2014: COMPLETE GAMES #54, #55...AND #56

Two more CGs last night...one winner, one loser. The current W-L record for CGs is now 45-10 (.818).

The winner: Cleveland's Josh Tomlin, who evened his season record (now 5-5) with one of the best CGs thus far, a one-hit, 11-K gem over the Mariners. Tomlin showed some promise in 2010-11, but was sidetracked by injuries over the past two seasons. By virtually all measures, he was at the pinnacle last night.

The loser: Mashairo Tanaka of the Yankees, now with his first actual losing streak in MLB (and you will remember that he was 24-0 in Japan last year) as a result of an ill-considered pitch to Mike Napoli in the ninth inning. The result: a tie-breaking, game-winning homer as the Sox won in the Bronx, 2-1. (The Sox didn't give Jon Lester a chance for a CG last night, turning things over to Koji Uehara... Lester had already thrown 118 pitches through eight last night.)

We're sure that the CG was of little consolation to Tanaka or the Yankees...

[EDIT: Sunday night (6/29), Homer Bailey of the Cincinnati Reds joined the CG ranks with a three hit shutout of the (still) reeling Giants. The Reds won, 4-0, but must have been scratching their heads the next night (6/30), when recently reactivated Mat Latos allowed just one hit over seven innings but lost to the Padres 1-0. It's been quite a year for such anomalies...more on that a bit later.]

2014: SIMON SIMPLY OUT OF NOWHERE

With more legal matters in his past than those referenced by Mouse and the Traps (who??), Alfredo Simon is truly a man who casts a shadow. (And, at 6'6", 265 lbs., it's not a small one.)

But it's taken Simon (who started out his MLB career with an alias...) until well into his thirties to make a splash. Coming into tonight's game in San Francisco (one of four organizations he bounced through in his circuitous journey), Simon, in his third year with the Cincinnati Reds, was an odds-on favorite for a berth on the NL All-Star team thanks to a 10-3 record.

And tonight, facing a team for whom he compiled a 6-20 record while in their minor league organization, Simon allowed just three hits and one run over seven innings. He left trailing 1-0, but was bailed out of a loss when Brandon Phillips hit a two-run HR in the top of the ninth. (The Reds went on to win, 7-3 in eleven innings, pushing the reeling Giants a bit closer to the Dodgers in the NL West.)

Simon had a couple of useful years in the Reds' bullpen after being picked up on waivers from the Orioles in early 2012, but rookie manager Bryan Price (who never got out of the minors as a low-level pitching prospect for the Angels and M's in the 1980s) helped make the decision to put the hulking right-hander into the starting rotation.

The results have been--well, surprising. Most sabermetric stats remain skeptical of Simon: FIP fingers him to fade sharply, while his BABIP is low enough (.243) to raise eyebrows. Our Quality Matrix measure (QMAX) is a bit more sanguine, however.

Currently Simon's QMAX averages are 3.13, 2.88/6.01. His QMAX Winning Percentage (QWP) is .627. The range data is also encouraging: he's hit the "success square" just under 70% of the time, and tonight's game (his first "1S" game of the year) brought him above the 30% mark in the "elite square."

This is all uncharted territory for Alfredo, of course, and baseball logs are littered with guys with impressive first halves who took a dive during the dog days. But we suspect that he'll stay within striking distance of these performance stats over the rest of the year, so long as he doesn't suddenly develop a weakness for the long ball.

2014: COMPLETE GAMES #52, #53

The Tigers' Rick Porcello has always been one of those pitchers whose "true talent" (to cop to the phrase that defies digestion just as much as certain overcooked specimens of the Tango Love Pie™) has always lagged well behind his success. The righty has always been an insider's tout, more of a personality kid than a bonafide big league success--yet in the midst of upheaval in Detroit, he's still standing.

And he's also thrown sixteen consecutive scoreless innings, capped the other night (6/26) by a three-hit shutout against the Texas Rangers. Hit prevention seems to be improving for Porcello, but that may not be a function of anything other the slow-roasted, crust-infested gooey goodness of random variation.

