Truth to the Brewers stinking against crappy pitchers?

[joepepsi]

I really wish I had the time to pick another team outside the Brewers and watch them closely for a full year to see if a lot of the perceptions fans have about the Brewers are accurate or not. I suspect that in general Milwaukee performs roughly the same as most other teams do when facing guys with higher and lower ERAs. And I suspect that most fans of other teams probably feel the same way we do.

I've been an Oriole fan since I was 6. I still follow them closely, regularly read the Baltimore Sun online, regularly visit two Oriole discussion boards similar to brewerfan.net. I think your suspicions are correct; fans of other teams have many of the same perceptions of their team as Brewer fans do with the Crew.

 

It's a very long season. The difference between the best player and worst player, or best team and worst team isn't really that much. The Nats may lose 100 games, but there will be relatively few where they don't have a chance at some point in the game, to pull ahead and win. The w/l records doesn't reflect how close almost all individual games are in the majors. The difference is really small when you compare an average team to an above average team. Toronto isn't going to the playoffs, but they've taken 4 of 6 from the Red Sox. They just swept Baltimore in a 3 game series last week. But they've also lost 5 of 6 to the Rays, and 4 of 6 to the Mariners.

 

It's the same with individual players. A 6-ish ERA pitcher might match Sheets pitch for pitch through 5 scoreless innings. Then in the 6th a couple non error misplays, a weak hit and one bad pitch in the zone, and it's 4 earned runs. The box score looks like the Brewers dominated, but watching the game you know it was closer than that.

 

[DougJones43]

Here's the preliminary findings:

 

Weighted Projected ERA: 5.12

Actual ERA Against Brewer Batters: 5.42

Russ, I think your findings are pretty good. The only thing I would say (and this is being picky, I know) is that by simply looking at the overall ERA against Brewer batters, one outing where they destroyed a guy (think De la Rosa) could pull the entire number way up.

 

So, let's say that the Brewers face 4 crappy pitchers. The crush one, and perform poorly against the other 3. The overall result might look good, but the ratio isn't good, and it has actually only benefited the team for one game.

 

Is there any way to examine (using the list of crappy pitchers you compiled), how many individual times the Brewers perform:

a) above expected

b) within an expected range

c) below expected

 

Something like that might be more telling for what we're looking at?

[rluzinski]

Doug, Of the 19 games started against opossing pitchers with a projected ERA over, 4.75, 9 finished with a game ERA of over 5 and 10 with ERAs under 5. Granted, it was either feast or famine against there guys but it all pretty much balances out as you would expect.

[Brawndo the Thirst Mutilat]

Is there any way to examine (using the list of crappy pitchers you compiled), how many individual times the Brewers perform:

a) above expected

b) within an expected range

c) below expected

 

Something like that might be more telling for what we're looking at?

 

Sure, just look at RLuz's spreadsheet and count. Not sure how wide you think the "expected range" should be, but they're above the opponent's projected ERA 8 times and below it 11 times. If you use, say, 1 run above or below as "within an expected range", that only happened 3 times out of 19 starts. I get 6 "above expected", 3 "within expected", and 10 "below expected".

 

But, as has been pointed out several times previously in this thread, this is precisely what you should expect, and a totally meaningless finding. It would only be significant if start by start ERA was normally distributed around the starter's mean ERA, which it isn't. Check the game logs for a couple of those bad pitchers and you'll see that their opponents would be "below expected" for MOST of their starts, and their ERA is only as high as it is because of a few times when the opponent "destroyed the guy" which "pulled the entire number way up". Maybe that's what you were getting at -- not sure.

 

Mark Hendrickson gamelog

ER by start- 6, 1, 1, 2, 3, 2, 3, 1, 4, 1, 5, 10, 4, 5, 3, 4, 5, 6, 4, 2

 

Livan Hernandez gamelog

ER by start - 2, 4, 0, 3, 4, 7, 1, 1, 3, 3, 5, 6, 5, 7, 7, 1, 1, 4, 3, 6http://www.baseball-reference.com/pi/gl.cgi?n1=hendrma01&t=p&year=2008

Both of them gave up 3 or fewer runs in at least half of their starts (10 of 19 for Hendrickson, 10 of 20 for Livan that would be "below expected"). That leaves just half of the starts to divide between "within expected" and "above expected". 4 or 5 runs might be either, depending on how many IP, but I've put in boldface the only starts that are obviously bad ones (3 of 19 for Hendrickson, 5 of 20 for Livan). This distribution of performances looks EXACTLY like the Brewers performances against bad pitchers from RLuz's spreadsheet.

[rluzinski]

And that's why I hate doing these kind of studies. Very rarely do I find evidence that supports a theory that many accept as fact but would make the Brewers a grossly atypical team for unknown reasons. And even when I do find that common sentiment is correct, it's often (although not always) caused just by random variance (as evidenced by the fact that the odd phenomenon melts away in the increasing sample size). Not much to gain overall, as those who believe this kind of stuff absolutely are generally not swayed by such things as statistical evidence.

