Strasburg Breaks NERD
If, over the past month or so, you’ve kept your eyes on the prize that is FanGraphs, you might’ve very well come across my humble attempts at devising a point system to preemptively adjudge the appeal of any given pitching matchup to the baseball nerd aesthetic.
To recap briefly, the resulting number — called NERD — is computed by taking the sum of the z-scores (i.e. standard deviations from the mean) for the following categories (weighted to best fit the tastes of the baseball nerd): xFIP, age, fastball velocity, strike percentage (of total pitches thrown), and swinging-strike percentage. To that total is added a pitcher’s “luck” (that is, ERA-xFIP, capped at 2), and a constant (around 4) to have everything come out approximately on a scale of 0-10. Additionally, because it seems a bit ridiculous to compute a toy stat to the decimal level, I’ve rounded the results.
The final thing I’ve done after all that is to round any scores above 10 down to that number (i.e. 10) and any NERDs below 0 up to that number (i.e. 0). Nor has this really caused any sort of problem. With about 170 pitchers in the sample, only about 10 or 12 have ever gone above or below the 0-10 range — and even then, never by more than 2 points.
Until Stephen Strasburg came along, that is.
Were we still living in a pre-Strasburgian world, these would be your current NERD leaders (rNERD = rounded NERD, aNERD = actual NERD):
What you’ll notice about that group is that they have the good sense not to dominate the rest of the league to such a degree as to to render NERD useless. Francisco Liriano‘s un-rounded 11.25 is the highest mark I’ve seen to date, but at least it’s on a human scale.
The same goes for our laggards, whom you see here (in a table that has been, for a reason that only my computer knows, reproduced more poorly than the other two in this post):
Again, despite dipping into the negatives, neither Snell nor Monasterios nor the rest of their incompetent friends reach depths that problematize NERD’s competence unduly.
But cast your eyes all the way to the tippy-top of the NERD leaderboards and you’re faced with this:
Apparently, Stephen Strasburg has no sympathy for this modest experiment, as his NERD score almost doubles that of the next-best pitcher in the majors.
Of course, it’s no trouble to see why Strasburg rates so highly: he’s got an xFIP of 1.54, an average fastball velocity of 97.5 mph, the highest swinging-strike rate in the league, and he’s only 21 years old.
Strasburg’s excellence asks an interesting question of NERD and, by extension, the question we might ask of ourselves when choosing which game to watch on the nights that he’s pitching: Is Strasburg, all by himself, enough of a spectacle to make a game worth watching? Because, really, with the exception of Snell or Monasterios (neither of whom, let it be known, are currently in a major league starting rotation), any pitcher, when combined with Strasburg, will give the game an average NERD score of 10 amongst its starting pitchers.
Put concretely: Is Strasburg vs. Brad Lincoln more interesting than Roy Halladay vs. Josh Johnson? The latter match-up has happened at least a couple of times now, and one of those resulted in a perfect game for Halladay. That’s pretty great shakes. On the other hand, Strasburg really does represent everything of interest to the baseball nerd — to the baseball fan, in general, really.
The ancillary question, of course, is whether it’s smart/necessary to round NERD scores outside of the 0-10 range back into that range. In most cases, it’s not an issue: again, only 10 or 12 players — somewhere in the vicinity of 5-10 percent — ask that question. But NERD is designed to represent the taste of the sabermetrically inclined fan, and so the question is a fine one to ask.
The best answer, for now, is probably to see if Strasburg can keep it up. So long as he does, maybe there just has to be a Strasburg Bonus. In any case, it’s not the worst problem to have.
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A new scale: 0-Strasburg
+1, because I can only click the button once.
My roommates and I have DirectTV’s MLB package. We tend to watch the Gameday mix (8 games at once), switching around the audio to whatever interesting is going on, and our own teams. When Strasburg is pitching we put the Nationals game on by itself (for the half inning he’s on the mound, then go back to Gameday mix for the other half inning). Watching him pitch is worth it, every time.
“Is Strasburg, all by himself, enough of a spectacle to make a game worth watching?”
So, to answer your question, absolutely yes.
I’ll do something similar – I’ll watch the replayed game on mlbtv the next day – skipping the half of the inning where the Nationals are batting.
Yes, 38.4% strikeout clips break just about anything, including the spirits of NL batters.
It’ll come down.
…it will, right?
You could always make everything a comparative ratio. The fastest faseball becomes a 10, the youngest and oldest pitchers become a 10, the highest swinging strike rate becomes a 10. Then average (or weighted average) the numbers for your scale. Strasburg would likely still be a 10, but others could still be in his league. For what it’s worth, I would rather watch Halladay and Johnson go at it.
I think, for this season at least, or certainly at least another month or so, Strasburg is enough of a spectacle to watch on his own. To some degree, his crazy NERD score is the result of being very good in a small sample (and while very young), so it is skewed a bit. But I think the hype and attention Strasburg is getting, and the degree to which he’s largely meeting it so far, would afford him a bonus even if his NERD score weren’t so high.
So while the NERD score might be a bit wonky in Strasburg’s case, I think it’s inadvertently reflecting his actual attraction to baseball nerds. He really is a sight to see right now, and given the options, I think there are few pitchers I would choose to watch over him. At least for a little bit longer.