Later that same evening, Adam Wainwright, definitely in the loop for the NL Cy Young Award, racked up his third CG of the season--but it was also his first losing CG, as his team (Cardinals) could not score at all against the Dodgers' Josh Beckett, Brian Wilson, and Kenley Jansen. Final score: LA 1, St. Louis 0.

By the way, 2014 is currently on pace to have 33% more 1-0 games than was the case in 2013. And the Cardinals have been in the most of these games thus far this year, a total of six 1-0 games. (They are now 4-2 in such games.)

YANKS, SOX: TWO PEAS, ONE POD

We're back to baseball's "marquee" matchup--the New York Yankees vs. the Boston Red Sox--even though, in this particular Year of Our Lord, the tarnish on the silverware is hard to ignore.

The schedule makers might have been tipped off in advance, for there is little frisson in how the two teams will face each other--no closely proximate home-and-home series to be found in the latter half of the 2014 season, which diffuses things. (According to some reports, it's the second "clustered" series between the two clubs that produces the highest ratings results...we won't have any of that working for us from here on out.)

And aesthetically speaking, that's probably not something to mourn. While the parity that's breaking out all over (read: "mediocrity") has the Yankees within striking distance of the Wild Card, the underlying numbers all but scream that they are really not a better team than the struggling Sox, who've had an even more precipitous offensive decline in 2014 than what would have been predicted by those who ground up their rose-colored lenses after last year's "bearded miracle."

Last night's opener of the suddenly underwhelming collision between two teams that are more reminiscent of overweight canaries than chest-thumping primates [NOTE: no BTF pun intended, though if the gorilla suit fits...] showed just how ho-hum things can be between franchises that used to promise instant excitement.

Joe and Vidal have perfected the "mid-inning handoff" in 2014.

The Sox floundered against the Yanks' endearingly wobbly southpaw Vidal Nuno, with their Big Three (Dustin Pedroia, David Ortiz, Mike Napoli) going 0-for-10 for the night. Meanwhile the Yankees found the long ball, hitting three HRs (two off starter Brandon Workman, who's been a bit of a bright spot for the Sox as they've been forced to shuffle their rotation over the past four weeks).

It was baseball that was strangely wan, not wanton; more soporific than scintillating.

That the Sox would be listless away from Fenway is no longer surprising in 2014: they are hitting just .227 on the road so far this year. The team that used to hit doubles at a clip resembling machine gun fire  is mired in the middle of the pack in 2014--and is tied for fewest doubles on the road.

The Yanks don't look much different. But somehow they've managed to play five games over their Pythagorean projection, despite an indifferent offense featuring ancient warriors (Derek Jeter, Alfonso Soriano, Carlos Beltran, Ichiro Suzuki) and nondescript journeymen (Brian Roberts, Kelly Johnson). One can only hold one's breath in wonderment at where this team might be in the standings without Masahiro Tanaka (11-2, 2.11), whom the Red Sox will face in tonight's game.

We'll continue to hold out hope that both of these high-falutin' yet frabjously flatulent franchises will keep up the flounder act for all of '14, giving us that annus mirabilis wherein both of them are on the outside looking in when the post-season arrives.

2014: COMPLETE GAMES #50, #51

The 2014 season's 50th and 51st complete games (we are still holding out Mr. Kershaw's five-inning game, for those who are keeping count...) could not have been more different from one another.

Dallas Keuchel's CG last Saturday night is the first "bad complete game" of 2014 (depending on how you've arrived here, you may have read about those already--the lowdown on "Bad CGs" can be found below). The quick definition is that this was a game where the starter went the distance and allowed five or more runs. In recent years (more details in the previous post...) these games have become exceedingly rare.

And as a matter of fact they are becoming scarcer than no-hitters (three for the seaosn thus far...)--which was the most recent addition to the year's CG totals--the not-quite-as-mighty-as-in-the-past Tim Lincecum victimizing the San Diego Padres once again (yesterday afternoon, at pitcher paradise Petco Park). The Freak is still capable of being dominating, but something definitely changed in 2012--it would be most gratifying if sabermetrics could actually figure out what it is, since the Giants (who aren't too shabby at developing pitchers) have yet to be able to do so.

