I never heard anything in the local media from Hawkins himself or any other players or members of the organization that shed any light on the anomalous results.

The only two factors that I can think of are these:

1) he had an arm injury early in the year that robbed him of his ability to throw his prefered breaking ball properly (this was the explaination for his horrible performance at the start of the season) and even when he returned he seemed to still be trying to find new ways of getting people out rather than reverting to the pitch selection and style that he had used the rest of his career.

2) Apodaca does place a heavy emphasis on pitchers keeping the ball down in the zone and getting ground balls and there is some record of success in this aspect with various pitchers over the last several years.

On a final note, having watched the vast majority of Rockies games on TV in 2007 I feel confident in saying that Hawkins results did not feel ‘flukey’ or random at all. Totally unexplained – yes. Flukey? No.

Normally, I would guess that a spike like that would be caused by throwing more 2 seam fastballs. Hawkins can throw both 4 seam and 2 seam fastballs. It would be natural to expect that Hawkins might fear the flyball in Coors Field and shift to more sinking fastballs. His average pitch speeds don’t give any indication of that, though; maybe a Rockies fan could tell us if my guess is correct.

As for his time with the Astros, he was getting Ks with a rising 4 seam fastball and a good slider. After the hiatus subsequent to his release from the Yankees, two of the Astros top baseball people worked out Hawkins and reported that his velocity had returned, relative to his period with the Yankees. The Fox network guns were reporting velocity of 95 – 97 mph as an Astros player. The swings and misses seemed consistent with that. Also, Hawkins has a huge differential in his righty/lefty performance. In 08, his WHIP was 0.86 against RHB and 1.74 against LHB. Cooper did a good job of protecting him from pitching against too many LHB, particularly in leveraged situations.

A quick look at PITCHf/x doesn’t explain things either, though. He didn’t throw a sinker or a change-up with a lot of sink, and he located pitches down in the zone at about a league average rate (you can check out a chart here: http://www.hardballtimes.com/images/uploads/LaTroy_Hawkins_2007_Vertical_Location.jpg). I really expected to see a whole bunch down in the zone, but that’s just not the case.

Very strange stuff.

His numbers as a Yankee in 2008: 41 IP, 23 K, 16 B, 42 H, 78 ERA+, 1.44 WHIP, 7 out of 12 inherited runners scored. Opponents hit .275/.339/.386 against him.

His numbers as an Astro in 2008: 21 IP, 23 K, 5 BB, 11 H, 992 ERA+, 0.76 WHIP, 0 out of 5 inhertied runners scored. Opponents hit .151/.203/.205 against him.

So his K rate and really all his other numbers didn’t pick up until he moved to the NL.

So I dug deeper and calculated the GB% for home vs. road. At home, he was at 70.5% GB, on the road 56.2% GB. That worked out to roughly 9 extra ground balls on the road (out of 89) and 22 extra ground balls at home (out of 88). So it was his home that really drove his high GB% in 2007, though his road was also on the high side for his career.

Also, looking at the FB%, it looks like it was FB that took the brunt of the switch to GB in 2007. On the road, his LD% was virtually the same as his career, but FB% fell from 34.6% to 23.6%. At home, however, both fell by approximately half. FB% fell from 34.6% to 18.2% and LD% from from 19.6% to 11.4%. Fell, meaning differed from his overall career numbers.

Something about those humidor balls in Colorado really deadens the ball, killing FB and LD and inducing more GB.

Given this evidence of ball deadening, and given the rumor that Colorado sometimes slips in non-humidor balls, hence those old wild games of old in humidor days, it would be interesting to separate the low-scoring games from the high scoring games in Colorado and seeing how different the GB%, FB%, and LD% are. Obviously, to have a high scoring game, there necessarily has to be a lot of FB and LD, but perhaps there is a stat expert reading who can calculate the odds of a high percentage of FB% suddenly in one game and seeing if that proportion holds across a full Colorado season, or even multiple seasons.

Also, just noticed his BABIP was way low in 2007, a result, obviously of all the GB.

But to Dave’s comment, just because variance is low does not mean that a relief pitcher had enough “events” to meet the sample size requirement. Have you done the calcuations (or seen it somewhere)? If so, what is the calcuation for sample size for this situation?

And just in general, the right sample size varies greatly in baseball, I’ve found. For example, Tom Tango a while back calculated that it would take 7 seasons of BABIP for a starting pitcher to (sorry don’t remember his exact words or technical stat jargon) “prove” that his BABIP is lower than the generally accepted .290 or .300 BABIP that “every” pitcher regresses to the mean towards.