What Could Jamie Moyer Possibly Have Left?
Remember when the robot in Terminator refuses to die? The lady, like, punches him, shoots him, squishes him in a pressing machine, but he’s still reaching out one mechanical claw, ever thrilled at the prospect of pre-killing John Conner? Well, in this analogy, Jamie Moyer is Arnold Schwarzenegger.
The Colorado Rockies have agreed to terms with LHP Jamie Moyer and are a physical away from one of the more intriguing displays in Triple-A. Moyer is not only coming back from Tommy John surgery, something that derails even young pitchers, but he is also recovering from The Beatles breakup. Which happened when he was 8 years old.
Get it?
He’s old.
This is the joke they were making about Moyer six years ago.
What does this mean? Well: (1) Jamie Moyer is pretty much my idol. And (2) he has a long — nay, looooooong — shot at making the big leagues in 2012. Let’s take a look at what Moyer could possibly have left in the tank.
Moyer turned 49 at the tail end of 2011, so he will play the 2012 season as a 49-year-old. In all the years of baseball history, only three players have pitched at or beyond that age: Jack Quinn (49 in 1933), Hoyt Wilhelm (49 in 1972), and Satchel Paige (59 at gametime in 1965).
Befuddlingly, that trio combines for 44 innings of 4.09 ERA and a 3.91 FIP pitching — with the absurd Paige appearance sparkling with 3 IP of 2.53 FIP ball in what was one of the games more bizarre days. Honestly, from a group that combines for 157 years, that is not bad. Granted, we have multiple eras of baseball roped together here, but none of them are Deadball Era pitchers, so it’s not entirely noise.
What do these three pitchers tell us? Well: At age 48+, a pitcher needs to be either serviceable or part of same weird Negro Leagues tribute game. Oh, and a Hall of Famer… Or Austria-Hungarian (why is Jack Quinn not in the Hall of Fame? You’d think 24 seasons gets you a consolation bust. I digress).
The term “serviceable” would require defining before applying it to Moyer. For the last 7 years, Moyer has had a FIP- under 100 only once — in 2008 (3.71 ERA, 4.32 FIP) — and when he last pitched in 2010, he mustered a 4.98 FIP (good for a 123 FIP-).
Still, despite all that, he has been worth 9 WAR his last 7 seasons — that’s about 1.3 WAR per season. In 2009 and 2010, he was worth 0.4 and 0.3 WAR respectively, but the mere fact he was above replacement level is fascinating. With a worse-than-average average FIP (which Moyer has incessantly) staying power and inning eating become the only paths to positive WAR.
Nobody is saying Moyer is a key cog to the organization’s 2012 plans. Moyer is in fact a low-risk, low-reward signing. Given his age and the fact he missed a year, odds are he will not be in good form until several months into the season, and at that point, his good form may not be good enough.
But pitchers get injured — even the young ones — and minor leaguers are needed. Last season, the Colorado Rockies used 13 different starting pitchers and all but 1 started multiple games. Because Moyer has no verifiable platoon split, he will either be needed for starting or long relief appearances.
Of those three other near-half-century pitchers, only Paige started a game, and even then was pulled quickly (according to a predetermined plan) and was part of a gimmick.
So what can we say for Moyer? Dude’s a trooper. In all likelihood, he’s on a very short leash. If his starts the season with a 5.00+ ERA for the first month, he probably gets replaced by a younger, higher upside pitcher — even if it’s just him shaking the rust off.
If he can show his ability to keep an ERA near 4.00 (or under 4.00 in the minors) and if his fastball — which has gone from 83 mph in 2002 to 80.9 mph in 2010 — shows some life, then, hey, who knows? Maybe he reaches out that robotic arm for a few more twirls.
I really want to see Moyer pitch as a 50 year old (or older). That’d just be cool to see. If he can’t find a contract, maybe the Pirates or Orioles will give him a start or two, just for a publicity stunt?
I’m an Orioles fan. I totally approve of this happening.
Shoot, he’d be their ace.
As long as I’m still young enough to travel, I plan on attending Moyer’s 300th win in person.
