Ryan Howard's Quality Start

Yeah, his BABIP is clearly not going to stay at .351, but line drive rate isn’t really a great way to go on BABIP projection anyway. In my StatSpeak article, I got that Howard should be hitting .310 on balls in play. A huge improvement is actually his K-rate down to 27.8% from 32.6% last year. That’s probably about .015-.020 points of average or so right there, given his average on contact. His BABIP is partly high since he keeps hitting doubles off the wall (check out this link: http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/playerHitChart?categoryId=223779). As a few more of those leave the yard and his BABIP goes down and his AVG stays up. I’m sure he’ll probably start striking out a little more as pitchers make adjustments to what he has changed, but it looks like he probably will hit .270-.280 this year.

those “stupid stats” that we use do a better job of predicting future baseball events and evaluating players than a lot of the more common statistics.

pitches per plate appearance doesn’t really vary all that much, so 0.1 difference is somewhat notable though not statistically significant, i’m sure. he is swinging at more pitches (though mostly at more strikes) and making more contact than he did last year. given that he’s seeing fewer strikes this year, that could be a somewhat bad sign…or at least an indication his K-rate is going up again to where it’s been before.

Please restrict all comments to RBI and AVG, please.

How long have you been reading this blog?

Let’s try this:

“Ryan Howard’s great start in 2008 is wholly attributable to improvements in his character—specifically, eating healthier, refraining from rough sex, sleeping from 10 pm to 6 am every night, and Getting Right With His God. The small gains in batting average and other numbers are completely certain to hold up over the course of the season and indeed the remainder of his career, so long as Howard adheres to the straight and narrow.”

What we try to do here is look at all the factors, quantitative and qualitative, to explain what’s happening to this team we love in this game we love. Pitches seen per plate appearance is a useful metric because it gives a sense of what kind of hitter a guy is: Juan Pierre is averaging 3.2 P/PA in 2009, and you know he’s a slap hitter who doesn’t draw a lot of walks. Bobby Abreu has averaged 4.1 P/PA this year, down a little bit from past seasons but still indicative of a guy who works deep counts and is willing to take a walk if he doesn’t see something he thinks he can drive.

Howard’s “drop” from 4.0 to 3.9 probably isn’t indicative of anything except a small sample size (another concept we’re big on). He’s always been between 3.9 and 4.2. I found it surprising—along with the drop in his walk rate, which might be significant—because my perception from watching the games is that he’s had a more patient approach… which would suggest both drawing more walks and seeing more pitches. But the better explanation might be that his Ks are down—because generally when a guy like Howard strikes out, those will be four or five or six-pitch ABs, which would inflate the P/PA number.

My point is that through 29 games he’s been more of a contact hitter than the homer-or-strikeout guy we’ve seen in the past. If this is all too difficult for you to grasp, maybe The Good Phight isn’t the site for you.

Because I know that no human being is capable of dropping a “farewell” message like that and not tracking the responses, I’ll do you one better and respond to your post substantively:

how many stats in sports these days are created for a genuine need for the information and how many are created by agents to increase their clients ‘worth’. Personally, while Scott Boras still roams the open plains, I think its more of the latter.

I think most amateur (and professional, for that matter) sabermetricians would love it if they were tools of Scott Boras, as it would probably mean they’d make a lot more money doing what they do. Boras does a fine job manipulating the traditional stats to make guys like Dante Bichette look like quality players; he doesn’t need to more esoteric, modern statistics to do his dirty work.

At least add some humor . . . (see my previous fanpost)

You’re presumably referring to this one. You know what, I looked at this when you posted it and I chuckled. It’s a funny turn of phrase. I don’t know what you were expecting as a response from us and the regular readers. I mean, it’s not like “dinger” isn’t common slang for a home run. If it had said “Victorino’s long, meaty, Polynesian dinger” then I’ll grant you, that’s potentially hilarious, but as it is…

Sports humor tends to be of the “OMG it’s funny, he just gave him a hot foot!” variety, or “look at the wacky bloopers!” How many Daniel Murphy and Raul Ibanez “highlight” clips have you seen on this site? And yesterday we gave you a truly terrible Ibanez/Warren Zevon Youtube video. We’re not going to be the wacky terrible Photoshop Phillies blog, it’s just not what we do, but if something strikes us as funny, we run with it. I’d also be interested to see what you find “humorous,” aside from the aforementioned Victorino dick joke (and the hilarious acronyms you enumerated above… I mean, “VAG”? That’s GOLD!).

The only thing I have found entertaining about this site is the breakfast links that are posted.. every so often.

Good point. I kind of eased off on these for a number of reasons, partially because I wasn’t getting too much feedback on them. Dropping them didn’t really have a perceptible effect on traffic. Also the daily commitment isn’t exactly conducive to my current job. If people like them, it might be time to recruit someone to take over… Ditto on the minor league stuff, I’ve been wanting to recruit a farm system “expert” to do updates for some time now.

The source story about Ryan Howard that we’re commenting in doesn’t refer to any esoteric stats — just AVG, OBA, SLG, and home runs. Frankly I lack the mastery of the more advanced stats that other writers have (such as MattS). I just stick with what I know. And pitches/plate appearance — the stat you seemed to have so much issue with — isn’t exactly hard to grasp, either. Are you just trying to strike a blow against the “uptight nerdlingers” or something?