More on subject, this is interesting. We’ve seen GB pitchers post lower than ‘average’ ht/fb rates, but what about pitchers with different skill sets? Remember how Bill James seperated his 100 pitchers in ‘families’? What about doing almost the same thing and checking it against that family’s HR/FB tendancies? I’m not asking someone to do it, but it might shed some light on why some pitchers post certain HR/FB rates and others post different ones.

Over the past five years, according to THT, he’s posted GB% of 45% or higher, yet has never averaged fewer than 1.2 HR/G over that span. The reason? His HR/FB rate has fluctuated between an “unsustainable” 14.2% and a ridiculously unsustainable 18.6%. I know that the 10% average HR/FB rate assumes that the pitcher has major-league-quality stuff, but this is a guy who had K/G rates above 8.8 for three years in a row (or rather 2 1/3 seasons, to be technical about it). How can a pitcher be so good at getting strikeouts and keeping the ball on the ground and yet so bad at allowing the kinds of fly balls that turn into home runs? Is this entirely a factor of Citizen Bank Park’s HR-friendly park factors?