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Rotational Metrics Separating this year's great rotations from the merely amazingly good 01/18/04 Jason Moyer Many articles have been written in recent weeks about teams that have incredible starting rotations. Taking a quick glance at almost any baseball news site, you'll find articles declaring 10-15 teams as having the best pitching staff in baseball. Clearly not every team can be the best, so let's take a closer look at some of the teams who are regularly placed among the pitching-elite teams going into 2004. We'll start with a list of the expected starting rotations for the Red Sox, Athletics, Phillies, Astros, Cubs, and Marlins:
Please note that there are two teams, the Dodgers and Yankees (well, and the Blue Jays, Expos, etc etc) who should probably be included in this comparison. Unfortunately, neither team has a solid idea of what their rotation is going to look like at this point of the offseason, so I felt it best to separate them from this discussion rather than include incomplete data. Aside from those 2 teams, I do believe these are the ones which have received the most press this offseason. For these comparisons, I'd like to focus on win shares. There are 2 ways these rotations can be compared this way. First, we'll look at raw win shares totals. For Milton and Burnett, I'm going to use their 2002 totals. Also, if you'd like to cross reference, pitchers are organized in the same order as in the above table.
As I suspected, looking at raw win shares totals shows the Phillies and Astros to be lagging behind the other teams, with the Athletics, Red Sox and Cubs grouped together on a higher level. The Marlins are somewhere inbetween, partially due to the loss of Redman (although his 11 win shares are more than made up for by Burnett's 14) but primarily because the pitching-friendly nature of Pro Player Stadium tends to make Marlins pitchers appear better than they actually are. The second way in which these teams can be compared using win shares, is by weighing them from top to bottom. I'll do this by simply multiplying the 5th best starter's win shares by 5, the 4th best by 4, and so on. This method handicaps teams that have 1 or 2 great starters surrounded by castoffs and gives an advantage to teams who may not have a clear ace, but have a deep overall rotation. Here are the team rankings using this weighted method:
Once again the Astros look weak, as all of their pichers are coming off of fairly mediocre 2003 campaigns. Oswalt and Miller obviously struggled a bit, but Clemens and Pettitte were not nearly as great as their records suggested. The Phillies and Marlins are given a slight boost here, but are still hurt by the overall mediocrity of their respective staffs. The Cubs had poor production from Clement and Estes at the bottom of the rotation which drags them down significantly. However, once again the Red Sox and Athletics shine. Both teams have quality pitchers at both ends of the rotation, and I believe that is being fairly reflected in these results. Finally, let's take a look at a fairly new metric that was introduced recently by the fine folks over at baseballgraphs.com: win shares over average. An article explaining how this stat is derived can be found by following the link to their website. I find this particular statistic may actually be the most useful when sizing up pitchers (or really any players) as it uses average as a starting point rather than 0. It's not quite as nice as win shares above replacement level (which, as I understand, is a work in progress), but it should suit our purposes just fine. For this portion of the study we'll ignore Burnett/Milton, as this data does not exist for 2002 and I don't wish to skew the totals in one direction or the other. Doing this is essentially the same as assuming they're both average, which at the present time is probably the best guess we can make.
Based on this set of results, it is incredibly clear that the Astros and Phillies do not even belong in the same list as the rest of these teams. While both are somewhat above average overall, neither is nearly as good as many in the baseball media seem to think. The rest of the results are somewhat mixed, but the one team that has excelled in each comparison is the Oakland A's. To be completely honest, this does not surprise me one bit. They combine 3 pitchers who can compete for the Cy Young in any given year with one of the top pitching prospects in baseball, and a recently acquired veteran who had a very underrated 2003. Likewise, the Red Sox have both incredible depth and strength at the top of the rotation. If somehow Derek Lowe returns to his pre-2003 form and if their offense performs at the same level as they did last year, the Curt Schilling trade could quite possibly be the move that puts them over the top. Finally, we have the Cubs and Marlins. The Cubs are very strong with Prior, Wood, and Zambrano returning, but Clement and Estes have performed so poorly that a single injury could turn their rotation from a great strength into an incredible weakness. The Marlins are nearly the exact opposite, without any true aces but lots of very good starters. It's quite possible that Willis, Beckett, and Burnett will develop into the aces that many are projecting them to be, pushing this team into the same class as the Athletics. Based on their recent history, I cannot make that prediction with any confidence, but I certainly would not be surprised if this were the case. On the downside, like the Phillies, the Marlins play half of their games in a moderately extreme pitcher's park, so it's also possible that (like the Phillies) the Marlins young starters have been highly over-rated to this point in their careers. Only time will tell. The Oakland Athletics get my personal vote as the most promising staff in baseball looking ahead to 2004. An honorable mention has to go to the Red Sox, as it's quite likely they'll have both the offense and defense to compliment a truly elite staff. I try to avoid making hard predictions, but it's not hard to imagine these 2 teams squaring off once again in the postseason. A Little Help From My Friends If anyone has a link to a site with historical park run factors (doesn't have to be more than a few years, but the further back the better) please send it in! Next week, I promise I'll write something interesting about Abreu. In the meantime, if you have any questions or comments about this article or anything baseball-related, drop me a line.
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©Copyright 2003
Phil Orr
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