 

The only reason I was motivated in this case was because I had a buddy scoff at my request to see proof of the bad pitcher theory. I didn't even say he was wrong, only that I was skeptical. The proof, he said, was in the fact that every Brewer fan knew that it was true. Even a Brewer employee knew it ... the elevator operator!!! Sorry, I need more than that.

[Brawndo the Thirst Mutilat]

The whole thing just goes to show the capacity of the human mind for cognitive dissonance and overlooking the obvious. I'm as guilty as everybody else, heck, I was complaining about this phenomenon as recently as Sunday in the in-game chat.

 

But looking at the data, and just thinking about it calmly and rationally for a minute, it's pretty obvious that it's a chimera. Ask any baseball fan about how the lousy pitchers on his own team perform on a start by start basis, and s/he'll complain about the "inconsistency", meaning he's good or ok for 3 or 4 starts, but then he'll just get lit up horrifically. All it takes to understand why the Brewers seem to underperform against lousy pitchers on other teams is to turn that perception around, and realize that their lousy pitchers aren't any different than our lousy pitchers.

[TuesdaysWithRillo]

But looking at the data, and just thinking about it calmly and rationally for a minute

That's the tricky part. Especially for me. There's so much passion in sports, it's hard to discard that and think objectively. I am guilty of this as much and if not more than anyone.

[rluzinski]

Nothing much new added but here's the blog post:

 

http://rluzinski.blogspot.com/2008/07/brewers-struggle-against-bad-pitchers.html

[mattmieske]

Delarosa has the worst projection out of the entire bunch. I'm not going to remove him because he can throw hard with the wrong hand while sucking.

 

I hope this doesn't turn into a cherry picking exercise, where someone says, "Yeh, but if you only look at pitchers who are x, y, z, the Brewers suck against all bad pitchers!" That's not being objective. That's fishing for a desired conclusion.

 

 

I don't think it's "cherry picking." My perception from watching nearly every Brewers game the past few years is not so much that the team struggles against all "crappy" pitchers, but that it struggles against right-handed, softer-throwing pitchers who rely primarily on breaking balls and offspeed stuff.

 

I know that's not easy to quantify, but even if you forget about pitching style and just take all of the left-handers off of your list, the numbers don't look nearly as good, especially since two of the top three performances by the Brewers against 'crappy' pitchers were against left-handers (I'm relying on the second, actual ERA chart rather than the projected ERAs, which I consider to be of minimal value now that the season is more than half over).

 

Also, this doesn't take into account pitchers who might not be quite "crappy" enough for the list in terms of projected ERA or actual ERA, but who fit the same style and could charitably be described as "mediocre" in their starts against teams other than the Brewers - Kevin Slowey (17 IP, 2 ER vs. Brewers in 2008) and Jason Bergmann (5 IP, 0 ER) being the best examples I can think of at the moment.

 

Thanks for analyzing this though. I'd be curious to see the numbers for the past few years, since it seems like this is a trend that's been going on for a while - if anything, it doesn't seem to be quite so bad this year.

[geddymd73]

Looking at the data, I don't think the ERA is as important as the total run production. The median wighted value is probably 2-3 runs against all of these "4.75" ERA pitchers. The median value or even the mode value is probably more accurate based on per game basis because those individual values appear more frequently (reality) than any computed average (formulated). There are way more 2 runs and 1 runs on the list than anything else. The median and mode run value is around 2. The median ERA is 3.38 and the mode ERA is 3.00.

Considering that the average ERA is over 5 after weighing, it seems like a skewed value, as the Brewers are certainly not putting up over 5 runs in most games against these guys.

 

I haven't done any deep analysis, but thats just what jumps out to me with the data.

[rluzinski]

You think that a projection, which incorporates the 08 ERA has "minimal value". The opposite is really true, which (as I've said) is big part of the probem' Fans rely way to much on current season's ERA. They see a 5+ ERA on a guy in June and he must be bad. That just isn't true.

 

And it used to be that people complained about the Crew "always" struggling soft tossing lefties. Now it's righties. I would expect the Brewer to do worse against any righty, obviously.

 

If someone wants to chart how well the Brewers have done against bad RH pitchers the last 2, get at it. I'm done chasing a moving target.

[Ranier]

So here's the challenge to the statheads: give us a breakdown of how the Brewers have fared over the last X years vs. SP's (or pitchers in general) with ERA's within certain ranges. Do we really score less than the opposing pitcher's ERA when it's 5+ and above ERA when it's 3 or less?

 

I guess my question would be more like:

 

How does the Brewers performance against +5.00 and sub-3.00 ERA guys compare with that of the rest of the league?

 

Why would I ask that question? Because we watch 150+ Brewer games per year and tend to remember beating up on Yohan Santana while being shut down by Mark Redmond. If you see that sort of thing often enough it's easy to conclude "Dang, the Brewers do really well against the best pitchers, but when we face bad ones we are terrible."