Overall won-loss record for CGs now stands at: 43-8 (.843).

Current projection for total number of CGs for 2014 now stands at: 105.

"BAD" COMPLETE GAMES

As much as we like to fulminate about triples, we've got to admit that they're not as rare as complete games. (Though, when you quantify in a particular way, it's actually a close call: triples only account for 2% of all hits, while complete games occur in just over 2% of all games.)

Infinitely rarer than either of these, however, is a new entity that we've recently been able to identify. Vot's dot, you ask? Why, the "bad" complete game. Once relatively plentiful, this subcutaneous cousin of the CG are now down in single digits in any given year.

Just what is a "bad" complete game? There are a number of possible definitions, but the one we settled on is as follows: 

--It's a complete game in which the starter gives up five or more runs.

"Bad" complete games, as the chart at right indicates, constitute 10% of all complete games (at least the ones we can count using Forman et fils' Play Index, which takes us back to 1914). The figure is probably closer to 15% when you factor in all of the games back to 1871, where CGs were a much higher percentage of games played.

The chart tells us some other interesting things, though. First, the overall WPCT for these games is around .350, which is probably higher than what you might first think. But more intriguing is the movement of that WPCT over time, particularly how it relates to the changing percentage of "bad CGs" (relative to total CGs). 

As "bad CGs" began to decline from their peak in the 1920s (and, again, there's a good chance that the peak for these might well be in the 1890s), an odd thing starts to happen: the WPCT in these games actually goes up. How is that? Well, CGs are declining over time, save for the blip we see in the 70s; as run scoring goes down in the 60s, there's less incentive to leave a pitcher in for the whole game unless his team has also scored him a bunch of runs. If such is the case (and it was...), the pitcher has a much better chance of being the winner.

As we can see, that changed dramatically and irrevocably during the 70s, when the accelerating scarcity of CGs began to randomize the process. Increasingly, pitchers with "bad" CGs were those who fell behind early, then regrouped strongly and pitched well for the latter portions of a ballgame, but took a loss due to low run support in that particular game. That became the paradigm for these games as they became scarcer and scarcer trace elements.

And as you can see, in our five-year running WPCT chart, "bad" complete games began a slide to what  might best be termed an "accursed oblivion" in 1969, when the WPCT took a spectacular nose-dive. The offensive explosion and the Rockies' home park (first Mile High Stadium, then Coors Field) pushed the WPCT upward for awhile, but the continuing emphasis on the bullpen and the increased levels of anality in counting pitches soon removed any incentive for leaving a pitcher in to face more than 35 batters. (We should note that most of what are now losing "bad CGs"--and no pitcher has won a "bad CG" since 2002--are CGs of the eight-inning variety.)

Let's take a quick look at the yearly fluctuations of "bad CGs" (in the chart at right). This gives us a more detailed look at the pattern than what the decade summary at the top provides.

When we look at that, we see that the major decline in "bad CGs" starts in the mid-to-late 30s and continues virtually unabated until the late 60s (with only a post-WWII blip to brake its fall).

The 70s then brings back both the CG (look it up at the Forman et fils pitcher encyclopedia page) and the "bad CG," which doubles in frequency around 1974 and stays around that level (with a few perturbations) for the next twenty-five years. Again, the new millennium brought us the expanded bullpen (probably not what Donald Fagen was nattering about in the blanded-out "Aja," where he almost seemed sincere while intoning that it was the "age of the expanding man...") and a disinclination to let a pitcher who'd allowed too many runs (and faced too many batters) to go so deep into a game.

Think about it. Back in the day (the mid-1920s) there was often a chance for the ticket-buying public to see not one, but two "bad CGs" in the same game. We can track that at Forman et fils, where one particular report informs us that there have been 251 such games since 1914--but not a single one since July 7, 1986, when Mike Flanagan and Frank Viola both stayed in all the way as the Minnesota Twins edged the Baltimore Orioles, 7-6. (The pattern we referred to earlier--a big inning early, followed by very efficient pitching in the latter stages of the game--is present here in Flanagan's performance.)