If Moyer’s young enough to win 33 more games, you’re young enough to travel.
Once squished in the pressing machine, the Terminator was dead. That’s what finished him. I will not have you tampering with the classics. Your evil. Or you’re evil. Either works. Like the Terminator. Who was evil and worked.
Oh. And what’s-his-name actually did all that stuff to Arnold in the first movie. Sarah did nothing more than the final squishing. It was in the second movie where she whacked the New Improved Terminator around to no final effect, prior to Arnold then finishing him off.
So you’re classic-tampering all over the place here. Your evil runneth over the cup.
“…the Terminator was dead…”
FALSE! It was that very hand that caused Terminator 2 in the first place!
FALSE! Only if Arnold or the New Improved Terminator had regenerated from it, which they didn’t. The hand only provided a secondary plot device, granted a really cool one.
Oh, and if you’re reading this, Armpit Face, stop. Before here.
I will commend you for using the word “squishes”, tho’. A very cool and underutilized word. There must be some baseball use it can be applied to. Particularly with Prince still being a topic of discussion.
The Sultan of Squish?
Keep in mind, Moyer has one of the most tangible intangibles in baseball – he’s a second pitching coach.
that’s one of the reasons the Rockies signed him.
What pitching coach could be better? He can teach kids how to stay in the game and at times be a pretty damn good pitcher with absolutely no skill whatsoever.
I think you meant no stuff, not no skill.
He can also read them bedtime stories from his rocking chair, or tell them about the good ole days.
Indeed. He deserves much credit for Cole Hamels’s development of mental toughness commensurate with his stuff.
Based on what? Unless this is a joke because of the way fans reacted to some struggles in 2010, what is your basis for saying Moyer helped him with “mental toughness?”
Well, Cole Hamels credits Moyer for Cole Hamels’ recent developments. I’d say that’s pretty convincing.
@Phrozen: Small sample size.
Arguably, it isn’t. 100% of pitchers named Cole Hamels give credit to Moyer.
I thought that after TJ surgery pitchers usually recover some of the lost speed from their fastball. It wouldn’t surprise me in the least if Moyer came back throwing 81, touching 82 or even 83 on occasion.
At least until they change the radar gun to read in mph instead of kph. (tribute to one of the best Mariners TV ads ever)
Oooh la la!
Are Ensure, Metamucil, and Viagra on MLB’s list of approved supplements?
… depends.. *smirk*
My thought when reading this piece was that FIP was not a great way to evaluate a pitcher like Moyer. I guessed that Moyer would actually perform better than his FIP indicated that he should. Sure enough his career ERA is lower than his FIP and most seasons his ERA is also lower. However, I ran a paired t-test on all of Moyer’s seasons to check whether the difference in ERA and FIP are significant:
Paired t-test
data: era and fip
t = -1.2884, df = 23, p-value = 0.2104
alternative hypothesis: true difference in means is not equal to 0
95 percent confidence interval:
-0.33437925 0.07771258
sample estimates:
mean of the differences
-0.1283333
Thus, the difference is not statistically significant and I can not reject the null hypothesis that there is no biased difference in ERA and FIP for Moyer.
Granted, this is a weak statistical test, since I am treating each season as equal and ignoring the number of innings pitched in each season. However, I’m content to accept that my initial reaction was wrong and FIP is an acceptable way to evaluate Moyer.
Or you can just look at the two career numbers and decide: Yeah, his FIP and ERA are pretty close.
http://www.amazon.com/Cult-Statistical-Significance-Economics-Cognition/dp/0472050079
Wow, Bradley, this comment is antithetical to the spirit of the site and completely wrongheaded.
Hypothesis testing, contrary to the assertions of the fringe book you linked to, is not going away, nor should it.
Hypothesis testing is arbitrary and intellectually bankrupt.
Hypothesis testing is anything but arbitrary. A hypothesis is an EXPLICIT explanation for a phenomenon that makes testable predictions. The alternative hypothesis is not arbitrary at all! If you cannot distinguish between two plausible hypotheses there is no justifiable reason to prefer one over the other.
