Dice-BB?
Yesterday, Daisuke Matsuzaka pitched seven scoreless innings to help Boston beat Toronto. He only gave up two hits and two walks while striking out six, pushing his record to a gaudy 18-2 and lowering his ERA to 2.80. 18-2 with a 2.80 ERA in most years gets you right near the top of the Cy Young voting. However, no one’s talking about Dice-K as a potential Cy Young winner, and it’s not just because of Cliff Lee and Roy Halladay‘s brilliance – it’s because Matsuzaka is having one of the strangest seasons ever.
His 2.80 ERA is 61 percent better than league average – that’s obviously outstanding. But, this isn’t a normal type of dominance, where he blows hitters away and looks like an ace every time he takes the hill. This is… something else.
Dice-K has a staggering 5.17 BB/9 – among qualified pitchers, it’s the worst of any starter in baseball. If you walk five guys per game, you generally don’t stay in the rotation long enough to rack up big innings totals. If we lower the IP qualification to 50 innings, we get the following pitchers who have displayed worse command than Dice-K this year:
Kason Gabbard: 4.82 ERA
Miguel Batista: 6.70 ERA
Tom Gorzelanny: 6.66 ERA
Radhames Liz: 6.69 ERA
Tom Glavine: 5.54 ERA
Fausto Carmona: 5.19 ERA
Batista, Gorzelanny, and Liz are basically the three worst pitchers in baseball this year, while Gabbard, Glavine, and Carmona all ended up on the DL with arm problems. So, Matsuzaka’s peers in strike throwing include the worst of the worst and some guys who were pitching hurt.
He’s 18-2 with a 2.80 ERA. With the worst walk rate in baseball of any pitcher in baseball who was able to keep his job. His FIP is a pretty ordinary 4.01, which is about the best you could possibly hope for given the worst walk rate in the league. He misses enough bats to offset some of the control problems (8.21 K/9) and has also had great success keeping the ball in the park (0.63 HR/9), though his 5.9% HR/FB rate suggests that’s not all skill. He’s also benefited greatly from a .271 BABIP, which has directly led to him stranding more baserunners than anyone in the AL.
Essentially, Matsuzaka has been the master of getting himself into, and then out of, a lot of jams. This is the kind of season that comes around every 50 years or so – for instance, Herb Score had a somewhat similar performance in 1956 – he went 20-9 with a 2.53 ERA on ratios of 4.66 BB/9, 9.49 K/9, and 0.65 HR/9. Score wasn’t exactly a command artist either, but his strikeout rate was ridiculous for the era – the next best guy in the AL had a 7.73 K/9, and the next best guy after that was 6.47. So, while Score dominated despite having control problems, he also was far better at missing bats relative to his peers than Matsuzaka has been.
Really, for a pitcher to experience this much surface-level success while pitching as badly as Matsuzaka has is nearly unprecedented. There’s little doubt that his 2008 season will go down as one of the most unique in history, and it’s unlikely to be repeated any time soon.
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Obvious bias from Dave! Cliff Lee’s name doesn’t hyperlink evenk though Roy’s and Dice-BB’s do! I call foul!
Just kidding.
His LOB% is ludicrous, something in the realm of 83%+ last I checked, and that might have gone up after today’s game, I’m not sure.
A .271 BABIP doesn’t seem extraordinary, though. Nothing like what Duke had pre-ASB (Duchscherer, not Zach Duke, who is terrible), even though it’s certainly sort of lucky.
It’s worth noting that he hasn’t been quite as useful as his ERA would suggest because he rarely goes deep into games, which seems obvious when he’s walking and K’ing so many guys, which is certainly going to ramp up his pitch count very quickly. Still, he’s been way better than you’d expect when you look at his walk rate.
Hey, at least his walk rate is better than Dontrelle’s. Here’s some food for thought: Cliff Lee has walked 31 batters this year. Dontrelle Willis has walked 32 batters this year, in just about 200 less innings. That’s….I don’t know what it is. Stupefying, really.
Andrew Dice-K also has 7 wins this year when he’s gone less than 6 innings, which is a new record according to Elias.
The cream of the crop of Japanese players are basically just freaks. I think they are experiments that have escaped from some mad scientist’s lab tucked deep within a foreboding, forgotten crevice of Mount Fuji.
I expected to see a lot of unearned runs in daisuke’s line, but it’s not there. 55 R, 51 ER. Weird. Or maybe a positive statement about Boston’s defense.
I brought this about a while back. He actually has pretty similar “control numbers” as Buchholz. The only difference is the lack of home runs Matsuzaka gives up. Which is strange in and of itself as he is not even a ground ball pitcher, 38.5%.
I wouldn’t be surprised in Nolan Ryan had some similar seasons, just with even more walks and way more strike outs.
His defense-independent stats are interesting.
From THT:
FIP: 4.05
xFIP: 4.83 (his HR/FB is at 7% this year)
From statcorner.com
tRA: 4.13 (down almost half a run from last year)
He’s obviously not a 2.80 ERA pitcher, but there’s also a large disparity between his 4.83 FIP and his 3.83 tERA (tRA – .30 runs, to put it on the ERA scale.)
tRA is giving him credit for his HR rate being real – xFIP is not. FIP/tRA are better measures of how he’s performed in 2008 – xFIP is almost certainly better at predicting how he’ll perform in 2009.
Matsuzaka may be pitching effectively in a new way that is not measurable by traditional defense independent pitching stats. His low BABIP and and HR/fly may not be flukes but may instead be an indication that batters just can’t make good, solid contact. If you watch his starts you will notice batters producing a lot of pop ups and dribblers. Stat-heads have been predicting his demise based on his high BB rate for two years now. It hasn’t come yet. Maybe it’s time to start trying to explain his unconventional success.
