PQS for Top 7 SP in ERA

In response to allfrank's request, I dug into the PQS of some top starting pitchers. Really a brain heating exercise, I had to stop after 7 guys, which I also thought would be a good cutoff point, as Arroyo had a 3.29 ERA then Carlos Zambrano "jumps" to 3.42; I was going to cover the pitchers down to Jason Schmidt originally. Below, I provide first half (pre-All Star break), second half (post-All Star break), and season DOM% and DIS% stats plus some other stats and commentary.

1. Johan Santana: Man! He was totally dominating! Don't need PQS to tell that. Whoever scouts pitchers for the Twins know their stuff, first they pick up Santana off the Rule 5 heap, then sucker the Giants into giving 3 good/great pitchers in trade for A.J. First half: 74%DOM/0%DIS; second half: 80%DOM/7%DIS; season: 76%DOM/3%DIS. He had 20 (!) 5-PQS games and 6 4-PQS. His only DIS was a 1-PQS. He ran off consecutive starts streaks of 5-PQS games of 6 games, 4 games, 4 games, and 4 games during the season, he was totally dominating, I was in awe compiling his PQS. And he has been like this since he became a major leaguer, past 3 seasons: 72%/6%; 88%/9%; 79%/3%. As good as the season was, you could say that it was his worst in 3 seasons. And only 2 DIS starts in two seasons, 6 in his entire career, where many pitchers consider having only 6 DIS starts in a season to be an accomplishment. I'm going to have to value him higher in my fantasy league next year; I knew he was good but not this good.
2. Roy Oswalt: A drop in quality but still very good: first half: 38%/6%; second half: 73%/0%; season: 55%/3%. He started off well with a 5, but obviously something bothered him for the next two months or so (I think he missed a start there, so he was probably not 100%), with only 2 DOM starts in his first 10 starts - he finished with 15 DOM in the next 21 starts or 71%DOM. He had 11 5-PQS games and 6 4-PQS games with one 0-PQS when he was struggling early season. His previous three seasons, he had DOM in the 60%'s and DIS around 10%, so this was a down year, but still much better than most pitchers.
3. Chris Carpenter: I never really pictured Carpenter as an elite pitcher before but he had a great 2006. First half: 65%/0%; second half: 67%/7%; season: 66%/3%. He had 12 5-PQS and 9 4-PQS games, with one 0-PQS soon after the All-Star break. He was very consistent all season long. This builds on his breakout year in 2005, where he was 76%/6% - he was "only" 50%/14% in 2004.
4. Brandon Webb: I thought that Webb was the question mark out of the trio of rookie starters - Jerome Williams, Dontrelle Willis and himself - the year they all came into the league, because he never did this well even in the minors. Somehow he improved when he reached the majors, as he had nice stats in the minors but not as good as Williams or Willis - I read somewhere that because he's an extreme sinkerballer, the improved defense in the majors helped him. First half: 74%/0%; second half: 50%/7%; season: 64%/3%. He had 10 5-PQS games and 11 4-PQS games; he had his only DIS start in his last start of the season, a 0-PQS game. Whoa, big drop between the two halves, perhaps he was tiring. He was consistent the previous season though, 61%/0% and 67%/7% for 64%/3% season, so it is probably just fluctuations. Only 2 DIS starts over the past two seasons: most pitchers would be looking at 2 over the past one or two months.
5. Ray Halladay: He had some injury problems in two starts, cutting them short. The Baseball Forecaster methodology would include them but that didn't seem fair, he was not pitching a O-PQS game when he left the game, though he wasn't dominating either. At worse I could count them as games but not as DOM or DIS, but I excluded them as I thought that would show his talent level better. First half: 55%/0%; second half: 67%/0%; season: 60%/0%. He had 3 5-PQS games and 15 4-PQS games, so he is the first to be not as dominating as the Top 4, who all had at least 10 starts with a 5-PQS score (that's 30%DOM right there, where 30% is what I would consider the minimum for a useful starter). He started off slowly, with 5 non-DOM/non-DIS games (i.e. 2 and 3 PQS games), before reelling off a bunch of DOM games.
6. CC Sabathia: He started off the season getting injured in his first game, if I recall correctly, and didn't come back until early May, but it was worth the wait. First half: 69%/15%; second half: 71%/7%; season: 70%/11%. He had 10 5-PQS games and 9 4-PQS games. He had 2 0-PQS games and 1 1-PQS game, mainly in the middle of the season. Pretty consistent halves, I was kicking myself for dropping him off my fantasy team when he had a bad couple of starts out of three.
7. Bronson Arroyo: Boy, Boston has got to be kicking themselves over trading him away, I guess he got the last laugh, he signed with Boston in the off-season, giving them a hometown discount and they thanked his loyalty by trading him to Cincinnati. First half: 79%/11%; second half: 44%/13%; season: 63%/11%. He had 10 5-PQS and 12 4-PQS starts, with 2 each of O-PQS and 1-PQS games. He looks like a good case for sell high - he had a steep drop between the two halves, so perhaps he benefited from facing batters and teams unfamiliar with him and then they caught up with him. However, this view is mitigated by the fact that he 4 5-PQS starts in his last 6 starts, so perhaps he was adjusting back against the league by then.

