Comments on: Maximizing Potential

By: Mariner Fan in Colorado Exile

Mariner Fan in Colorado Exile — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 18:37:12 +0000

Can this change be attributed to pitching coach change – new coach, new approach? I don’t know anything about Dave Eiland, but if I am in his shoes and see the strikeout stuff potential, I’d sure mix it in a bit more to keep hitters guessing and add a strategic weapon to the arsenal.

By: kwk

kwk — Tue, 29 Apr 2008 02:04:32 +0000

Oh, there’s no problem with the GB/FB/LD rates – I love them the way they are. (I thought that one possible reason for not using K% might be because of confusion due to K% coming from BFP and GB/FB/LD coming from only BIP.)

Thanks for the link…I figured you had your reasons – I was wondering what they were :)

By: David Appelman

David Appelman — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 23:56:42 +0000

KWK: There's been a lot of discussion about using K% instead of K/9, but here's the short short version: I believe K/9 isolates strikeout potential better than K% does. You can read the long version here (in the comments): Get to Know K/9 I'm not sure I understand the issue with using GB/FB/LD as a percentage of BIP though?

By: KWK

KWK — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 23:29:29 +0000

Not to go off on a tangent, but why is it that Fangraphs (and this post) uses K/9 and not K%? I understand that K/9 isn’t going to give you a vastly different picture than K/Batters Faced, and that there might be some confusion caused by the existence of your GB/FB/LD rates that are pulled from BIP numbers only. I’d just like to see the much cleaner K% (especially for relievers) as the default rate stat for strikeouts on the player pages.

By: Tom Au

Tom Au — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:51:09 +0000

Chien Ming Wang is something of a late bloomer. He only got started in the majors three years ago, at the age of 25. So even though he’s 28 on the calendar, he may be more like 24-25 compared to other players. This suggests that he may peak at 31-32, meaning that he has several more years of development ahead.

The line drives are troubling but the offsetting factor is that Wang doesn’t give up many home runs (or walks). So the rise in his strikeouts puts his sabermetric ERA below 3.00, since (13*1HR+3*11BB-2*27K)/39 IP) represents a subtraction from the constant term, into Cy Young candidate territory.

He should have won his arbitration case last winter (and the Yankees were small-minded to take it there). Oliver Perez, the Met, got $6.5 million (almost $2 million more than Wang asked for) even though he’s a year younger and has worse lifetime stats.

By: David Appelman

David Appelman — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 21:03:57 +0000

One other thing to note about his GB% is that his LD% is kind of high this year compared to his previous years and it looks like those groundballs from previous years are turning into line-drives.

If his LD% returns to league average levels (19%-20%), I’d think a lot of them would revert back to being GB instead of FBs. If he continues with 24% line drives, it could mean trouble. But it’s worth noting that 12 of his 29 line drives so far have been Fliner-Line-Drives, which only fall for hits 63% of the time as opposed to a standard line drive that fall for hits 74% of the time. Still, not a good thing.

Either way, the strikeouts will definitely help.