It is when the player is a pitcher who was injured while pinch running.
That's how good the '16 Sox are. They can lose their best first-half pitcher to a boneheaded managerial decision and still be 3 games up with two weeks to go.
Steven Wright- ace up the sleeve... Amiright?!?!?
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That's how good the '16 Sox are. They can lose their best first-half pitcher to a boneheaded managerial decision and still be 3 games up with two weeks to go.
Because he's not used to running the bases. From looking at his career professional batting stats including the minors, he has 6 plate appearances and has never reached base. That might be the only time he's ever been on the bases as a professional.
It was functioning on some basic level. It came up with the three-man bullpen in the first place before it forgot about it at the worst possible time. But I digress...
+1.
Wright probably did not realize his lead was as big as it was and made him vulnerable to a pickoff attempt, especially at 2B. Still, it would have been good for someone to say "2 step lead, no more". Makes one wonder when he was identified as a potential pinch runner for Ortiz. Was it when Papi was at bat? If so, there should have been some time to have that conversation. Or was it after Betts singled? Which would beg the question as to "why not earlier?". Then again, Betts' at bat was pretty short (2 pitches), so that may have had something to do with it as well.
Can we maybe ease up a bit on the hyperbole?
Steven Wright's stats through the point of the injury:
3.37 FIP, 4.42 xFIP, 2.41 K/BB, 146.2 IP
Rick Porcello:
3.68 FIP, 4.00 xFIP, 4.81 K/BB, 151.0 IP
David Price:
3.42 FIP, 3.31 xFIP, 4.42 K/BB, 155.2 IP
The most you can say is that he was the third best pitcher through the date of his injury. If you really want to cling to the first half to maximize your position, well, it still doesn't help.
Wright:
3.60 FIP, 4.38 xFIP, 2.19 K/BB, 114.0 IP
Porcello:
3.84 FIP, 3.96 xFIP, 4.38 K/BB, 106.0 IP
Price:
3.49 FIP, 3.19 xFIP, 5.00 K/BB, 116.1 IP
In the first sample, Porcello is the best pitcher, Wright is third best. In the second sample, Price is the best pitcher, Wright and Porcello balance out pretty well. In neither was he the best pitcher. Your position here, much like the argument that pinch running Wright on August 7th was some kind of monumental blunder, is based entirely on results without considering what's going on beneath the surface.
Are you throwing that at me because I made a big deal that Farrell let Buchholz throw only 6 or 7 pitches when it was his throw day and he could have gone a lot more?
(Yankee game that the Sox lost). Wright is built more like his comedian namesake, or Louie CK, so he's a poor choice for base running no matter what.
You should probably discount a bit of xFIP since by it's nature, the knuckleball is going to prevent squaring up as often as other pitches, but his xFIPs in both cases are significantly higher than either Price or Porcello. The K/BB is also heavily tipped in the other two's favor.
Look, I'm not saying Wright didn't have a great first half. He did. But he wasn't the best pitcher on the team, despite having the best ERA. Calling him the best pitcher is taking a surface level look and nothing more, and that is exactly what people who think pinch running him was somehow worthy of a lawsuit (or a firing) are doing.
They didn't? What else did they tell him when you were in the dugout? Maybe he was told and ignored it like he did earlier in the season when he threw the fastball anyway after JF told him not to.
Yep. Using FIP, xFIP and BB/K to measure "best pitcher" isn't fair to knuckleballers.
I have no idea. The point was that Wright pinch running shouldn't have resulted in an injury like that. Either he screwed up by ignoring them or the coaches screwed up by not telling him to stay anchored to the base. I'd lean towards the latter, but I don't mind if you disagree. If he pulled a hamstring while actually running, I wouldn't feel the same way. That injury was easily preventable.
Whatever. First-best or second-best, it was still nuts use him as a pinch runner.
And as others have noted, FIP is a lousy measure of knuckleballer effectiveness.
Pre-ASB ERA
Wright, 2.68
Porcello, 3.66
Price, 4.43
WHIP
Porcello, 1.17
Price 1.19
Wright, 1.21
Using Wright to pinch run was a monumental blunder the day it happened. Farrell is lucky Buchholtz has stepped up. Still, had Wright not been injured, they'd likely be 5 or 6 games up now.
How so? Seriously. Why isn't it fair? I'll grant that xFIP, which normalizes home run rates, should be taken with a grain of salt,
Look at Tim Wakefield. Career 4.41 ERA, 4.72 FIP and a .274 BABIP. Or RA Dickey. Career 4.01 ERA, 4.38 FIP with a .280 BABIP (even just looking at 2008 on, when he adopted the knuckleball, he was consistently higher with his FIP and had BABIPs between .257 and .290). Charlie Hough, 3.75 vs 4.29 with a .250 BABIP. Joe Nierko, 3.59 vs 3.79 and a .270 BABIP.
