How Johan Santana Succeeds as a Fly Ball Pitcher
As we looked at yesterday with John Lannan, inducing ground balls is a great way to overcome other flaws in a pitcher’s repertoire. Lannan’s ERA stands nearly a run below his career FIP because of his high ground ball rate. Similarly, Joel Piniero had his best season in at least six years, and he achieved much of his success via an astounding 60.5% ground ball rate.
Johan Santana, on the other hand, is a pitcher who has no problems striking batters out. Although he has slipped some in recent years, his career K/9 stands at 9.12, meaning he strikes out over a batter per inning on average. He doesn’t struggle with walks either, giving up almost a whole walk less than average, both in recent years and in his career.
However, Santana does not excel in inducing ground balls. His 35.7% ground ball rate last season ranked sixth in the major leagues. Clearly, Santana is a great pitcher, as his 3.38 career FIP, 3.60 career tRA, and 42.4 WAR in the win value era (second only to Roy Halladay) suggest. This begs the question – if inducing ground balls is so essential to pitcher success with guys like Lannan and Piniero, how come it doesn’t seem to affect Santana?
Of course, as mentioned above, Santana’s basic peripherals are incredible. With the amount of outs that Santana gets via the strikeout, his batted ball profile has a much lower impact than with a guy like Lannan (3.9 K/9) or Piniero (4.4 K/9). Also, with a low walk total, the impact of hits on balls in play is lower due to having fewer runners on base for those hits.
The fact that Santana’s peripherals make him a good pitcher isn’t terribly interesting to us here. That’s the crux of the DIPS theory behind FIP. However, tRA, based on batted balls, doesn’t see an issue with Santana due to low GB% as it does with players like Ted Lilly (34.5% GB, 5.12 tRA, 4.45 FIP) or especially Aaron Harang (38.0% GB, 4.98 tRA, 4.10 FIP)
Here, we see two major things come into play. First is line drive rate. As we hit upon with Lannan yesterday, the NL BABIP on line drives is .718. Giving up line drives is an almost sure way to give up hits. Santana, despite the fact that he doesn’t give up many ground balls, has a career line drive rate that is nearly average. Aaron Harang, on the other hand, has a career LD% over 2% above the average – significant for a statistic that has a range under 9% for a single season.
Also, Santana’s infield fly rate is one of the highest in the league. His 16.4% rate led the majors by 1.5%, and his 13.3% career rate is in the top 10 since 2002, the beginning of our batted ball data. The league BABIP on infield flies is miniscule. After a strikeout, the next best way to insure an out is to induce an infield fly. Santana has repeatedly been above average in this statistic since 2002. As a result, the true problem with fly balls – their penchant to turn into home runs – is minimized by this ability to induce weak contact on balls in the air. As such, Santana’s career HR/FB is below average, and has effectively cancelled out the sheer number of fly balls he gives up, resulting in an average HR/9.
With the amount of HRs and line drives Santana gives up limited, and the amount of essentially automatic outs he induces via the infield fly, Santana’s low amount of ground balls has no impact on his incredible peripherals, making him still one of the best pitchers in the game today.
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Kudos Jack.
Slight nitpick. The GB% was sixth lowest in the league. The sentence was slightly confusing as written, but understandable.
His pitches seem to have considerably more ‘rise’ than league average ( this year FA: 10.9, 9.1; CH: 7.8, 6.0; and SL: 3.4, 1.7) . Any studies on if increased rise leads to increases in infield fly rates?
Also, I don’t know how to get the data, but it’d be cool to see his pitch/swing/contact location chart and see if he pitches higher in the zone on average and/or gets a higher swing% than the typical pitcher there.
I wonder what effect (affect?) this has on relievers that come in when he leaves the game. If batters keep getting under his pitches and adjust they should be getting a lot of line drives. I wish I knew how to query this stuff.
