Angels Big Two
For years, the Angels have had a couple of all-stars at the front of their rotation, anchoring their team and leading them to playoff contention. With John Lackey and Kelvim Escobar starting the year on the disabled list, however, it looked like 2008 would be the year where the Angels had to win by scoring runs and getting consistent pitching every five days, rather than being carried by a couple of Cy Young candidates.
Well, apparently, traditions are harder to break than expected, because once again, the Angels have a couple of guys pitching like aces at the front of their rotation. Joe Saunders and Ervin Santana are reasons 1A and 1B for why Los Angeles is 21-13 to start the year, ranking 2nd and 4th respectively in the American League in WPA among starting pitchers. Santana was brilliant again last night, throwing a complete game shutout against the Royals to lower his ERA to 2.02.
While these two have provided a big April lift for the Angels, the question of whether they’ve actually reached a new level of performance is unanswered. For that, let’s take a look at their relevant peripherals.
Santana: 6.98 K/9, 1.65 BB/9, 34.5% GB%
Saunders: 3.91 K/9, 1.86 BB/9, 46.5% GB%
Both of them are pounding the strike zone like never before, significantly reducing their walk rates from their major league career averages. That command improvement could certainly be legitimate. However, neither of them are striking out more batters than usual, and Saunders has actually seen his strikeout rate nosedive so far this year. Additionally, neither of them are getting any more groundballs than usual, so they’re not trading strikeouts for weak grounders. Those peripherals simply don’t match what you’d look for in a guy getting ready to contend for a Cy Young award. In fact, if we look at the numbers that affect run prevention and have very little predictive value, we see that both Saunders and Santana are leaning heavily on factors that are mostly beyond their control.
Santana: .236 BABIP, 4.7% HR/FB, 80.4% LOB%
Saunders: .253 BABIP, 6.3% HR/FB, 82.3% LOB%
All of those numbers are jumping and down, volunteering to regress to the mean. Those performances aren’t indicative of a true change in skill for either of these guys, and as those numbers shift back towards their career averages, both Santana and Saunders are going to give back a lot of the gains they’ve appeared to make early on.
If you’re an Angels fan, you have to be thrilled with what those guys have given you in the first month of the season, but you also shouldn’t expect it to continue for much longer. They’re both capable major league starters, but neither one is an all-star, and their early performances are built on a house of cards.
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So you’re saying that Santana and Saunders have been lucky rather than genuinely good so far? Like James Baldwin of the White Sox in early 2000?
One thing you didn’t account for with respect to Santana..his previous year’s home record was superb. Only his road starts were awful. If he has found a way to translate his home success to the road (not improbable, considering his age), you could have a real breakthrough.
I’m skeptical on Saunders.
Correction: Santana was facing Kansas City last night. Also, you need to be careful using straight K/9 & BB/9 for guys with such low BABIPs. For example, the Hardball Times’ K/G & BB/G (basically the rates for the typical number of batters faced in 9 innings) for Santana are 7.6 & 1.8. A bit more impressive, no? He’s certainly going to regress in his traditional stats, but he still looks like he’s taken a significant step forward. With improved control, he is a good bet to be an asset going forward, with his home run rate being his primary liability.
Keith Law, whom I trust very much in matters player evaluation-related, has said repeatedly that Santana has #1-starter stuff. I think that Saunders is due for a regression, but with Santana I’m more inclined to wait and see.
The home/road thing with Santana has been overblown. Yes, his performance away from Edison Field the last few years has been horrible, but it was based on absurd home run per fly ball rates that were equally unsustainable. He was bound to regress (progress?) to the mean in terms of road performance, just as he is bound to regress to the mean overall now.
Justin: The 7.6 K/G on THT is sort of double counting that he has a low walk rate and gives up very few hits. If you were to assume he’ll revert back to his career BABIP, his K/G would be more on the level of 7.3. So .3 of K/G is due to his low BABIP, and then if you were to revert back to his career walk rate, you’re looking at another .3 gain in K/G. So .6 of his K/G is because of his walk rate and his low BABIP.
I guess the big question is if Santana’s control is for real. He can be an extremely successful pitcher (Cy Young caliber on the right year) walking around 2 per 9 and striking out around 7 per 9. But I do think Dave is right in that he has been unrealistically good for the first month of the season.
I would be way more concerned about Saunders.
A 2 BB, 7 K, 35% GB pitcher would have to be very lucky to put up a Cy Young season. That combination of skills is basically the David Bush/Jered Weaver/Jeremy Guthrie/Scott Baker profile – a solid middle of the rotation guy, but certainly not one of the best pitchers in the league.
That’s pretty much what I think of Santana – a solid #3/#4 starter on a contender, but the home run problem will always keep him from being a legitimate frontline starter.
I think there’s a real difference between a 2.5 K/BB of those pitchers and the 3.5 to 4-ish K/BB that Santana has exhibited this year, which he could realistically continue to post.
But yeah, the home run issue is still there.
Seems to me there may be a bit of the wish-casting by our author here… ;-)
Regarding Santana’s home-road splits the last 3 years, I disagree with the argument that they are luck-driven. According to reports, one reason for Santana’s struggles away was his inability to maintain consistent mechanics on the road. If he has resolved that issue, his gains this season may be very real.
