Objective Power Rankings

by phatj on Sep 20, 2010 11:54 PM EDT

This is a follow-up to my post of a few days ago: http://www.thegoodphight.com/2010/9/17/1694057/best-pitcher-right-now. I had to do a new FanPost instead of adding a comment to the previous one because the comment engine doesn't appear to allow for tabular formatting (if anyone knows a way to do this, please let me know).

Anyway, what I have devised is a weighted average of a pitcher's starts wherein the most recent are weighted much more heavily than the earliest. This gives a kind of pitcher power ranking by showing how a pitcher is doing right now, rather than just his averages for the season.

Here are the numbers (note that this does not include Blanton's or Hamels' most recent starts):

		Straight								Weighted
Pitcher	Date	IP/G	ERA	H/9	BB/9	K/9	K/BB	HR/9	GB/FB	wIP/G	wERA	wH/9	wBB/9	wK/9	wK/BB	wHR/9	wGB/FB
Halladay	Sep 15	7.57	2.49	8.51	1.07	8.05	7.50	0.88	1.12	7.43	2.79	8.82	1.02	8.28	8.15	1.13	1.11
Hamels	Sep 14	6.49	3.01	7.86	2.54	9.29	3.65	1.11	0.91	6.68	2.44	7.12	2.26	9.53	4.21	0.83	0.93
Oswalt	Sep 17	6.62	2.90	7.11	2.31	8.20	3.55	0.86	0.90	6.69	2.69	6.84	2.27	8.08	3.56	0.84	0.91
Blanton	Sep 13	6.19	5.00	10.82	2.15	6.63	3.08	1.34	0.87	6.15	4.30	10.69	2.18	7.36	3.37	1.18	0.77
Kendrick	Sep 18	5.36	4.78	10.17	2.49	4.22	1.70	1.41	0.85	5.37	4.84	10.49	2.35	4.12	1.75	1.42	0.83

As you can see, my assertion that Hamels has been the best pitcher in baseball recently may have merit. He bests Halladay in hit rate and strikeout rate by wider margins than before, and has been very stingy with the home run ball of late. Halladay does have a huge advantage in K/BB rate and gets more ground balls so some systems might actually still consider him to be superior even with the weighting.

Unfortunately the spreadsheet I built for this is not user-friendly and it's a pain in the ass to add data; however, if anyone wants to see numbers for other pitchers, please let me know. I'll run the numbers if I find time.

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