The only thing I can remember is a lot of Santana’s games getting blown by the bullpen during 08. Though you would have a SSS issue.
Or a ‘The Mets bullpen fucking sucked’ issue.
There are a handful of guys that succeed doing what Santana does, just not as much. This is why I’m so curious to see what happens with David Hernandez next season. In the minors, his LD% was very low and the infield fly rate was very high (along with a very high SO rate). In the minors that helped him keep the homers around average or just under. This season in the majors the lack of strikeouts have been a focus for good reason, but there has not been as much focus on the home runs, which have gone off the charts.
So is Johan’s effectiveness based on him just having great stuff in general, or is it that the incredible change/slider combo gives him the ability to keep hitters off balance in hitters counts? Hernandez has good stuff, so is he just not making the right pitches at the right times, or have advanced metrics uncovered the mirage that was his minor league career? Who else falls broadly into this category that could be a breakout candidate?
This is a different story, because he was striking out hitters at the major league level, but Juan Cruz showed an equally striking drop in k rate this year. It will be interesting to see what happens next year.
I’d really like to see a profile of these types of pitchers, especially the ones who give up a lot of IFF. I would hypothesize that, like santana, many of them are lefthanded, and throw a lot of inside fastballs.
Speaking of Joel Piniero, can someone please tell me what’s up with him? Has he completely remade himself, or is this some kind of fluke season that he’ll never live up to again after using it to cash in on the free agent market this offseason? I watched him pitch with the M’s, and saw him make a relief appearance with the BoSox, but the only time I’ve actually seen him pitch this year was his NLDS appearance. I can’t figure him out, and I’d love to know if he really is a completely different pitcher now.
Linked from his player profile page (http://www.fangraphs.com/statss.aspx?playerid=1094&position=P), here’s a good start: http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/index.php/is-pinerios-newfound-groundball-success-sustainable .
Considering that GB% tends to stabilize pretty quickly, and that his jumped more than 10 percentage points over his previous career high, I’m inclined to think he’s a changed man. Fangraphs says he threw his fastball(s) 71% of the time in 2009, whereas he was sitting in the high-50% range for most of his career beforehand.
Someone more in the know or with a better grasp of PITCH/fx can break it down better, but it appears that he’s just firing two-seamers in the strike zone.
So my guess is Pineiro’s ground balls are sustainable and he should remain pretty solid as long as he doesn’t go all Fausto and start walking guys like crazy. That said, his walk numbers in 2009 were otherwordly, so I’m not sure if that can hold up. He led all pitchers in BB/9. It might be a career year, but I wouldn’t count on any massive regression to his career norms.
He’s actually throwing a “one-seam sinker” and it’s something he developed before the season started this year. Apparently some of the other guys on the Cards staff have tried it too, like Wainwright, but he only threw a few per game and Pineiro is simply relying on it completely.
As such, considering it’s a new pitch that has led to this change, it’s easy to believe he’ll be able to continue the success. He did have some luck over the course of the season with his HR/F%, but considering he kept the ball down so well, he still would not have given up very many home runs.
The key will be his control; over the last month of the season and in his one playoff start he could not keep the ball down, a far cry from the near legendary level it was during the beginning of the season.
Next season should be an interesting one for him; relying so much on one pitch people are bound to stop swinging at it, but maybe that will add to his K totals as he opts to mix in a few more normal fastballs with the sinker?
I’d just add, be wary of him if he goes somewhere without strong infield defense.
I took a look at him a couple of days ago here:
http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/blog_article/joel-pineiros-deal-with-dave-duncan/
In short, he’s been throwing a lot more fastballs with added sink, and has been throwing the ball in the bottom third of the strike zone about 3% more of the time. It seems like those are the main factors that have caused his major increase in GB rate.
Santana’s GB% “raises the question” of how immutable its importance is for pitching success. “Beg[ing] the question” is a logical fallacy involving circular reasoning, and is commonly misused in manner it was in this article.