The Dave Duncan Effect
Last week Dave, in his piece on Real Groundball Rates, and Erik, in a piece on Brad Penny’s first start, referenced Dave Duncan’s ability to get his pitchers to generate a great deal of groundball outs. In fact in Dave’s summary of the Cardinal’s organizational ranking he specifically referenced Duncan’s ability to take pitchers off of the scrap heap and turn them into serviceable MLB starters with his pitch to contact philosophy, and cited it as one of the reasons for the Cardinals recent success. With all of that in mind I thought it would be interesting to investigate how the batted ball data supports these positions, and what is the magnitude of the effect.
My methodology was a simplified version of Tom Tango’s WOWY. I found the difference between each pitchers’ ground ball rates for the two years after he joined the Cardinals and the two years before he joined (if available). Then I found the weighted average (weighted by the lesser of the two sets balls in play) of said differences. I limited the sample to just starting pitchers as that is who people reference when discussing Duncan’s “Magic”. With that in mind here’s the sample
Pitcher With-Without Brett Tomko 0.8% Mark Mulder 2.8% Jeff Suppan 2.4% Todd Wellemeyer -10.5% Kip Wells 2.2% Jason Marquis 8.7% Chris Carpenter 11.9% Kyle Lohse 6.2% Joel Pineiro 9.1%
The weighted average of the difference works out to ~4.5%, so Duncan’s pitch to contact reputation is backed up by the data. All but Wellemeyer showed improvement in GB%, even Mulder who was a GB pitcher before coming to St. Louis. Clearly this analysis doesn’t speak to overall quality of pitching (for that see this piece by Kincaid) as groundballs and improving groundball rates aren’t the be all end all; however it has been a key component to the Cardinals success in the Tony LaRussa / Dave Duncan era.
What ever happened to Leo Mazzone’s reptation as the best pc in baseball? What was his recipe for success?
Mazzone was known for pounding the outside corner away. Seems his “magic” dried up when Questec was fazed into the game…
Excellent observation. Glavine’s frustration was palpable in his latter years.
This is a remarkable3 record. Penny’s GB% after two games is at 60%, up over 7% from the last two years.
Not that he didn’t teach pitchers to throw to corners, but I think Mazzone’s defining characteristic as a pitching coach was his throwing regimen. He was one of the only coaches at the time who had his pitchers throw so much in between starts. Lots of long toss, mound work, etc. Atlanta’s starting 3 didn’t seem to get hurt until they got old, a rarity for any pitchers (much less 3 on the same team).
What about Braden Looper?
I would like to see him added to this study as well.
I can add him in without too much difficulty clearly. I originally left him out because all of his “w/o” innings are as a reliever and I didn’t want the role change to bias anything.
What I find so itneerstnig is you could never find this anywhere else.
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Mazzone’s contributions were all about fitness and conditioning. Maddux, Glavine and Smoltz were all very different pitchers in style and all had tons of talent to begin with.
Duncan’s magic is taking pitchers who have had little or marginal success and recognizing their ability to throw certain pitches, especially sinking fastballs, and getting them to focus on that style as a means of improving their success.
where’s kent bottenfield!?
You should add another two columns to the table, since the philosophy is pitch to contact, you should add K/9 and BB/9 as well, since we would expect to see a drop in K rate and BB rate. It would also be a better answer if Duncan is improving these pitchers.
Agreed. I thought about that when I scheduled the post to publish this morning. Unfortunately real life kept me from getting it done.
GB% equals pitching to contact now?
For what it’s worth MGL did a study from 2003-2007 and found pitchers were worse in St. Louis…
You’re clearly right in that there’s more to pitching to contact than GB%. It does appear to be a byproduct though, and one that is frequently talked about.
What’s MGL and how did it find out that pitchers were worse in St. Louis?
You also need to look at what that 4.5% increase gets you in terms of runs saved or outs produced, if that’s even the case. Without evidence it’s difficult for me to believe that a 4.5% difference is going to translate into that much improvement in runs allowed.
For all the magic we hear about with Duncan it doesn’t really seem sustainable. None of the pitcher who he ‘fixed’ kept having good stats after their big year. Pineiro might prove to be the best of the bunch though. Usually it is scrub pitcher goes to STL, has one good year, everyone gives props to Duncan and then the next year they stink again because most of the good year was a fluke.
I’m sure he is a good pitching coach but this stuff tends to be a little overblown.
for what it’s worth, most of his successful projects have taken the money and ran so clearly he is the biggest variable. lohse signed back with stl so we still have to see if that was a fluke
There are some guys who regressed. Wellemeyer as far as I know, is out of baseball. Marquis has had some decent years since leaving. The book is still out on Pineiro.
Still his work with once-retreads like Carpenter, Bottenfield, Woody Williams, and others is well documented. I think Kile might have some bad years before working with DD. One thing that might be overlooked with Duncan, is he has charts and videos of every hitter and is responsible for most of the defensive shifts in the game. Most pitching coaches don’t assume anywhere near that level of control over in game strategy.
Wellemeyer is in San Francisco. Early returns this year are not good to say the least. 2 starts, 10.1 IP, 11 Runs allowed, 4 HR, 8-7 K-BB.
As an aside, remember that Penny has pretty much always been a GB pitcher. The reality with that guy is that he stopped striking people out around 2006. Which is ridiculous, seeing that he has a 98 mph heater and a big hook.
Great minds think alike. I had a post with nearly the same exact title on the same exact date. Your mind is greater though as my post only focused on lower walk rates. Thanks for rounding out (or grounding out) the full story.