrender just seven home runs this season, and for fun, here is a list of qualified starters who have surrendered seven home runs or less than 1969 (when the strikezone was decreased and the mound was lowered; it wasn’t unusual to give up fewer than 10 homers in a season before that):

Quite a list of hall-of-famers, future hall-of-famers, guys who belong in the hall of very good, and others who never really did much after that. Danny Jackson in particular seems to have gotten extremely lucky that year, surrendering six home runs despite the fact that he gave up a hit per inning (a 9.4 H/9 rate) while boasting a 1.26 K/BB ratio. This is why single-season stats aren’t indicative of anything; anyone can look good for an entire season, and sometimes a player can be lucky for an entire season. It would be a great accomplishment if Liriano manages to maintain his miniscule home run rate the rest of the season, but it doesn’t mean he’s the next Andy Pettitte.

It is unusual for a starting pitcher to surrender so few home runs over an entire season, since it takes a combination of both skill and luck to keep fly balls in the ballpark. It varies from year to year, but even the most effective ground-ball pitchers typically see about 9% of their fly balls leave the yard (this season, the league-average HR/FB% for all starters is about 9.07). In fact, most ground ball pitchers have a similar HR/FB rate as fly ball pitchers; they just don’t give up as many home runs because they don’t give up as many fly balls. For example, when Fausto Carmona was competing with teammate C.C. Sabathia for the Cy Young in 2007, he posted the highest GB/FB% in the league, at 2.97. While he didn’t surrender many home runs (just 16, for a 0.67 HR/9 rate), 11.1% of his fly balls turned into home runs. Liriano, by comparison, has a GB/FB % of 2.09 but a HR/FB% of just 2.9%. So, while Francisco Liriano has pitched well this season by both traditional and advanced metrics (3.45 ERA, 2.31 FIP, 2.99 xFIP, 3.30 K/BB), he’s also been incredibly lucky that so few of his fly balls have turned into home runs. Considering how unlucky he’s been on balls in play in general (.350 BABIP), Liriano is having one statistically odd season.

(via Fangraphs)

Coming into tonight’s game, Carl Pavano posted a .274 batting average on balls in play.  I think that has regressed a bit closer to the league average now.