Appelman: It would be interesting to see how all these stats interact with each other in practice. But conceptually, here’s how they seem to fit together to me: BB% (or BB/G) describes how often a pitcher puts the hitter on base on his own. Then, setting aside those walks (& their associated batters faced), you want to how often the hitter can make contact, i.e. not strike out. Presumably this second number would remain relatively constant if the first number goes up.
For example, right now Santana has faced 189 batters, and has put 10 (5.3%) of them on base via a BB (4.8%) or HBP (0.5%). Of the 179 batters Santana forced to swing at the ball, 38 (21.2%) struck out. Of course, if these rates stay the same and he starts giving up more hits on balls in play, he will take more batters faced per inning and his K/9 & BB/9 will go up (to roughly 7.6 & 1.8, respectively). But if he starts giving up more hits on balls in play AND his walk rate goes up, but the 21.2% rate stays the same, his K/9 will still be 7.6 because the walks don’t affect the number of innings he’s getting through (except for double plays, caught stealing, etc). I just built a spreadsheet to check it and here’s what I came up with (the rates per 9 IP are off slightly because of rounding errors in all the percentages I used in the HR calculation):
5.3% BB+HBP, 21.2% K/(BFP-BB-HBP), .225 BABIP: 7.09 K/9, 1.67 K/BB
5.3% BB+HBP, 21.2% K/(BFP-BB-HBP), .300 BABIP: 7.63 K/9, 1.80 K/BB
8.0% BB+HBP, 21.2% K/(BFP-BB-HBP), .300 BABIP: 7.63 K/9, 3.13 K/BB
So a K/9 of 7.6 seems reflective of the skill level he’s displayed thus far.
Cameron: Weaver hasn’t had a 7 K/9 since his rookie year, and Guthrie never did. Bush is a separate case, as he never had a GB rate below 40%; his problem is that he can never hit the ERA that his peripherals say he can. So given the scouting reports & his prospect status coming up through the minor leagues, I take Santana over any of those guys. (To me, the jury is still out on Baker; his K rate is way up this year.) I agree that a Cy Young season would be a stretch for the most part because of his FB rate, though I might liken Santana’s best-case scenario to Javier Vazquez, and he came pretty close a few times.
Anyway, setting aside his traditional stats (we all know his ERA will end up closer to his 3.75 xFIP than 2.02), I think the doubts about his performance thus far start with the offenses he’s faced. He is on the lower end of starters in Baseball Prospectus’ Quality of Batters Faced metric this year (as is Saunders, I might add), and 5 of his 7 starts have come against the 6 worst offenses in the AL by slugging percentage (@ #10 Min, #13 Cle, @ #4 Tex, #9 Sea, @ #2 Det, #12 Oak, @#14 KC).
Hmm…correcting a few errors in the table-type thing in the middle of that last post: “K/BB” should say “BB/9″, except in the last row, in which it should be “BB+HBP/9″ (I assumed 1 HBP – Santana’s current total – in the first two rows).
There are always post-hoc reasons given for outliar performances. I’m sure people have all kinds of theories as to why Santana’s struggled on the road so much the last few years, just as I’m sure that no one really knows what the answer is. It might be luck, it might not be, but I will suggest that home/road splits (beyond what we already know about park factors) generally have very little predictive ability, so they’re best ignored when making projections of future ability.
K/9 makes no sense compared to K/PA and it vexes me that no one publishes it. Measuring the rate in terms of outs is very artificial compared to measuring it terms of batters faced. If two pitchers have the same K/9 but one has given up many fewer hits, the conclusion should not be that said pitcher has been more lucky on balls in play or something like that, but that he is better at striking batters out, which you could not tell from looking at K/9!
Justin you said:
Santana’s K/9 would in fact rise if his walk rate rises. We’re assuming that he’s striking out a fixed percentage of batters (21.2%) and additional walks means that he will have to face additional batters to get the 27 outs to complete nine innings (i.e. there will be a rise in plate appearances against/9). Since he’s facing additional batters over a period of nine innings and he strikes out a percentage of those batters that means an increase in K/9.
If Santana were to maintain his K% when his BB% goes from 5.3% to 8.0% it would mean that his K/9 has increased.
The 21.2% is the percent of batters who strike out, ignoring those who walk or are hit by a pitch [38 Ks / (189 BFP - 9 BB - 1 HBP) = 21.2%]. In other words, it’s the percent of batters who try, but fail, to put the ball in play. If he started walking more batters, I would definitely expect his overall K% to decrease (because he’s now walking batters). However, I would expect this 21.2% value to remain relatively unchanged (though it would apply to a smaller percentage of his overall batters faced). Does that make more sense? I’m sorry if I wasn’t clear before.
So the real question is
If we own him in our fantasy team.
Do we A) Trade him now for as much as we can get
or B) Keep him and expect a good season with 15-18w and a decent era somewhere around 3.75-4 and a decent whip
E.g would getting someone like Felix Hernandez be a good deal? Felix has a career whip of 1.3?