This really is a stupid argument. You are willing to eyeball the difference between an ERA and FIP, but you aren’t willing to accept a difference in P-value between 0.01 and 0.5. In the first case you have a 99% chance of being correct and in the second you have a 50% chance of being wrong.
You are the one being arbitrary. I am weighing my chances.
Eyeballing two numbers and saying “they are the same” or “they are different” isn’t even intellectually bankrupt. It is anti-intellectual.
Yes, there are things in life and baseball that are simple and self-evident enough that an eyeball test suffices. I guess it is intellectual to run complicated tests of blindingly obvious (and not that important) things. Which just goes to show that not everything requires or even benefits from intellectualism.
Mind you, I’m agnostic as to this specific issue of how self-evident Moyer’s FIP/ERA actually is.
As a science educator, this argument really bothers me.
It was once “blindingly obvious” that the earth was flat and the sun went around the earth. It was once blindingly obvious that a .350 hitter was better than a .280 hitter.
Do you understand why people talk about sample size? Do you understand that the error and the P value are a quantification of the effects of sampling and how likely you are to be wrong given your sample?
First, props to Jason for throwing down some stats. Moyer’s career ERA is 0.42 lower than his FIP, and that’s a sample size of 4000 innings. So no, I don’t think it was painfully obvious that ERA and FIP tracked each other with Moyer. So I’m glad Jason did some basic statistical testing to confirm this.
There are plenty of times where statistics are abused in society. I for one am happy to see someone frame a question in an appropriate manner and then properly implement the correct statistical tool the find the solution. A specific question was answered. The point of Ziliak and McCloskey’s book was to beware of running hypothesis testing with little regard to proper contextual analysis if results.
Oh, and one more thing. Delving into the Jamie Moyer FIP quandary further, I found this fascinating tidbit:
Years with ERA > FIP
86-87, 89-91, 95, 00, 07
Years with FIP > ERA
88, 93-94, 96-99, 01-06, 08 – 10
6 out his first 9 years, Moyer posted FIP’s lower than his ERA.
14 out of his last 16 years, Moyer posted ERA’s lower than his FIP.
Moyer only once outperformed FIP before 1993. ’93 was right around when Moyer started transforming into the effective crafty we all know and love. His BB% took a dramatic drop (previously around 9%, started consistently pitching around 6%) and his strikeout rate climbed.
I’m very rusty on actually calculating T-tests, but my eyeball test says there are two Jamie Moyers, the young and older, ageless wonder. That older guy, well, FIP alone may not tell his whole story.
Mac,
When I looked at Moyer’s numbers I noticed the trend you note as well, however it is a more difficult statistical question to ask whether Moyer’s career path is random or if there is some real trend to the data. I am not aware of any appropriate null model to compare the data to or the math to calculate the distribution myself, so I did the easy thing and wrote a computer simulation. I basically repeatedly randomized the years of Moyer’s career and sought the frequency with which the simulated careers were as extreme or more extreme than Moyer’s in terms of the underperforming FIP early in the career and outperforming it later in the career.
In 100,000 replicates, 1.2% of the simulations were as extreme as Moyer’s actual career. Thus, it is highly unlikely that Moyer’s career is random. You are correct that Moyer is a different pitcher later in his career with respect to his ability to post lower ERA relative to FIP.
I can make the computer code available to anyone who wants to take a look or run the simulations themselves.
So, assuming that Moyer is in fact a different pitcher in the second part of his career, does he really outperform FIP based upon ERA? I now performed a paired t-test on the last 14 years of Moyer’s career:
Paired t-test
data: era[9:24] and fip[9:24]
t = -2.7474, df = 15, p-value = 0.01496
alternative hypothesis: true difference in means is not equal to 0
95 percent confidence interval:
-0.53940032 -0.06809968
sample estimates:
mean of the differences
-0.30375
Over this time period, we can reject the null hypothesis that the difference between FIP and ERA is zero. There is almost a 99% chance that Moyer’s ERA really does outperform his FIP.
So, in summary, Moyer really is a different pitcher from early in his career, and in the latter part of Moyer’s career, Moyer really does consistently post lower ERA than FIP.
