QMAX: WEIGHING IN ON WAINO

St. Louis Cardinal mainstay Adam Wainwright survived a calamitous final season, bringing his win total to 200 with a miraculous near-return to form this past September 18th. Indications concerning his stuff--which had been harrowingly absent for yearly a calendar year--were so dire that he almost didn't make his scheduled start.

Fortunately, all's well that ends well for one of the true "good guys" in the game, and a pitcher whose career interruptions have concealed his level of achievement. As we use the Quality Matrix (QMAX) to survey Waino's career in greater detail than has been done elsewhere, let's begin by noting a fact that has also been strangely overlooked with respect to his career.

What's that fact? Wainwright made three successful comebacks from significant injuries, ultimately returning to a level of excellence on each occasion--a feat that is remarkable even in this age of rampant, escalating arm injury (particularly to starting pitchers). He was fortunate to be more of a "pitcher" than a "thrower," even at an early age, which aided him in ways that aren't necessarily available to the more two-dimensional "flamethrower" types.

Let's get right into the data for Waino, using information gleaned from Forman et soeur (and then augmented with a newly-revamped and upgraded QMAX):

We are looking only at Waino's starts here, so you'll notice right off that his win total is not 200, it's 198 (the number of wins he achieved as a starter). Over at the right, shaded in yellow, you'll find the special BBB QMAX data, which includes a couple of stats you've probably never seen before (TB/H, or total bases per hit; and TB/IP, or total bases per inning pitched), both of which come into play to add precision to the calculation of the QMAX "S" score, which measures hit prevention.

Before we go further into those added nuances (which will explain some things about pitcher types that rarely if ever get taken into consideration...), let's note the gaps in Waino's career that are somewhat hidden in the above data. 

First, note that there's no line for 2011: that was his first year missed due to injury. It took a year for Waino to regain his form after that, but he led the Cardinals to the World Series in 2013 and had what might be his best overall season the following year.

Then, another injury occurred in 2015--serious enough that many folks feared it would prevent Waino from returning at all. He was a lesser version of himself in 2016 and 2017: a good bit more hittable (with a sharp increase in both TB/H and TB/IP). 2018 began more promisingly, but it wasn't long before he was on the shelf again, which again left his career in doubt. 

But Waino rehabbed well and made it back for 2019, where in the second half of the year he began to round into something resembling his 2009-2014 peak, reeling off a five-game winning streak in September. The delay in the 2020 season due to COVID seemed to have a salutary effect on him as well (except for an uptick in HRs allowed), and he finished that abbreviated year with his lowest ERA (and QMAX "S" score) since 2014.

2021 and most of 2022 were more of the same, as the now-"elderly" Waino was almost as good as new at the age of 40. Prior to another physical setback in September 2022, he had the fifth best ERA+ over a three-year career span from ages 38-40 (124, behind two Hall of Famers--Randy Johnson and John Smoltz--and two other notable late bloomers, Jamie Moyer and Dennis Martinez).

THAT late-season setback in 2022 proved to be catastrophic for Waino--he would never pitch effectively again (save for the miracle game this past September 18th). In 2023--an agonizing season for both him and his team--he hit a wall in late June and lost ten games in a row, jeopardizing what had previously been a superb personal WPCT (sending it spiraling toward .600, a figure we'll return to a bit later). The Cards, committed to their long-time ace, and in a year where it was abundantly clear they were going nowhere, gamely pitched him game after game, in hopes that something--anything--would turn around. 

On August 17th, Waino actually pitched rather well--allowing just four hits over six innings. But the Cards' hitters didn't cooperate, deepening what would prove to be a pronounced second-half slump--and it proved to be his eighth straight loss. Eleven days later, he left the game in the seventh tied 0-0, but the bullpen allowed his baserunner to score for his tenth loss in a row. The two good to excellent performances that Waino willed into existence in September lowered his ERA to 7.40 for the year. (You can see the eerie consistency of his pitching from 9/22 to 9/23 in the first row of data in the master chart with green coloration: it's clear that there was nothing left in the tank.)

AND the contrast in the seasonal matrix charts just above also highlight the night-and-day difference in Waino's performance level. QMAX's "success square" (the green and yellow regions in the upper left of the matrix) is something that Waino hit about two-thirds of the time in his career: in '21, a fine year, he hit it three-quarters of the time. From September '22 on, he hit it only 15% of the time. In '21, he gave up more hits than innings pitched just seven times in 32 starts (about 22%); from September '22 on, he gave up more hits than innings pitched twenty-two times in 27 starts (about 81% of the time). That's about as deep a hole as you can dig and still be pitching in the big leagues.

All of which reminds us how quickly things can change in baseball--how slender the line can be between success and failure. 

The matrix chart for Waino's last 27 starts gives us a sense of what "replacement level" starting pitching looks like while also demonstrating the performance nuances when we place them into the QMAX context. Those twenty-two starts where the "S" score is 5-7 produce a probabilistic winning percentage (what we call the "Quality Win Percentage," or QWP) of .327. Over the course of a 162-game season, that would work out to just about 53 wins. 

It was a sad coda to a brilliant, injury-riddled career: but we can all be heartened by Waino's success in reaching a "magic number" (200 wins) which is presently an endangered species in terms of starting pitcher performance measures. 

Here's one last "contextual QMAX" aggregation for you vis-a-vis Waino's career performance, via a look at the key QMAX regions within the performance matrix. The chart at right shows those regions: the "success square" (delineated earlier) and the "elite square" (the 1,1/1,2/2,1/2,2 "best games"); the two top rows (S1/S2) which contain the top hit prevention games; the converse, in the bottom two rows (S6/S7), which constitute the "hit hard" region; and, most pertinent in the case of Waino, the region we call the "Tommy John" section of the chart, the box encompassing the starts where hits are at least equal and often greater than the number of innings pitchers, the region spanning (4,1 to 7,2) on the matrix, where pitchers manage to win games because the type of hits they give up in such games are more often singles than extra-base hits, thus allowing a higher percentage of stranded baserunners. We've highlighted that data in light blue above, while presenting all of Waino's full seasons (representing 368 games, about 85% of his career starts). As you can see, he consistently lived in the "Tommy John" region, with nearly three times the overall historical average of his starts residing there. (The region also requires excellent control: pitchers who live here do not put extra men on base via the base on balls.) 

This is also why, when you examine basic QMAX S to the more XBH-encompassing QMAX S', you'll see that Waino's S' values are consistently lower (better) in comparison to the basic measure, meaning that all those starts in the "Tommy John" region added value to his overall performance. (It's the nuance in QMAX that is missing from all other evaluation methods.)

It's possible that Waino was the last great exemplar of this type of pitcher: only time will tell if the pendulum within the game will swing back in this direction...

WE'LL revisit Waino's career record when we get into the latter phase of "awards season" at the point when Hall of Fame voting occurs (early January). Keep your focus on the line in the master chart that shows his record from 2007-2015, for that will be one of the key data elements used in evaluating his case for potential enshrinement in Cooperstown.