You could also add a small indicator to the NERD score to reflect people outside of it. For example, keep rounding down to 10 to keep everything on that scale, but if someone’s score needs to be rounded by more than .5, they get a star. So everyone else would be a 10, but Johnson, Liriano, and Strasburg would be 10*. This might be an unnecessary complication for a toy stat, but it would add a little reminder for those few special pitchers who really are on another level.
Keep rounding it down to ten for all the humans. Leave Strasburg’s at 15.
There’s always that one asshole who breaks the curve.
Strasburg loses two points because it means you have to watch Nyjer Morgan lead-off, and one point for watching Ian Desmond flub a routine ground ball that ought to have been the double play Strasburg was looking for.
Seriously though, I think Strasburg could reasonably take a penalty for being a a strict low pitch count. Cliff Lee definitely has it going for him that we have a good chance of seeing 8 or 9 innings of Cliff Lee, and very little of some boring middle reliever and a commercial break in the middle of the inning for a LOOGY. With Strasburg, you start watching the game and you suspect that if he had 21 Ks on 97 pitches leaving 7th, Drew Storen would take the mound in the 8th. (Granted, I guess you would never, ever want to miss that….) Perhaps NERD should include IP/GS in some fashion?
This comment is why the Nationals will not be sellers. It’s one thing to be the Natinal joke when nobody sees your games. But when you’re on national TV every 5 days, it kind of makes you look foolish and stupid when you play such bad defense behind the kid. I’m a Nationals fan who has been to all of the home starts (and maybe 15-20 games total so far), and the ChiSox (with the home wave, yikes) and the Royals with the lack of offense were national embarassments to a kid who is more than doing his job.
You should check and see if Mark Prior broke the NERD too through his first 5 starts.His numbers are similar to Strasburg.
Prior – 43Ks 12BBs in 28 1/3 IP
Strasburg 48Ks 7 BBS 31 1/3 IP
Yeah….. except for all of these dissimilarities…
WHIP:
Prior – 1.24
Strasburg – 1.01
BABIP:
Prior – .290
Strasburg – .354
ERA:
Prior – 3.83
Strasburg – 2.27
K/BB:
Prior – 3.58
Strasburg – 6.86
So… I’d say except for strikeouts, Prior and Strasburg are not very similar at all. This start by Strasburg is a once in a lifetime event.
Good god, I had no idea his BABIP was that unlucky. Some of that is due to the fact that any time somebody makes contact it goes somewhere hard and the small sample size of balls in play due to all the Ks, though.
He made it worth it for me to attend a royals game last week. So… Yes.
It’s a good thing the Nationals didn’t trade him for Oswalt. And it seemed like such a smart idea at the time…
I think they’re just waiting to boost Strasburg’s trade value so that Houston will go through with it.
Why don’t you normalize all players based on the highest and lowest NERD rating to 0-10? You can crank out a ratio so everyone fits into that 0-10 scale rather than just rounding several players above 10 to 10 and players below 0 to 0. Then you can get an idea of the differences between the great players, because that’s what we all want after all… we don’t want to see that the best 11 pitchers are all 10′s and that several dozen players are 0. We want to see that Strasburg is a 10 and everyone else is below 9.3 or something
I remember being 11 years old and being astounded by Dwight Gooden.
That must be what today’s fan is going through with Stasburg.
With SS there is also the curiosity factor of “Is THIS the game where some team knocks him around?”
Pedro’s dominant 5 years was a once in a lifetime event (I’m too young for Koufax).
Strasburg may still turn out to be that, but right now, IMHO, he’s still in the “wait and see” stage … But he sure is fun to watch
I’ve gone to Strasburg’s three home starts — even in D.C., it actually feels like a baseball team, like a baseball fan base, and you are absolutely locked in to half the game — the half he pitches. And when we’re talking about the Pirates, the White Sox as interleague “rivalry” and the Royals, those are three games that usually bring a collective zero innings of interest.
Plus, he somehow keeps exceeding expectations. The first start, he wasn’t even supposed to go 90+ pitches, much less strike out 14. Then, after the Cleveland mound disaster, you figure, uh-oh, he’s in trouble. But nope. Even against KC, it was the same: maybe this is the down start? But again, no.
Obviously, it’s a short-term phenomenon. But to me, NERD is dead-on in capturing the “now” of Strasburg.
Ditto for me, too. I’ve seen all of the home starts. Twice during the week I’ve cashed in free weekday community tickets. The Saturday one I was out there in line waiting for the grandstand seats and I’ll be back out there in line for this one Saturday. Once every 5 days, the Nationals play the equivalent of a playoff game and the rest of his team is determined to render his awesome performance as meaningless as possible it seems. Nats went 8-19 in June and he could easily be 5-0 instead of 2-3.
One thing you have wrong is Snell vs Strasburg would be less appealing than say Strasburg versus Lincoln. Seeing the best pitcher facing the worst in baseball deserves a bonus in itself. Ofcourse, that is after factoring out the Dibble penalty that you face when you watch a Nationals game.