Make Love Not WAR (wins above replacement)

So this morning I learned what Wins Above Replacement, or WAR is all about.  I thought it was probably stupid based upon it's name, and after actually looking into what it calculates, I would say it's not as stupid as I thought it would be, but it's still a rather useless statistic.  So basically it measures how much better a player is better than an average AAA-level or bench player?  That's stupid.  Number one, not all AAA players are average.  Sometimes a guy comes up and rips it up because he's pumped about playing in the majors.  It measures how valuable a player is to the team.  Like as if to say "without him, we'd be stuck with this jabroni over here and we'd be screwed."  Okay, fine, but if you watched a baseball game once in a while, you would see a guys value using your own two eyes, no?  Why not just look at his ERA, or even his SIERA?  Wins?  K's? I get that WAR is a composite score of a dudes value, but it doesn't tell me much.  So Cliff Lee and Clayton Kershaw have really good WARs?  NO SHIT.  Just look at any of their regular, standard numbers and you could gather that yourself.  Or better yet, watch a Phillies or Dodgers game.  That's how I figured it out.  I don't need WAR and I will probably forever roll my eyes whenever I hear or read anyone mention it.

I'm stuck in this spot between embracing advanced stats and stepping back and realizing that advanced stats are clearly for people that don't watch baseball.  I don't watch Rockies games, so I can learn how Michael Cuddyer is doing by reading about his WAY inflated BABIP this morning.  Makes sense to me, because he's Michael Cuddyer, so I knew something was up.  There's no way the Michael Cuddyer I remember could be putting up these kind of numbers without some luck.  But I imagine if I watched a few Rockies games, I could tell you he's on a hot streak right now, and baseball has this wonderful thing called Regression to the Mean, where every player either gradually gets better or worse over the course of a career.  Any jumps in productivity means their slumping or on a hot streak.  Many, many players throughout the season and throughout the history of baseball go up and down throughout their careers.  Things like BABIP help to show you when that's happening so you don't have to watch baseball, because who would ever want to do that?

Jhoulys Chacin has an Unsustainable HR to FB ratio! My first sojourn into the world of Advanced Stats

Okay, here's my first go at taking a good look at a guys advanced stats to figure out what kind of pitcher he really is. Hang on tight, because it's probably going to be ugly and wrong.   The subject is Colorado Rockies pitcher Jhoulys Chacin.  I have heard his name pronounced properly a number of times by now, and I still don't know how to pronounce it, so to me he's Jew-Hoolies Cha-Seen.  I know that's not correct, but that's what I'm going with in my head.  I've decided to use Mr. Chacin because I stumbled across a number that shocked me.  Jhoulys Chacin leads the majors in HR/FB ratio.  And his home park is Coors Field.

The basic, standard stats suggest a middle of the road, perhaps slightly above average pitcher, which is something that is required if you're going to have any pitching success with the Rockies.  Obviously pitching in that ballpark is not ideal, so they have to overpay guys and take chances on others to get anyone to pitch there.  The overpay part is dedicated to Mike Hampton, the take a chance on him guys include Roy Oswalt and Jamie Moyer.  Two of those three haven't worked out so good and the other, it's too early to tell.  Good luck Mr. Oswalt.  Anyway, they can also draft and sign young pitchers who want to make it to the majors and test fate by coming up in the Rockies organization.

Jhoulys Chacin, let's get into it.  Homeboy didn't win a single game in the month of May.  That's not good.  However, he has won his previous three starts, two against the Nationals and one against the Phillies. He has an overall record of 6-3 in 14 starts. Okay, getting better, but we all know that wins is not a good stat to judge a pitcher on.  Okay, lets continue on.  His ERA currently sits at 3.92, and some of that is inflated by his horrible month of May where his ERA ballooned to 5.87.  He's pitched better as of late, so that'll bring that down to earth.  1.24 WHIP is not great, but not terrible.  The number that stood out to me is his home runs given up, which is TWO!  A Rockies pitcher that has only given up two homers.  One on opening day against AT the Brewers and one on June 1st at home against the Dodgers.  So that means one home run given up at Coors Field in nine starts.  Yes, a mediocre Colorado Rockies pitcher has the major league's best HR/FB ratio, at 2.5%.  Yeah, that's not sustainable, is it?  He does boast a nice 48% ground ball percentage, which ranks him 35th in baseball.  So it's not like he's getting all grounders, which would explain the lack of homers, but the league leader in ground ball percentage, Trevor Cahill at 58%, has a HR/FB of 10.7%.  So what gives?  Shouldn't these two numbers correlate?

In fact, in the top 10 of guys for GB%, there are only two guys who have HR/FB rate under 10%, and none of them are below 5%, and that's Doug Fister and Jon Niese.

And that's when I scroll a little further down the page and realize that another Rockies pitcher, Jorge de la Rosa also has a HR/FB ratio that's shockingly low, he's at 7%,  Alright, is this what all the pitchers are doing out there in Colorado?  Let's have a look.

The answer is no, they've been terrible.  Jeff Francis, Juan Nicasio and John Garland have all been pretty not great.  Jeff Francis had a HR/FB of 20.4%, for crying out loud, but he did have a 7.44 K/9, which was best on the team.  He also got sent to the minors four days ago, and in came Roy Oswalt.  Of the five Rockies starters I'm talking about here, they've all got FB ratios between 27%-33%, but it's only Chacin and de la Rosa that are managing to keep those fly balls in the park.  They weren't hitting line drives off Francis (18,1%) but they sure were hitting the home runs (11).  They are hitting line drives off de la Rosa (26.5%), but not many home runs (five, 7%, as I mentioned before).  And Chacin has a line drive rate of 23.5%, which is pretty good.  5.26 K/9 for Chacin as well...I don't really get how this is happening.

