<< Previous Article
Prospectus Notebook (05/25)

<< Previous Column

Lies, Damned Lies (05/17)

Next Column >>

Lies, Damned Lies (05/31)

Next Article >>

Transaction Analysis (05/25)

May 25, 2006
Lies, Damned Lies
Is it Still Good to Be the King?

by Nate Silver

Printer-
friendly

Contact
Author

I was in Las Vegas this past weekend, and was asked by a couple of poker buddies about the struggles of Felix Hernandez. Being a few drinks and a couple hundred hands of crazy pineapple into the wind, I made the bold claim that I’d rather have Cole Hamels than the King. Oops.

The point I was trying to make is that is that when you have limited information about a player--and almost any young pitcher meets that criterion--even a small amount of additional information can make a large amount of difference in his valuation. The problem, of course, is that I picked a bad example to support my case. This is not so much because of Hamels’ injury, but because the information we’re getting about King Felix is not all bad.

Let’s take a point-by-point comparison of Hernandez’ numbers on the season to date against his attractive preseason PECOTA projection.

       Actual      PECOTA
1B      18.5%       15.3%
2B       3.9%        3.6%
3B       0.0%        0.3%
HR       3.9%        1.5%
BB       9.1%        9.1%
K       22.0%       21.7%
HBP      1.7%        1.0%
GB%     69.1%       66.7%

The three most important indicators in this table are strikeout rate, walk rate, and groundball percentage--and PECOTA has dead-on nailed Hernandez’ performance in each of those categories. The key differences are in the number of base hits that he’s given up, and the number of home runs.

Hernandez' BABIP on the season to date is .359. That’s the sixth-worst performance in the league among pitchers with at least 40 innings pitched. Although groundball pitchers give up a few extra base hits, that performance is way out of line with what we’d expect out of Hernandez, and almost certainly reflects his bad luck. It’s not like Hernandez is a Carlos Silva type who throws meatballs and telegraphs his pitches.

The inflated home run rate is a bit more of a concern--Hernandez is at nine home runs and counting before Memorial Day, when PECOTA projected him to give up just 11 on the entire season. But it’s much less of a concern than it would be if Hernandez’ groundball ratio had deteriorated with his dinger tally. I decided to watch videotape of the nine home run pitches that Hernandez has thrown this year to see if I could pick up on anything systematically wrong:

The rest of this article is restricted to Baseball Prospectus Subscribers.

Not a subscriber?

Click here for more information on Baseball Prospectus subscriptions or use the buttons to the right to subscribe and get access to the best baseball content on the web.

That's a 33% savings over the monthly price!

Already a subscriber? Click here and use the blue login bar to log in.

RECENTLY AT BASEBALL PROSPECTUS