We'll come back with another post about individual pitchers and "bad CGs," but let's leave you with the "heat map" for what we might call "dueling bad CGs"--a frequency chart that shows how many of these games occurred in what year.

As we noted, the "halcyon days" for two "bad CGs" in the same game was the mid-1920s, with 1936 (an offensive boom year in the AL) being something of a "last hurrah." It's interesting, though, how many of these games show up in 1918 and 1919--years that we (rightfully) associate with the deadball era. It's likely that a good bit of what happens here is due to the elevated unearned run totals of the times, due to the greater frequency of errors.

Clearly, though, the 14716 fans in attendance at the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome (we like to call it the "Hump-Dome"...) had absolutely no idea that when they plunked down their dough on that summer's day in Minneapolis, they were watching what just might be the last game of its kind. While the changes in the game that have brought about this extinction are clearly warranted, it's still sad to contemplate the irrevocable loss of two starting pitchers battling it out from beginning to end, for better or worse. (In this case, mostly worse.) Somewhere where the sun is shining bright---possibly north-northwest of Mudville--there might yet be a frivolous but freighted anomaly, a throwback to the times when a team's relief corps didn't threaten to outnumber the number of men on the field.

2014: COMPLETE GAME #49

The Phillies' A.J. Burnett added himself to the 2014 CG roundelay last night (6/20) by scattering seven hits in St. Louis en route to a 5-1 win over the Cardinals.

That brought A.J.'s lifetime CG total up to two dozen (or 24, if you prefer to see that in numerals). His single-season high was seven--for the Marlins, back in 2002.

ANOTHER LOOK AT THE "YOUNG PHENOM"

The two strains of neo-sabermetrics--"swagger" and "hysteria"--merged and metastasized in issues coalescing around starting pitchers.

The "swagger" involves all range and manner of analytic over-reach, from "new" and "better" ways to measure the true performance of a pitcher to the giddy quantification of any and all facets of the act of pitching.

The "hysteria" stems from the horrible awareness of risk that is first experienced, then exaggerated, and finally institutionalized within insider practices. It is further accelerated by the hyper-economic overlay that has overtaken the sport in the past two decades.

So much counting, so much modeling, so much measuring, so much over-investment in particular kinds of biased counter-intuitivity: we've met the enemy and it's ourselves.

And we are surrounded by holes. Black holes; wormholes; rabbit-holes.

Let's focus on "hysteria" today, as it has taken a back seat to "swagger" over the past half-decade or so, but has reared its head of late as a lamentable litany of young starting pitchers (who embody what we've termed, up top, as the "young phenom") has been providing the type of "night sky" show that enthrall astronomers but fill the neo-sabermetrician with dread.


Too much "swagger" about a subject that turns out to be only remotely understood--such as the continuing profusion of injuries to young pitchers (and in particular "young phenoms")--turns to a puddle of hysterical goo.

What's needed to at least allay these fears? Why, historical perspective, of course. Perhaps if these overcompensating careerists knew that the problem they so brazenly thought they could solve with a series of simple proscriptions (throw less innings, throw less pitches) was actually something that is more or less constant over time, they could find a different path through the forest.

And that's just what we hope to accomplish here, right now--by examining the "young phenom" from a larger historical perspective and with a complete absence of the over-ingenious measurements that actually get in the way of understanding the problem for what it really is.

The chart at right shows all of the "young phenom" seasons since 1901. We are defining the "young phenom" season as one in which a pitcher aged 23 or younger produces at least seven (7) Wins Above Replacement (WAR). There are 43 such seasons since 1901, produced by 35 pitchers.

The color-coding on the chart provides what we might call a "basic survival" rate for these pitchers, who were all worked hard at a young age--some more so than others. The pitchers coded in orange made less than 100 additional starts after their youthful peak seasons; the pitchers coded in yellow made less than 200 additional starts.