I see no reason why FIP should be considered unfair to a knuckleballer.(Edit: will follow up on this down thread) Never mind the rationale behind K/BB being unfair. Should walks not count because the knuckleball is hard to catch?
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Why assume that's what happened then? Seems pretty ridiculous.
It was a thing that happens in baseball. It's not anyone's fault. Wright should know without being told what his job is on the bases. I lean towards overaggressive stupidity on his part because he's not in little league.
What I'm saying in Wright's case is that when he was on in the first half, he was getting a lot of weak contact that non-knuckleball pitchers can never count on getting a lot of. That will make his ERA a lot lower than his xFIP. When knuckleball pitchers are not pitching well, they throw a lot more bad knuckleballs which get hammered at a far higher rate. A bad knuckleball is almost like a batting practice pitch. A good knuckleball is pretty much impossible to hit hard. Wright wasn't throwing many bad ones in the first half. The entire key to an effective knuckleball pitcher is avoiding throwing the bad ones.
Wright has 263.2 IP in his career and his ERA beats his xFIP by 0.92 runs. I expect that to continue.
I just looked up about 10 knuckleball pitchers and every one of them has an ERA that beats their FIP. And in their best seasons, by a lot. And all of their BABIPs were under .280 for their career.
Because if your ERA beats your FIP every time, it's fair to say that you have a weak contact skill that gets ignored by FIP.
Most knuckleball pitchers also have a high IFFB rate, which are pretty much as good as a strikeout. Wright doesn't, but Wakefield did.
Ease up on the hyperbole already. Jesus.
Wright's ERA since July 1 is 5.53. That includes seven starts prior to his injury. Without the two post-injury starts, it's 4.95. I also conveniently chose a starting point just after the "heat-induced-sweat" disaster in Arlington (8 R in 4.2 IP).
There's no reason to believe that, uninjured, he accounts for 1-2 more wins in the last 5-6 weeks.
I had no idea, so I had to look it up and found out that Buchholz threw 3 pitches, not 6 or 7.Are you throwing that at me because I made a big deal that Farrell let Buchholz throw only 6 or 7 pitches when it was his throw day and he could have gone a lot more?
Don't leave out my whole quote to make me look dumber than I am.
That was literally the first time Wright was on the bases in at least 10 years.
Great, even with that weak contact ability, Price had a better first half, and Porcello was better in the sample that goes up to the injury. Plus, as Red(s)HawksFan just pointed out, Wright was struggling mightily leading into the injury suggesting that he wasn't nearly as good as his results looked before that. Again, the argument that Wright was the best first half pitcher is a surface level look and that's just not going to cut it.
OK, well that's your argument with other people. Mine was only that I hate using FIP and xFIP to evaluate knuckleball pitchers.
"Don't take my words out of context!"
"I'm not interested in addressing your post in context!"
That's a pretty special back to back. Think that's enough of this thread for me. Heh.
"Fair" is probably the wrong word. FIP and its variants exclude balls in play. Good knuckleballers want balls in play - soft contact ground balls and pop ups. Even the best knuckleballers will walk too many batters to have high K/BB rates and give up more HRs/PA than other comparably successful pitchers. It's the nature of the knuckleball.
The idea behind FIP is to take fielding defense completely out of the equation. Knuckleballers, more than, say, fastball strike-out pitchers, depend on fielding for outs. There's nothing wrong with that. There are eight other players on the field for a reason.
Consider this:
Pitcher A spreads out three walks and three hits, one of them a HR, and gives up two runs over 7 innings. Zero Ks.
Pitcher B walks three, Ks six, but gives up six hits and four runs over seven, with no HRs.
Which had a better day? Which had a better day FIP-wise?
Wait what? I only said that knuckleball pitchers break FIP and then you started arguing with me. I wasn't interested in the rest of the argument about who was the best pitcher in the first half.
And the other reply was to the person who left out most of my post so he could make me look stupid. What he replied to me with would make no sense if he included my whole post. It's the most annoying thing on message boards.
I didn't even quote you when I made my first FIP post, let alone argue with you out of context.
No, the most annoying thing on message boards is when people state their opinion as if it is a fact. That's what you did--"no coach told Wright..."--and you were called out on it. He wasn't trying to make you look stupid, he was asking you to differentiate opinion from fact. If you looked stupid, that isn't his fault.
Okay, one more post to acknowledge I made a bone headed mistake regarding FIP. I've crossed that part of my argument out.