Greg, maybe. But the odds are against that. And I don’t remember anyone spouting off about Daisuke’s demise after his 2007 season with a 4.40 ERA.
Dave, any good reason you think pitchers’ current season HR totals are indicative of their current skills while they aren’t indicative of future skills? Are you making an argument based on a definition of “value”?
I believe he’s just making the distinction between FIP’s descriptive abilities versus xFIP’s predictive abilities.
It is a unique season by MLB standards, but not by DiceK standards. If you look at his season in Japan he pretty much had success with the same method. He walked an incredible amount of hitters, yet never gave up a lot of hits. If you watch him pitch I think you can contribute this to his ability to change speeds and movement with about five to six different pitches. Simply put he still attacks hitters the way he did in Japan. The difference is in the MLB he is not going to get high innings totals because they are not going to let him exceed 130 pitches every time out.
A general rule of thumb – if your explanation is “he’s an exception to the rule”, it’s probably not true. We hear this every year – some pitcher has a season of results that don’t match how he pitched, we hear post-hoc reasoning for why he’s unique, and then, when he eventually regresses back to the mean and proves that he isn’t that unique, everyone forgets about it and moves on.
Rinse and repeat. This year, it’s Matsuzaka.
Eventually, the “he’s the exception!” crowd will be right, and we’ll find someone who really is. But the people who assume that the crowd is always wrong will be right far more often.
This isn’t sustainable.
If his performance in Japan really does cho his first two MLB seasons, he might be one of the rare exceptional players who can sustain the ability to limit hits.
Obvious explanation no one has proposed yet: It’s the gyroball!
I think Matsuzaka’s walks are partially by design. I watched Matsuzaka in Japan a lot and you always kinda knew he’d pull something like this. In Japan, starting pitchers were expected to finish their games and Matsuzaka had absolutely no problems throwing lots of pitches (try 300+ in one bullpen session). He also had a sort of intimidating aura around him in Japan that allowed him to get a lot of swings and misses outside of the strike zone, so it never really concerned him to throw a lot in the strike zone. I imagine that in his mind, he’d probably didn’t care if he walked batters because the likelihood of him getting outs on strikeouts or swings at bad pitches were very likely.
Now in the MLB, he seems to have retained some of that mentality. With so many pitches at his disposal that move in different directions, he’s kept people guessing just enough to get out of jams.
So I think it is repeatable (for him), but maybe not necessarily to this year’s degree.
Mooninite:
I don’t know eough about his career in Japan, but I think that studying the similarities between his rates and LOB% between America and Japan might be insightful.
As much as Dave is right that *usually* these things aren’t really “skills,” that doesn’t mean every such case is a “fluke.”
I think it’s worth a closer look, since he’s a unique pitcher in many ways.
What’s this “walked a lot of hitters in Japan” BS? He hadn’t walked more than 3 per 9 innings since 2001. And hi BABIP in 2004 was .357! From 2003-2006 in Japan it was between .277 and .357, so you can’t really say he had the ability to limit hits.
It’s smoke and mirrors. Unless he fixes something he’s going to get shelled next season pitching like he is now.
dan:
I’d expect him more to regress to his 2007 stats than to “get shelled,” since his rates weren’t amazingly different last season, and the biggest difference in his favor is the large drop in HR/9.
As a huge Sox fan who has watched most of Dice-K’s starts, your statistical analysis misses something you see with the naked eye: they guy is really hard to hit. He’s only given up 124 hits in 163.7 innings (.76 H/Inn) this year, which is Petco-esque. He takes all kinds of chances and puts guys on base because he has tremendous confidence that no one can hit him. It’s maddening to watch, but it works, and has worked for two years (especially when you can keep the ball in the park):
Peavy 392 innings 311 hits (.79 H/Inn)
Lincecum 352 innings 294 hits (.84)
Dice K 368.3 innings 315 hits (.86)
Santana 436.3 innings 379 hits (.87)
Hamels 400.6 innings 348 hits (.87)
Burnett 379 innings 335 hits (.88)
Kazmir 354 innings 313 hits (.88)
Webb 449 innings 401 hits (.89)
Zambrano 400.3 innings 356 hits (.89)
Beckett 369 innings 355 hits (.90)
Wakefield 359 innings 337 hits (.94)
CC: 478 innings 453 hits (.95)
Haren 431.7 innings 410 hits (.95)
Shields 422 innins 402 hits (.95)
Lowe 407.3 innings 386 hits (.95)
Halladay 462.3 innings 446 hits (.96)
Vazquez 416.7 innings 399 hits (.96)
Lackey 384.7 innings 368 hits (.96)
Meche 414.3 innings 411 hits (.99)
So in response to the “walks a lot of guys” non sense comment. Are you ignoring the bb/9 over 4 he posted three consectuive seasons? Also He still limited damage in a year where he had his worst bb/9 and lowest strand rate. Huh, imagine a guy changes speed and hitters can not square him up. Because he A) changes speed B) nibbles. Now again he has gotten some what lucky. But, this is not that different from some past results.
Frank-
Your list is littered with strikeout artists who are naturally going to allow fewer hits. If Dice-K had a superior ability to prevent hits on batted balls it wasn’t apparent in 2007 (.306 BABIP). And last year his real ERA was worse than his FIP.
“So in response to the “walks a lot of guys†non sense comment. Are you ignoring the bb/9 over 4 he posted three consectuive seasons?”
Yea, I’m pretty sure you can ignore Daisuke’s age 18,19,20 seasons when talking about his walk rate at age 27.