Some Phillies Links For You, October 8, 2010: More Roy Halladay Stuff, Tim Lincecum Answers

“As the master speaks, two pupils pay attention…and the third naps.”

1. is pretty funny, too, just because Arroyo is the Game 2 starter.

Agreed. I had totally stopped watching it last year. I left NBC on while working on something with my wife and we got sucked in. Best episode I’ve seen of it in a few years.

Over the last 10 years or so our knowledge of the true nature of what a hit means to a pitcher (or a hitter, for that matter) has increased exponentially. It turns out that most pitchers “control” whether batted balls in play become hits or outs only to a very small degree. Guys who get a lot of groundballs tend to allow fewer hits on balls in play than others, but the difference isn’t great. So from this perspective, a no-hitter, while by anyone’s standards a good game, is as much about luck and the performance of the defense as it is about the pitcher.

On the other hand, the peripheral stats that pitchers can best control are strikeout rate and walk rate. And it so happens that these are perhaps the best two indicators of pitching performance – if you strike guys out, they can’t put the ball in play, and if you don’t walk guys, then there won’t be many guys on base to be driven in when balls in play fall in for hits.

Halladay and Lincecum each walked one batter in their respective starts; but Halladay allowed 20 balls in play while Lincecum only allowed 13. The fact that two of Lincecum’s BIPs landed for hits doesn’t say much about Lincecum himself as compared to Halladay (although the fact that both were pretty hard hit and IIRC he gave up some other hard-hit balls whereas there were virtually no hard-hit balls against Halladay. But this is nitpicking.

To me, dominance as a pitcher means not giving the hitter a chance to beat you, and that means striking him out. Although I suppose you could make an argument that Halladay’s pitching style manifests in a different kind of dominance; his pitches are easier to make contact with, but they’re incredibly hard to make solid contact with. So the hitters head back to the dugout just as baffled.