Table of DOM%/DIS% for 2006

Here I put the data into a table format (Blogger don't do tables!), showing first season, then 1st half and 2nd half. I added the Giants main starters as well, for contrast.

Pitcher - DOM%/DIS%: season; 1st; 2nd

Santana - 76%/3%; 74%/0%; 80%/7%

Oswalt - 55%/3%; 38%/6%; 73%/0%

Carpenter - 66%/3%; 65%/0%; 67%/7%

Webb - 64%/3%; 74%/0%; 50%/7%

Halladay - 60%/0%; 55%/0%; 67%/0%

Sabathia - 70%/11%; 69%/15%; 71%/7%

Arroyo - 63%/11%; 79%/11%; 44%/13%

Cain - 52%/23%; 38%/38%; 67%/7%

Lowry - 31%/27%; 17%/17%; 43%/36%

Morris - 47%/12%; 47%/20%; 47%/16%

Schmidt - 56%/6%; 67%/0%; 43%/14%

Analysis and Implications for Giants

It looks like the best pitchers are able to keep their DOM starts over 60% and their DIS starts under 10%. That is why I have been saying that Cain looks like he might be able to take Schmidt's place in the rotation without skipping a beat. Cain's second half of 67%/7% would fit right in with the Top 7 starters and easily beats what Schmidt did for the season, so Cain can regress a little from the second half and still match Schmidt. If he can pitch like this all of 2007, his ERA should end up very close to a 3 ERA - as it was, he had a 3.26 ERA in the second half.

And that is why I am still high on Lowry. He had a 58%/12% season in 2005, which put him on the cusp of the Top pitchers - Arroyo was 63%/11%. Hence my comment that if he returns to his form in 2005, we could have a 2 Ace starting staff. I think this is likely because clearly his injury affected him all season long and in 2005, he was very consistent and even improved in the second half: 50%/22% first half; 67%/0% second half, and his qERA for the season was 3.97 (actual 3.79). Obviously he pitched like one of the top pitchers in the second half of 2005 and was still good in the first half as well. Matching Cain's 4.15 should be very doable for him.

Morris had a 47%/12% in 2006 which is virtually the same as his 2005 48%/16%, which again supports my point in my previous post that he had a bad luck year in 2006. His qERA for 2005 was 4.40 vs. his actual of 4.12; my calculated qERA for 2006 was 4.41 vs. his actual 4.98. So it seems that he got lucky in 2005 and pendulum swung back in 2006. A 4.40 ERA would be good for the rotation in 2007, as we don't need him to pitch gangbusters to have a good staff and would easily beat Lowry's 2006 4.74 ERA.

Furthermore, there is potential for even better results. Here are his 2005 splits by halves: first half, 69%/12%; second half, 27%/20%; season, 48%/16%. How does a pitcher go from such domination in one half - as shown above, elite status - to such troubles in the second? If there was an injury, there were none that shelved him during the second half, he made all his starts; he missed the first few starts at the start of the season because he was still recovering from his shoulder surgery 5 months before but otherwise made all his starts.