So we have a total of seven "young phenoms" whom we can say were, in some way, ruined by their early success. However, one of these phenoms (Babe Ruth) proved to have other more "marketable" skills, and was shifted off the mound. Another (Herb Score) was hit in the face by a line drive and could not recover from the trauma of that injury.

So that leaves five. Meaning that one out of seven, or about 14%, of the top young starters fell victim to arm injury and were unable to sustain their careers for more than a very few seasons after their breakout success.

We would expect the usual counter-argument: that this is a ridiculously small sample size; that we should use a much larger population of pitchers; that we should be trying to examine some more specific factors that point to cause-and-effect.

To which we reply, of course we should. But so many have done just that for so long and have so little to show for it, don't they?

It's better to look at the pitchers at the very top end of the spectrum, because the anxiety over "lost superstars" is the true locus of this hysteria.

If we know that the risk of virtually complete flameout (ironically, it's Bill James' namesake from the "Miracle Braves" who leads the pack here, having started only nine more games after his 1914 heroics at the tender age of 22...) is 14%, then we should be able to perform the simple act of subtraction to realize that six out of seven have at least had reasonably long careers.

In fact, the won-loss records for these 35 pitchers for the seasons immediately following their "young phenom" year adds up to the following: 4115 wins, 3125 losses, .568 WPCT, a 3.32 ERA.

That works out to an aggregate "rest of career" involving 250 additional starts (exact number: 249) beyond the peak (or, in this case, the latest) "young phenom" year (7+ WAR), producing an average subsequent won-loss record of 121-92.

The rest of the data for the "young phenom" group shows that more than a third of the them throw another 2000 innings over the rest of their career, just under a third of them win at least another 150 games, and less than a fourth of them win less than 50 games.

Jim Creighton: he died for your sins even before you committed them...

The problem--or, rather, the risk--involved with young pitchers who are extremely successful has been with us since the beginning of the game. We can only do so much to eliminate it. No matter what we do, it will fail to eliminate the problem. The best may be able to simply reduce the risk by 40% or so.

But it is beyond folly to have assisted in creating an environment where "hot-house flower" young flamethrowers are being created through mechanical techniques that make them virtual certainties for one or more surgical procedures, and then look the other way when assigning blame, or locating the root cause. The higher the K-rate, the greater chance that these altered mechanics are being employed; the higher the K-rate, the greater the chance for injury no matter the age of the pitcher.

The overuse of over-simplistic but so-called "advanced" measurement techniques has resulted in this "hysteria" within the "swagger." When the "swagger" identifies a problem and pig-headedly thinks it has solved it with a couple of math proofs that bear more resemblance to instant coffee than to Chateau Latour, we are greeted with hysteria and bewilderment. Quel surprise...

What's clear from the data above is that before, during and after all of these rather pathetic examples of overthink, the risk rate for "young phenoms" has been pretty constant over time. But, paradoxically, injury rates are arguably higher for lesser pitchers of all ages--and the effects of those injuries for lesser pitchers seems to be greater, more catastrophic (which makes perfect sense, since they have less ground to give before they are too ineffective to stay on a major league roster). However, we don't have a way to definitively quantify that, and until we do, "swagger" and "hysteria" will remain the reigning components in the ongoing banshee wail that passes for "sabermetric discourse."

2014: COMPLETE GAME #48

The Mets finally join the ranks of the teams with CGs, thanks to Zack Wheeler.

Wheeler shut out the Marlins in Miami, allowing only three hits and fanning eight. The Mets tore a page from their '69 playbook and won the game 1-0.

The remaining teams without a complete game as we push past the 40% mark of the 2014 season are: Chicago Cubs, Colorado Rockies, Kansas City Royals, Pittsburgh Pirates.

Then again, the MLB-leading team in this stat thus far (St. Louis Cardinals) has only four CGs.

No team cracked double figures in 2013 (Tampa had nine) or 2012 (Detroit and Cincinnati each had nine). You have to go back to 2011 for that--when five teams, led by the Phillies (18) managed to amass more CGs than we're able to count with two hands.