I will point out that you can't just toss them out because Wright is a knuckleballer and rely on ERA to make the argument about who was better, and I still see no reason why K/BB isn't a good way to look at knuckleballer's, either. Walk rate is important no matter what, as is the ability to miss bats at at least a decent level. There was very little reason to hope that Wright was as good as he looked in the first half. All of his peripherals screamed regression. How much is up for debate, but there was almost no chance he was going to maintain a sub-3 ERA going forward based on a deeper look at his stats at the time.
It's no surprise that his ERA came up, or that he hit a rough patch. The good with a knuckleballer is that when they are on, they're impossible to hit hard with any consistency. The bad is that when they're off, well... SpaceMan37 covered that earlier. Being such a touch pitch, you can never count on a knuckleballer to be that good for an entire season. It's sort of like winning streaks and losing streaks. A team is never as good as their latest hot streak, or as bad as their latest cold stretch. Steven Wright wasn't as good as his first half. He also isn't as bad as his rough patch that followed. He's a fine pitcher, and a great guy to round out the rotation, but calling him the best on the staff (or even second best) over a long sample because the ERA was pretty is short sighted.
And then I backed off on that, but he left that part out when he quoted me because he couldn't continue to chastise after I backed off without editing it. I thought it's pretty much implied that every post on a message board is easy to figure out if it's meant as speculation or fact. My opinion sounded more reasonable than saying that Wright ignored instructions. IMO of course.
There is a big difference between
and
FIP is a perfectly good stat, but like all stats, it has limitations. I wouldn't base a "best pitcher" argument on FIP, ERA orWHIP alone. And I'll admit to a little hyperbole re Wright being the "best" first-half pitcher. Whether he was 1st or 2nd or a close 3rd is irrelevant to my argument that it was colossally boneheaded to use him as a pinch runner. You'll have take my word for it that that's not hindsight. I said so the instant it happened. Not worth the injury risk, no matter how small.
As for whether his injury has cost the Sox none, one, two or three wins, that is, of course, conjecture and impossible to prove either way. Maybe Wright would have sucked second half. Maybe he would have returned to first-half form. It is my opinion that it's cost them at least two games. Regardless, it was still spectacularly dumb to use him as a pinch runner.
I don't have the time to do this, but why not adopt the argument that the actual results matter, instead of trying to filter out non pitcher factors to determine abstract skill level? Just look at innings for Wright divided by actual runs (not earned runs), then select the same number of innings for the other two and look at actual runs.
That'll give you insight into real value for this club. Maybe Wight would be better or worse on another club, given defense, passed balls, etc., and other statistics might show that. But a good starting point for value is what actually happened.
Easier to just look at ERA than to figure out total runs/IP. Should be close enough unless you think some pitchers engender more errors than others for some reason.
Something like this?
Runs divided by innings pitched.
For the whole season:
Porcello = 0.375 runs per inning pitched (3.375 per 9 innings)
Price = 0.454 runs per inning pitched (4.086 per 9)
Wright = 0.472 runs per inning pitched (4.248 per 9)
For the first half (thru ASB):
Porcello = .451 (4.059)
Price = .491 (4.419)
Wright = .430 (3.87)
Yes.
Knuckleballers are simply different - and they effect stats differently. Czar has posted before on why FIP and xFIP are not ideal stats to measure knucklers. Perhaps he'll weigh in here.
Wright's value can be seen in the % of his pitches that are in the strike zone, he ranks 13th in baseball in that category using Pitchfx data. He was leading the majors in Zone% before he cooled off in July. He is leading the majors in ZContact%, and fangraphs measure that two ways, he leads in both.
Simply put, he throws more strikes than the vast majority of major league pitchers, and his strikes are more difficult to hit than all other pitchers' strikes.
But he gives up more unearned runs due to his passed balls, so that stat is distorted in his favor.
Exactly like that - thank you. I think that's probably how we all remember their relative value to the club. (Not saying this is predictive, or that I'd take Wright over Price in terms of fantasy drafting - but that was how things played out.)
Good point. However, I'd expect knuckleballers' higher PB rates to be offset a little by more soft-contact balls-in-play, double-play ground balls and pop ups. Note above that Wright's RA/9 was still lower than Price's and Porcello's pre-ASB.
In the Globe's Red Sox Notebook today, Pete Abraham writes: "Wright will report to the team facility in Fort Myers, Fla., on Monday to start a throwing program. It’s uncertain whether he can build up in time to pitch again this season."
This could make for an interesting decision when it comes time to name the ALDS roster (God willing).
This could make for an interesting decision when it comes time to name the ALDS roster (God willing).
Shades of Buchholz at the end of 2011 with the will he/won't he make a start before the end of the season or in the post-season (of course, there ended up being no post-season).