Then he had his slow start in 2006, which Krukow (and I, in a post) attributed it to jitters/adrenaline pitching for a new team, wanting to justify the contract - he was over throwing, a common thing to get over for some pitchers (ironically he was hired because he was suppose to be a vet who wouldn't not have this type of problem). For two months he was lost, then he ran off a 9 start streak where he had 7 DOM starts. Then he was lost for 3 games, then ran off 5 DOM in 7 starts, before he somehow broke his ribs. That is 12 DOM in 19 games, or 63%. This is why I think that, while remote, there is still a chance that Morris could be a third ace in the rotation.

Thus, as I showed in my other post, Cain would be our new Schmidt, Lowry should be able to duplicate Cain's 2006 performance, Morris should at least match Lowry, and Sanchez should be able to do as well/badly as Jamey Wright did for us. And I think that is pretty conservative and pretty likely to happen, with Cain probably not doing as well as Schmidt, but Morris counterbalancing that by doing better than Lowry, whose ERA was 4.74 in 2006; again, Morris qERA for the past two seasons was basically 4.40. Thus we only need a pitcher to take Morris's spot in the rotation and just equal his 4.98 ERA in order to have a staff equal to last year's. Hennessey can probably do that, though it would be less riskier to sign someone.

But then there are the upside wild cards. Cain was only 21 in 2006 and will be 22 in 2007. Who knows how good he can become? He only got better as the season progressed, he was learning faster than the league was. Lowry returning to his 2005 form would easily outdo the 2006 Cain. Morris, as I showed, can be dominating in extended stretches but not over a season: I believe fatigue set in for the second half of 2005 and injury finished him off in late 2006, so if he can have a strong workout this off-season and injury-free 2007, he might be able to turn it up a notch, in terms of consistency. Sanchez will have a full off-season to prepare as a starter on a major league staff and could become consistent and do much better than Wright did; in his 4 starts, he was 50%/50%, whereas Wright was 29%/19% with 5.19 ERA.

Lastly, there is the last starter. Hennessey probably would at best be slightly better but only marginally so, and if he was the starter, there isn't much chance of upside - he just can't strike out anybody despite his good slider. But if the Giants can sign a good pitcher - perhaps Greg Maddux or maybe even Jason Schmidt - suddenly the rotation could be a 4 ace rotation if everything went our way, and at minimum, it would be likely that at least 2 of them will be ace-like in their pitching. With pitching like that, we don't need much of any offense to win games and be competitive for the NL West title. There is also the off-chance that Lincecum is ready to come up by mid-season and proceed to do a number on the NL, like he did in the minors.

This is why I'm so positive about the rotation for 2007 and think that there is the potential to get really good, really fast. I think I'm being conservative in saying that the rotation is about the same, in terms of production, for 2007. On top of that, I see a variety of number of ways that the rotation could turn out to be even better, and some of them seem very possible. All in all, the rotation, as is, is shaping out really well, relative to last year, and could get better. Of course, last year was not that great, but when the team is in transition, I will take positives where I can get them.

FYI: Durham Probably Signed by Giants

Merc recently reported - saw here in USA Today - that Durham signed with the Giants, terms unknown. Apparently he wanted two years but all the other interested teams passed on that chance, so he decided to return to the Giants. Sounds good, though I would not have minded the draft picks.

In any case, this is a perfect situation for the Giants, we can trade Durham mid-year for a bushel of prospects if 1) Frandsen plays and hits very well in the chances he gets, making Durham unnecessary, 2) the Giants are out of it by too much, or 3) some team desperately needs a hitter like Durham and the Giants are overwhelmed by the deal. Win, win, win.

Some have speculated that this means Feliz is out of the picture, but don't forget, he can play 1B. His agent was talking recently in the Merc about returning to the Giants for $4M, so, given that low amount, that means that the rest of the league saw what we Giants fans saw and said "pass", so he could still be around in January and sign with the Giants for $1-2M, something on the cheap. I'll bet his agent looked at Adrian Beltre's stats and figured if he is worth 5 years, $65M or $13M per season, then Feliz is worth at least 3 years at $8-10M per season. Because, if you look at their stats, they are not that far apart, except for Beltre's "fluke" season in 2004 as he was becoming a free agent.