 

But most of us haven't seen enough games by other teams to know whether or not what the Brewers are doing is being done by most of the rest of the teams in baseball or if they are odd-balls. We don't see (or remember) when Diamondbacks do the same thing, or when the Yankees beat up on Josh Beckett and King Felix and are shut down by Carlos Silva and Garrett Olson. And even if we remember the occasional game, most of us don't watch 150+ games played by another team.

 

I really wish I had the time to pick another team outside the Brewers and watch them closely for a full year to see if a lot of the perceptions fans have about the Brewers are accurate or not. I suspect that in general Milwaukee performs roughly the same as most other teams do when facing guys with higher and lower ERAs. And I suspect that most fans of other teams probably feel the same way we do.

 

You took the words right out of my mouth...I've always thought that most of the gripes are shared by just about every fan base in the league.

[Pointer1VB]

There are way more 2 runs and 1 runs on the list than anything else. The median and mode run value is around 2. The median ERA is 3.38 and the mode ERA is 3.00.

Considering that the average ERA is over 5 after weighing, it seems like a skewed value, as the Brewers are certainly not putting up over 5 runs in most games against these guys.

 

I haven't done any deep analysis, but thats just what jumps out to me with the data.

This comment sparked my interest, so I did some additional number crunching starting with rluzinski's data. I listed every start on the season by the pitchers he classified as bad (Delarosa, Fogg, Rusch, Olsen, Redman, M. Hendrickson, Livian Hernandez, R. Liz, G. Reynolds, Piniero, Moehler, Badenhop, O. Perez (WSN), C. Morton, Nelson Figueroa! and Chacon). I don't put as much stock in projected data, especially since they tend to be a little generous in terms of horrible pitchers (ie they don't project people over 5.5, but many of these guys have ERAs above that in actuality). Here's what I came up with...

 

Weighted Projected ERA: 5.12

Actual ERA Against Brewer Batters: 5.42

2008 ERA Versus All Teams: 5.43

 

This shows us that the Brewers are in line with all of the other teams against crappy pitchers. But how about the spread of these games and do we have a larger feast or famine tendency as geddymd hinted at? These pitchers have a combined 198 starts on the season. The median is 4.50 on the button. Note that the median is BELOW the actual ERA. This says that poor pitchers have more above average ERA games then below average ERA games. Geddymd is correct by saying the median ERA is 3.38 for these pitchers against the brewers, which may show the Brewers have a tendency to give poor pitcher more above average games then most teams. However, this sample size is only 19 games, and the next ERA after 3.38 is 5.07, which is obviously above 4.50. Therefore, if we have above a 5 ERA against the next poor pitcher start, our median will jump over a point in ERA. Therefore, there is too small of a sample size to do anything with the median, but the data suggests there is no reason to believe our median would be dissimilar to the 4.50 mark with a larger sample size.

 

Also, the mode for the Brewers against these poor pitchers may be 3.00, but surprisingly the mode for these pitchers against everyone is 0.00 (15 of 198 games had 0 ER, 13 had a 4.50 ERA). However, the tendency for certain ERAs for a game to show up more often for nice round numbers (such as 0, 3, 4.5, 6) shows me that mode is not a good analysis tool in this situation.

 

My conclusion is that the Brewers are perfectly average in their performance against poor pitchers, however even poor pitchers perform better then their season averages in the majority of their starts. Therefore the perception is that the Brewers do worse then they should against poor pitchers when they are performing at a perfectly reasonable standard.

 

I would post my data, however I do not have a website to upload to, and it's rather ugly because I only have Microsoft Works Spreadsheet and didn't spend the time to format and pretty it up. Also, please ignore any grammatical errors because I typed this out quickly after crunching the numbers.

 

[obobo55]

All I have to say is that we should remember Wes Obermueller. By his ERA, he was a horrible pitcher. However, he would often throw a gem for 5 innings--and I am sure our opponent's fans were tearing their hair out--then he (or our bullpen) would allow the game to blow open in the 6th inning.

 

That is what bad pitchers generally are. They often can not extricate themselves from the bad innings. If Ben Sheets gives up a leadoff double, he does not walk two guys being too careful and give up a bloop double that scores 3. He will bear down and go after each hitter as if that guy on second isn't there. That run may score but he will usually limit the damage to that. It really does come down to trusting your stuff. When a mediocre pitcher gets rattled, he starts to nibble. That results in a couple of things, more balls lead to batter-friendly counts and it gets the pitch count up. So even if the "poor" pitcher gets out of it limiting the damage by nibbling and not giving up the nail-driver he probably threw extra pitches which cause him to come out of the game early. This is then reflected in his ERA. Suppan is an almost perfect example of this in a bunch of games I have went to. He ends up giving up only 2 or 3 runs (and we end up winning) but he can only go 5 or 6 innings because he throws so many pitches to get his outs.