Sonnanstine and E.R.A. Don’t See Eye to Eye
While writing and researching this post it is still hard to believe, for this baseball fan at least, that the Tampa Bay Rays are currently 45-31, a full fourteen games over .500. Not to say I didn’t expect them to be good but their turnaround has been remarkable and very fun to keep tabs on. In looking over some of their statistics I came across this interesting little nugget: Andy Sonnanstine leads the AL in E-F, at 1.53.
E-F, or ERA-FIP as you may have seen at The Hardball Times, does just what the title suggests: it subtracts the FIP from the ERA in order to see which pitchers have been lucky or unlucky with regards to their earned run barometer and controllable skills measure. Sonnanstine has a 4.85 ERA yet a 3.32 FIP. That FIP ranks 8th best in the league and the only other E-Fs higher, in all of baseball, belong to Bronson Arroyo and Ian Snell; their ERAs are 6+ right now.
Adding to my interest level are Sonnanstine’s numbers last year: a 5.85 ERA and a 4.26 FIP, resulting in a 1.59 E-F. So, two years running now Andy has posted an ERA over 1.5 runs worse than his controllable skills (BB, K, HR) would suggest. It didn’t even matter that this year’s ERA is a full run lower. Not surprisingly, his .348 BABIP is the highest in the AL, and his 63.8% LOB rate is the second lowest in the league. For comparison’s sake, the AL average LOB rate at this juncture is 72.36%.
Due to this lack of luck, his win probability metrics have taken some serious hits. Andy’s -0.39 WPA ranks 5th worst in the league while his -0.34 WPA/LI registers 8th from the bottom. Despite one of the best measures of controllable skills in the league, he has statistically been one of the worst contributors to success. Whereas Aaron Harang has been unlucky in terms of his W-L barometer, Sonnanstine has been unlucky in a number of different areas yet currently holds an 8-3 record.
Sonnanstine has been unlucky thus far in terms of the numbers largely out of his control but don’t tell that to his W-L record, which is good enough to introduce himself to plenty of fantasy owners out there.
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an interesting thing about Sonnanstine is that his BABIP is actually higher this year, even though the team BABIP for Tampa pitchers has gone from .334 last year to .281 this year, showing the huge improvement in team defense. Sonnastine’s BABIP last year was actually better (.329 to .334) than Tampa’s defense would suggest. But obviously this year he has been quite unlucky
Maybe Sonnanstine just is not good at pitching from the stretch?
I’d be interested to see a larger study in this. Matt Belisle has consistently put up ERAs below his FIP. Many of us initially chalked it up to “bad luck”, a high LD% leading to a high BABIP, but in observing Belisle, it became clear that he was really to blame.
Belisle has decent stuff. He gets a fair amount of strike outs and keeps the walks down. But when he misses the zone, he misses thigh-high over the plate and gets lit up.
I’m beginning to realize that BABIP is not a normal distribution. The distribution actually skews left. However, because pitchers with high natural BABIP don’t have very good results, they don’t tend to stay in the majors long. Thus, the BABIP distribution for major leaguers more closely resembles normal. Unfortuantely, for a guy like Matt Belisle, and perhaps Andy Sonnanstine, FIP simply cannot account for how hard he gets on a regular basis, even when keeping the ball in the yard.
Rick, you might want to talk to RJ Anderson of Beyond the Box Score, who has been working on an upgrade of WHIP that takes into account extra base hits and more. According to his BPIP, Bases Per Innings Pitched, which apparently correlates better with ERA than FIP in terms of gauging where someone “should” be based on hits allowed and such, Sonnanstine is right where he should be. It seems that he gives up a lot ox XBH; while he may still be unlucky, it’s coming in the forms of doubles and better instead of bloop singles or balls right between fielders.
I find it interesting that if you use the new “Last 3 Calendar Years” button, and sort by E-F, you’ll see very few pitchers who have been able to outdo their FIP (basically, Zambrano and Zito) by any substantial margin, but a ton of pitchers who have underperformed their FIP by a pretty big margin (Bonderman is the big name, but there are lots).
For most of the pitchers whose ERAs don’t match their FIP, it has to do with a lower than expected strand rate. I think there could be something to the theory that certain pitchers don’t pitch as well out of the stretch as we would expect them to, and so FIP will overestimate their abilities by normalizing their LOB%.
But I would also caution against drawing any conclusions about guys like Sonnanstine and Belisle based on small samples. Without specific evidence explaining why they are the exception to the rule, it’s best to assume that regression to the mean will kick in. Too often, fans jump to conclusions based on small sample results that are simply not true.
Pitchers with ERAs well above their FIPs are sometimes known as “soft-tossers.” They don’t give up quite enough home runs (or walks) to justify their high ERAs, but yet are “easy” to hit by other metrics such as BABIPs and extra bases.
Dave, yep, as I mentioned in the post Sonnanstine is at 63.8 while the league average is 72.36, quite the drastic dropoff. No idea why, really, but interesting nonetheless.
Scappy, also, with regards to pitching out of the stretch, we wouldn’t just have to look at Sonnanstine’s splits with bases empty vs. runner on 1st/runners on but rather how he differs in that regard from a larger group. For instance, if we find that Sonnanstine has a much higher OPS against with runners on 1st than bases empty, it is interesting but not conclusive until we compare it to a big group. If we find that everyone in the larger group has a much higher OPS with runners on 1st than bases empty, but have not been as “unlucky” as Sonnanstine then we couldn’t really use that as the cause.