Thanks Mac, for noting the apparent trend and prompting me to do a more in depth analysis.
@Jason
“As a science educator, this argument really bothers me.
It was once “blindingly obvious” that the earth was flat and the sun went around the earth.”
I hope people don’t pay you to teach them science. It was never obvious(or even really believed at all) that the earth was flat. Pythagoras and Parmenides, for example, knew it was round. The belief that premoderns thought the earth was flat has become a nice little piece of revisionist intellectual history that survives only be emphasizing the dissenting voices of the period and ignoring the general scientific communities of the time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flat_earth#Decline_of_the_Flat_Earth_model
With respect to the sun orbiting the earth, you’re confusing “blindingly obvious” with “it’s what they thought.” The theory that the sun revolved around the earth was not simply the result of the “eyeball test, as it were. It was the result of much interpretation of phenomena and was consequently overturned by more interpretation of ohenomena. It’s not the strict dichotomy that you set up re: blindingly obvious eyeball test versus hypothesis testing.
FIP’s not a great way to evaluate a lot of players similar to Moyer. Among the leaders in career WAR on fangraphs, the pitchers you see with the big discrepancy in ERA and a higher FIP are often guys who don’t strike out a lot of hitters but manange to post low ERAs anyway. Tom Glavine, Dave Stieb, Tim Hudson, Mark Buerhle, Jimmy Key, etc. As a result, an FIP-based WAR generator might be undervaluing these pitchers.
Yes. Pitchers of a certain style consistently outperform their FIP, and are definitely undervalued by FIP-based WAR. It seems clear that Moyer is one of them. They’re often among the more underrated pitchers in the league. Matt Cain’s another one who beats his FIP by a reasonable amount and beats his xFIP by a mile.
One guy who outperforms his FIP by almost the widest margin career-wise is Mariano Rivera, and I can’t really figure out what is leading to the discrepancy. His ERA is a full fifty points lower than his career FIP. His K/9 is 8ish and his BB/9 is around 2, which are good numbers. His HR/9 is an uber-low 0.48, which should really deflate his FIP. So I just don’t get it with him.
@bstar
I think Mariano Rivera’s lower ERA than FIP and extremely low HR/FB % is easily explained by weak contact. I do not have line drive % numbers to support this, but watching him pitch for almost two decades i can confidently say a big majority of his outs are on VERY weakly hit balls as a result of his ridiculous cutter and perfect location.
FIP, xFIP and the normalizing of HR/FB all assume balls are hit with the same authority. Mariano is an outlier to these assumptions.
If he pitches just a little longer his player page will be two pages long.
You totally spoiled the end of Terminator for me. Thanks a lot.
1. Moyer is younger than I am, therefor he is not old.
2. If he had nothing in 2010, how could he have ‘anything left’ now?
3. If he needs nothing, and has nothing, then he’s good to go.
He missed 2010 b/c of Tommy John surgery. I am certain that some team would have taken a minor league flyer on him last year as well, and that he would have likely gotten at least a few big league starts/innings.
he didn’t miss 2010, he missed 2011… and he frankly pitched pretty well in 2010, before his season-ending injury… two bad starts (one horrible on in Boston, 9 runs in 1 IP) warped his numbers, and he didn’t have time to recover; granted, if he’d not gotten injured, he may have just regressed back to those final numbers anyway…
The total number of HOF-eligible pitchers with 300 career wins who are not in the Hall of Fame = ZERO. The two highest career win totals of non-HOFers belong to Bobby Mathews (297) and Tommy John (288). Tommy John was on the ballot all fifteen years and the highest percentage of votes he ever received was in his final year on the ballot (2009) when he got all the way up to 31.7%. I think that it goes without saying that Tommy John would’ve gotten in with an extra 12 career wins.
Jamie Moyer is at 267. He would probably need to pitch for three more years in order to have a shot at 300. Is Moyer good enough to be somebody’s #5 starter for the next three years? I think that he probably is. Plus, as others have pointed out, he serves the additional purposes of co-pitching coach and tourist attraction (a very fan-friendly anomaly pursuing 300 career wins).