So what am I trying to say here?  I guess I'm trying to say that Jorge de la Rosa and Jhoulys Chacin have been pretty good, but I don't know if it's sustainable with that park.  If this is what has driven some of their success, I would be worried.  I wish I had time to go back and look at the history of the Rockies starting pitchers and see if any of these numbers have ever been sustained by anyone.  Like I said , I'm really only getting started in this crazy world of advanced stats (something I just a few weeks ago wrote a post rallying against as a regular old fan of the game) so I don't know if comparing HR/FB ratio to GB% is even something I should be doing, but as a fan of baseball, it would make sense to me that if you induce a lot of ground balls, they're not going to go for a lot of home runs, unless everyone is really fast base runners who get inside-the-parkers. I don't think that's ever going to be the case.  And it would also make sense to me that if you are giving 28.5% of the balls hit off you are going for fly balls, more than one at Coors field should have left the park by now.  The other starters have similar fly ball numbers and theirs ARE leaving the park.

So despite Jhoulys Chacin's pedestrian 6-3 win-loss record and 3.92 ERA, he's actually pitched pretty good so far because he has avoided the long ball.  But how long can that be sustained with a fly ball rate at 28.5%?  I would guess that whatever mediocre stats he's put up thus far, be it ERA, wins, WHIP, BABIP what-have-you, will only get worse once the unsustainable HR/FB ratio evens out and he starts giving up dingers at a more acceptable clip.  It should REALLY be noted here that he has a career HR/FB ratio of 9.5%...so expect regression.

All this work, and I'm sure any Rockies fan that has actually watched their games would tell me, NO SHIT.  I guarantee that what I'm writing does nothing to change the experience of the average Rockies fan, nor educate that fan.  I put in all this work and now I'm thinking "so what?"  So they haven't given up home runs, have they won games in which they've pitched?  Yeah, sure they have.  It's a crowded west, with the Padres suddenly finding life.  It's just something to keep in mind the next time you're watching a Rockies game.  Jhoulys Chacin has the lowest HR/FB ratio this season in all of baseball and he plays for the Rockies.  That's just interesting.  

Advanced stats

There are a lot of advanced stats out there.  SABRmetrics, or whatever.  Listen, this all might just be coming from a place where I have a lack of understanding on the subject, but I don't really put a whole lot of stock in advanced stats.  That might sound weird, but I just think there are other ways of determining if a guy is a good baseball player or not.  Like, oh I don't know, watching a game.  I'm way more of an eyeball test kind of guy.  Does he look alright?  Then he's alright, isn't he? Guys get hot, guys get cold.  It comes and goes.  Everyone goes through this. I'll tell you right now, after writing this mini rant that I've been planning in my head, I'm going to go and search on Google "how to read and decipher advanced stats" and see if I can change my own mind on the subject.  But as of right now, I think fancy stats are only good for three things.  Number one is obviously fantasy baseball.  It's good to know if a guy is playing over his head or underachieving compared to what he usually does so you can win your fantasy league.  But this reason directly leads me to the number two and three reasons for using fancy stats for baseball is to sound smart, and to be right.  For me, I don't put much stock in being right all the time.  I've lost hundreds of arguments with my wife because I just don't care if I'm right.  She has to be right, it's in her nature.  It's part of what makes her special because she's determined to be right and smart and respected.  Me, I don't care.  I just want to get along with everyone and have a conversation about baseball.  Taht's why this blog exists.  I'm not going to (be able) to tell you that Tyler Lyons has a stranded runner rate of 91% because I looked it up.  I'll tell you that because the Sleeper and the Bust podcast told me that.  I had already dropped him anyway, but that helps the decision feel like the right one.  Is that a fancy stat?  Not really, that's a pretty regular stat, and I probably would have been able to tell you this stat if I had actually watched the Cardinals play for the past 15 days.

What I have watched is Atlanta Braves baseball, and I don't need fancy stats to tell you that Justin Upton had a terrible May, but his numbers don't look all that bad because he had an amazing April.  I know this because I've only missed a couple Braves games all year.  I know this team.  I don't know Cardinals very well.  I don't know Astros or Mariners or Yankees or Angels or really most of the league unless they've played the Braves.  I haven't watched any of their games more than an inning or two this year.  This is where I need people that read into fancy stats to tell me what they're doing.  Why do I run a baseball blog, anyway?

That brings me to my final point here.  What does advanced stats do for me as a fan?  Not as a fantasy baseball team owner, but as a fan of the Atlanta Braves and of baseball watching in general, how does knowing Dan Uggla's BABIP (if I knew what it was) change the way I feel every time he strikes out or flies out or grounds out or walks....which is all he does...Or hit a home run.  If Dan Uggla could just start hitting doubles I'd be impressed.  But he just doesn't.  And I don't need to look at any type of advanced stat to know he's not had a good year.  Knowing advanced stats does very, very little for me as a fan watching games.  What I care about is wins, strikeouts, hits, home runs, web gems, double plays, no-hitters, disputed calls, weird pitching wind-ups, weird pitching deliveries, 17 inning games, position players pitching, catchers throwing their masks off to make a catch on a popup behind the plate, "is a hit or is it an error?" yada yada yada.  Fancy stats are for people that don't watch baseball games.  That's my conclusion.  If that's the way you want to experience this game, then go for it.  Do whatever you want, but I'll just watch the game.