 |
||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
Pitching Under Pressure Do pitchers really get worse in the playoffs amongst better offenses? 01/09/04 Phil Orr If you've been following along with our site, you would have read
my colleage Thomas Ayers' piece about Andy Pettitte and his postseason
ability. I read through it as I always do, and thought he did a great
job, but one sentence hit me. "I don’t really have much
evidentiary research to back it up, but my opinion is that most people
will likely perform reasonably similarly to their regular season performance
in the playoffs." Well, I then knew what I had to write about.
It's understandable not knowing this, as I've been trying to search
all night for some indication and haven't come across one. Hell, I
couldn't even find an easy way to find out who the career leaders
are in postseason IP (outside of those listed in baseball-reference,
which although primarily modern, not entirely.) I wanted to take a
look at players in the 90's, and compare their postseason with their
regular season. And after digging through some data courtesy of the
Lahman database, I determined
the top 10 pitchers in regards to postseason innings from 1990-2002.
(2003 not included because we're still anxiously awaiting the release
of the next database. But 12 years is still a reasonable indication.)
Also note I had to manually go over the file as my abilities in Excel
are not as superb as I would like, so although I am 95% sure this
is the top 10, there may be someone who slipped into the bottom ahead
of Schilling, but I couldn't find him.
Probably a good 7 seasons worth of total innings there, enough to make a reasonable judgement, although I implore those interested in the results to extend this to more pitchers to see if the results hold true. The following table compares players regular season and postseason
stats. a green number in "change" indicates that the player
has been better in the postseason in that category, whereas a red
number indicates a decline.
That's a lot of numbers to look at, and after hurting my brain calculating them for the past 4 hours, it seems like it would be good to break them down into some results. 1. The further you get from the top of the list, the more you see playoff numbers that are out of line with career numbers. This is almost certainly due to sample size, and if the pitcher had the chance to pitch more innings, you would likely see them come closer. 2. Not only was Thomas right in saying that Andy Pettitte was not the playoff monster he is billed as, he is actually the worst pitcher in the playoffs compared to the regular season out of the top 10 in playoff innings in the 90's. What's even more perplexing is how he got this reputation, when Yankees David Cone and Roger Clemens pitch near their regular season levels, Wells pitches above it, and El Duque absolutely destroys his regular season numbers. 3. Thomas' theory regarding pitchers not behaving differently in the playoffs seems to have a lot of merit. A larger study needs to be done, but as the innings increase, the difference between the regular season numbers and playoff numbers decrease. Even more telling is that the overall numbers are within small fractions of the regular season numbers. The largest number, a 9% gain in the number of walks per 9, is directly offset by the number of hits/9. Overall, the WHIP is the same between the regular and the postseason. 4. The common thinking that the pitchers will pitch worse because they face more difficult competition seems to not hold true. I'm having trouble accepting that, and I welcome reasons that the numbers average out rather than being worse overall. One theory is that strategy changes in the playoffs, where teams start playing more smallball, making the more difficult opposition offset by the change in offensive strategy to a lower scoring game. Although it wasn't a big part of Thomas' article, his statement about pitching numbers appears to be dead on. Which also amplifies his claims against Andy Pettitte. The main purpose of this isn't simply to back up his article, but to add something to the internet that Thomas nor myself could find, being a comparison between playoff innings and regular season. And although this should probably be looked into in more depth, I'm quite frankly amazed at how close the final numbers ended up being, and hope this provides the stathead community some new evidence to fuel debates. There seems to be a new trend where we include our e-mail down here despite it being on the writers page. Who am I to defy convention? You can reach me at phil.orr@ballparkanalysis.com, or you can feel free to discuss this article on our message board. Oh, also... I'm broke. Buy some stuff from our webstore. Buy, Buy, Buy! Come on... it's funny! That is all.
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
©Copyright 2003
Phil Orr
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