Has it occurred to anyone else that Moyer is basically the pitcher equivalent of Johnny Damon? Both were good but rarely great players with reasonable shots at reaching milestones (3,000 career hits in Damon’s case) that have always guaranteed entry into the Hall of Fame barring some sort of ethical rationale to bar them (Pete Rose in the case of 3,000 career hits). Interestingly, both are probably going to need three seasons in order to reach that magic number and both are very likely (in my opinion) to retire at the end of that third season (2014). Which would make each player eligible for entry at the same time (2019).
Each player is beloved by the members of the media who get to vote for the Hall of Fame and by baseball fans, in general. Also, each player is perceived to be the antithesis of his peers during the steroids era; each player is perceived to have played the game “the right way.” A vote for either player also functions as an “F___ You” to those players who are tied to steroids. The statistical community can make all of the arguments in the world against HOF entry for these two players but I just cannot imagine that they won’t get in if they reach those magic numbers (300 and 3,000). From a statistical purist’s standpoint, they probably don’t deserve to get in, but from a fan’s standpoint, who can really complain? You know?
I’ve always thought Damon was actually pretty good in his prime with good average, solid walks, okay power.
And the arm of a ten year-old girl.
Coincidentally, Moyer also has the arm of a ten year-old girl.
When 49 years old you reach, throw 80 mph you will not.
If he can keep his ERA under 4.00 in Colorado Springs the Rockies need to get him to the big club right away.
Colorado Springs had a team ERA of 6.41 last year, their top 4 starters (by # of starts) posted ERA’s of 7.43, 6.03, 6.81, and 9.42.
Although the Sky Sox are installing a humidor for this season so, hopefully, those number will level out a little bit.
I understand from a player development perspective why they’d want to install the humidor; however, the idea of the average pitcher with an era of 6.41 and I’m assuming a ton of home runs sounds like really fun games.
It gets pretty crazy – plenty of 12-10 kind of games, which is kind of a fun novelty. COS is 1,000 feet higher than Denver, so the ball really flies out of the yard.
The Sky Sox have become a holding place for AAAA/Replacement guys – Rockies have decided they don’t want their pitchers getting shelled and losing confidence or their young hitters learning to just swing for the fences every time up, hence the installation of the humidor.
Will be interesting to see what kind of results it produces.
Very disappointing that the Mariners signed Oliver Perez instead of Moyer. The Mariners need some feel-good stories. Maybe they were scared off by the ugly ending of Griffey’s career.
I’m not so sure that Jamie Moyer would’ve wanted to sign with the Mariners. The Mariners are a rebuilding team with lots of nice young arms. I don’t see the Mariners wanting to give a 49-year-old a spot in the rotation. Moyer wants to sign with a team which is most likely to give him a spot in its rotation as he continues his quest for 300 career wins. If he is replacement level or somewhat better this year and hits double digits in the wins column, 300 is a number that he may have a better shot at reaching than you might think. Again, 33 wins away, dude has a rubber arm, there are serious benefits to having him as your #5 starter and on your 24-man roster (co-pitching coach, boosts ticket sales as he is gunning for 300, very active in his community).
Are you kidding? I’m sure he’d love the chance to pitch in Seattle again. He lives there, his foundation is there, if he’s active in a community, it’s Seattle, not Denver. Plus, Safeco is gonna be a bit easier for him than Coors’.
Yes, he probably has a better chance of starting in Colorado than in Seattle, but in every other sense, the Mariners would be a better fit for him.
You have to give serious props to the guy. People said he wasn’t good enough, that he didn’t throw hard enough when he was in his twenties. Yet, if everything goes perfectly, he could pitch into his fifties! Please visit tannerball.com and visit the blog to see my top ten rankings on everything from catchers to broadcasters.
Listen and understand. Jamie Moyer is out there pitching. He can’t be reasoned with, he can’t be bargained with. He doesnt feel pity or remorse or fear. And he absolutely wont stop until he wins 300.
A 77-mph fastball, if the pitchfx from his first start of the year are correct.
All hail Jamie Moyer!