Wolf Hunting
For all the talk about how large of an impact Orlando Hudson has had on the Dodgers (and he has, with a +2.5 win season that has made him a great pickup for LA), it seems that one of the other bargain free agents signed by Ned Colletti last winter flies under the radar. Randy Wolf, who signed for $5 million in February (plus some performance incentives that he’s likely to reach), continues to give the Dodgers consistently steady work and is basically matching Hudson’s production with a +2.4 win season of his own.
Wolf isn’t a frontline starter by any stretch of the imagination. As a strike-throwing flyball lefty, his performance is heavily impacted by the variations of HR/FB and BABIP rates. In his last years in Philadelphia, these numbers were terrible and served to make him look like a batting practice pitcher. A little regression on his side has allowed him to slot in as a nifty mid-rotation starter the last few years, and some positive luck this season has made him appear even better than that.
Through it all, Wolf has basically the same guy all along. Other than a one season dip in 2006 (when he legitimately was awful), his BB/K rate has been basically steady for his entire career. In graph form, it looks like this:
Wolf strikes out more than twice as many guys as he walks, which is necessary to survive as a guy who puts the ball in the air a lot. He is the classic good-command-of-blah-stuff southpaw, though despite pitching well the last two years, he hasn’t been viweed as more than a fungible arm by most of baseball. Now that he’s got a sparkly 3.43 ERA (thanks to a .270 BABIP, of course), that should change this winter, as Wolf should be line for a pretty decent payday.
But for this year, at least, Wolf was a pretty big bargain, and signing him on the cheap is one of the reasons the Dodgers are on top of the NL West.
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So Washburn + ~3K/9 at half the cost? Not bad.
I just did a whole article on Wolf on another site and I think you kind of missed the boat.
Wolf actually has very good stuff, despite not throwing incredibly hard. He lives around 89 and can touch 93 with a moving fastball. His big off-speed offering is an 11/5 curve that goes around 68 MPH. That is a huge difference in speed and change in break. People have gotten way too obsessed with the velocity = stuff equation, because it simply isn’t true. Brian Wilson throws really, really hard, but really kind of has blah stuff. Greg Maddux lived in the same velocity range as Wolf and had incredible stuff. Also, until this year, Wolf has been a strikeout/flyball pitcher in the mold of Sid Fernandez. This year, his K’s are down but so are both his walks and both his OSwing% and his OContact% are up. In fact, the biggest reason for the sharp decline in BABIP is that he is fooling guys into making poor contact with outside pitches, as opposed to missing them outright or taking them as balls as he did in the past. Because of that, his BABIP is in the range of where the aforementioned Fernandez, a better pitcher than Wolf but not by a huge margin, used to sit all the time.
The final thing that has really helped Wolf both stay consistent with his pitches and his health is that he made a mechanical tweak around the time he was traded to Houston last year. Wolf has always made the Inverted W, which has been a huge factor in shoulder injuries to guys like Mark Prior and Anthony Reyes, but he has been better than them at keeping it from messing with his timing. When his timing was off, he screwed up his elbow, then his shoulder. Then, he had a poor half season with the Padres before repairing his timing and turning into an out machine in the year since.
Yes and no.
I don’t know how anyone could classify Wolf’s stuff as “blah.” He has a FB that can get swings-and-misses and a sick curveball.
But the biggest reason for Wolf’s low BABIP is luck. Fans try to fool themselves with all sorts of reasons as to why a pitchers’ BABIP is low (or high), but it always invariably regresses back to the mean.
Even Voros McCracken admits that isn’t true in all cases. Knuckleballers are the biggest example, but extreme flyball pitchers are another one. Sid Fernandez had a career BABIP of .259. Nolan Ryan was .275. Maddux, who relied more on grounders, had several years under .280.
Also, I don’t necessarily think Wolf’s BABIP won’t regress to the mean in different years, but it would probably mean his K rate went back up and off-set the change.
Alireza: “Maddux, who relied more on grounders, had several years under .280.”
Right, and he had several years over .300, including one (1999) at .334. For the most part, he was right around .290-.295.
I don’t get how Maddux having several years under .280 is showing that it’s not luck. If anything, showing the variations in Maddux’s BABIP is evidence that is IS luck.
So, 4-5 years in a row of solid luck? Or perhaps there is a larger degree of control over these things than most will admit.
Honestly, I think to ever say that BABIP is because of luck is a total cop out.
Isn’t eliminating the concept of luck the very point of statistical analysis?
To me, someone who wants to analyze statistics cannot ever even say the word “luck”. It’s not luck, it’s something. It can be all kinds of reasons to raise a pitchers BABIP, maybe it’s too complex for us to look into at this point, but it’s not luck. It’s not a roll of dice, it’s circumstances, environments, matchups, it’s something reckonable. Luck is simply not an option. To me, that should be the motto for people who care about statistics. Otherwise let’s not talk about statistics. Say BABIP is a powder too fine to be analyzed at this point, but don’t say it’s luck.
Whoa, according to this site, Wolf has the best fastball in the majors, followed closely by Kershaw.