The Lineup Card

Saturday, May 19, 2007
5:56:00 AM EDT

Wrote a column for the Web site this week on Jake Peavy and how big a role luck can play in a pitcher's success, building off of Voros McCracken's findings that pitchers can only really control strikeouts, walks and home runs (and a few other things - particularly ground balls).

Anyway, I thought it might be interesting and particularly useful to you fantasy players out there to look at which pitchers are having the best and worst luck so far this season. I've got the five luckiest and unluckiest pitchers here, based off of fielding-independent pitching ERA (what a pitcher's ERA should be based off of the things he can control) and BABIP (batting average on balls in play, where anything outside of the .290 to .310 range is an odd statistical outlier).

Here's the luckiest hurlers:

Pitcher	ERA	FIP	Diff.	BABIP
Fausto Carmona	2.55	4.53	1.97	.233
Joe Kennedy	2.53	4.30	1.77	.248
Gil Meche	1.91	3.63	1.72	.290
Jason Marquis	2.22	3.90	1.68	.193
Tom Glavine	3.31	4.85	1.54	.242

That's a who's who list of pitchers performing over their heads this season, with the exception of Glavine, who is such a tremendous control artist, that I suspect he isn't as susceptible to the normal constraints of most pitchers in Voros' study.

On the other hand, here's the unluckiest hurlers:

Pitcher	ERA	FIP	Diff.	BABIP
Kameron Loe	6.21	3.85	-2.37	.336
Adam Wainwright	6.34	4.49	-1.85	.371
Casey Fossum	7.80	5.97	-1.83	.325
Matt Belisle	4.38	2.58	-1.80	.317
Kip Wells	6.75	5.06	-1.69	.276

Wow have Loe, Wainwright and Belisle gotten extraordinarily unlucky this year. Trade or acquire those guys in your leagues and ride the regression to the mean wave.

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This entry has 1 comments: (Add your own)

• #1 Comment from kasedoggie 
  5/19/07 6:44 PM | Permalink

  I was at that Jethawks game last night. It was bad...