Point Blank – August 27
When Bad Things Happen to Good Pitchers
Adam Wainwright will go off as a favorite in Pittsburgh this afternoon; that is where his past performances and reputation place him. But he has not been near his reputation level recently, and it leads to a short seminar today in how to interpret whether a pitcher is really off of his game, or just having a run of misfortunate that can be attributed to “Baseball Being Baseball” (soon to be reduced to strictly “BBB” on this page). In Wainwright’s case, the numbers tell a disparaging tale.
Baseball has its own unique geometry. A ball can be crushed, yet caught at the wall, batter beating pitcher on the field, but losing to him in the box score. On the next pitch another batter can break his bat, but manage a bloop over the first baseman’s head that turns into a double. The batter lost the swing, but won the outcome. Over time, there can often be clusters of those bounces than can skew the bottom line to the point at which you can take advantage – calling for misleading “momentum” to reverse, especially if the markets took the statistical bait.
And there are some times when even very good pitchers see their stuff decline. That appears to be the recent chapter to Wainwright’s career arc. Let’s took a look at the fall, contrasting how he had performed through the end of July, and his five August starts:
(Pre-August) / August
Team: (16-5) / 2-3
ERA: (1.92) / 5.29
Hits-per-9: (6.6) / 10.0
BB-per-9: (2.0) / 2.8
K-per-9: (7.3) / 6.4
Team Wins and Losses can come down to bounces, with a pitcher having little control over run support except his own plate appearances. An ERA can be impacted by bounces over small samples. Hits can be inflated by bounces. So while the first three categories show major declines, a further step is needed. Walks may be subject to opposing lineups and umpires, but not as dramatically as this increase. The same can be said for strikeouts. Those two columns tell us that there may indeed be something wrong, and when you see those indicators you dig more deeply. It is not just that Wainwright’s BB rate has increased over the 2014 precedent, but that it is more than double the 1.3 in 2013, and those 6.4 Ks are off of an 8.2 LY.
Why would such a dominating pitcher have such a stretch? Innings can certainly be an issue. The good news for Wainwright and the Cardinals a while back, was that he rebounded from his lost 2011 DL campaign with seemingly no drop at all in performance level. In 2012 he worked 198 2/3 regular-season innings, and he followed that up with 241 2/3 LY. But there were also 50 IP in the post-season across those campaigns, with his 2012 not ending until October 18, and 2013 on October 28. Now he is already at 182 innings this season, for a three-year combined total of 672 1/3. Justin Verlander is at the same exact count over that span (as a meaningful aside, look at what has happened to him); no one else is close.
So could Wainwright be wearing down? The indications are there. His current xFIP of 3.46 is high highest since 2008. For the full season he has lost one full K-per-9 from LY, and has added nearly one full BB-per-9. And the fact that the batted balls are being elevated more sounds an alarm – he had a 50.8% ground-ball rate in 2012, which fell to 49.1 LY, and now 44.7 this season, including a bothersome 39.8 in August. The current Wainwright is getting fewer strikeouts, walking more batters, and getting fewer ground-balls. That can not be attributed to bounces.
If anything, there has been one particular category that has been fortuitous for Wainwright, and may regress. While he has given up more fly-balls than in the past, he has managed to get them to fall short of the fences – only 3.8 percent have turned into home runs. How good is that? Of the 93 pitchers that have reached 130 innings, no one has a lower rate. Yes, it is a skill to not give up home runs, but for Wainwright this number is an outlier – his career rate of 7.5 is nearly double that, and the last two seasons were at 9.9 and 8.1. That HR/FB rate is a key factor in his xFIP being nearly a full run higher than his ERA.
The bottom line is that Wainwright’s performance in August brings legit reason for concern. This has been a loss of stuff, and not a few spins of a roulette wheel. Yes, he misses Yadier Molina. but this much? Many times there is a focus to buy in on an ace that has been going bad, anticipating a correction, but at this juncture this is not one of those times.
In the Sights…
Looking ahead to Thursday NFL, there has rarely been a game that brings as much “vanilla” as the flavor-of-the-day as the Cardinals/Chargers matchup. While there are often games in which teams play a pre-season game that is a precursor to an upcoming early regular season meeting, it is most rare that the rematch is immediately on deck. In this case it is, with the venue switching to Arizona for next Monday night.
So consider the motivations. Neither coach wants to get anyone hurt, especially with quick turnarounds for both teams off of Sunday games, which is why you will likely not see a single starter from the offensive skill positions, and precious few starters overall (the Cardinals will give a little work to G Jonathan Cooper, LB Kevin Minter, NT Alamdea Ta’amu and CB Tyrann Mathieu because none of them have been healthy enough to appear in a game yet). Neither coach wants to show any playbook wrinkles that they plan to use next week. And neither coach is going to want to win by any kind of margin, creating unnecessary motivation for the other side next week.
So how to best take advantage? At this juncture an Under ticket would appear to bring more value than Arizona +3, although there would be nothing wrong with a little of each. At +3 and Under 39 the game projection is 21-18, so the Chargers would have to score more than 21 points to create any jeopardy. The San Diego depth at the skill positions is not special, with zero points scored through three fourth quarters so far, so a sequence of Dog and Under is reasonable, specially since the +3’s are available at low vig this morning (there are indications that 3.5 might become available). There is nothing particularly wrong in this setting with daring the Chargers to score more than 21 points.