Zaidi Pitching Strategy: MPT of Starting Pitching

So I read this blurb (in July) on the Dodgers at The Athletic (subscription required to read):

Their biggest need is likely to bolster a bullpen that is now down Blake Treinen, Daniel Hudson and Tommy Kahnle. Craig Kimbrel has been shaky just about every time out. The cracks are forming. While trading for a frontline starter to replace Walker Buehler would help, as would fortifying their bench with a quality fourth outfielder, they just need enough arms right now. — Fabian Ardaya

And that reminded me of the biggest problem I have with Zaidi's current strategy for pitching, what I would call the Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT) of Pitching: and I'll quasi-quote him here, he's not looking for starting pitchers, he's looking for pitchers who can help him get to 162 starts in a season.  

ogc thoughts

I'll admit, this has been a successful strategy for navigating the vagaries of a full 162-game season, just look at what the Dodgers have done since Zaidi joined Friedman in LA to rebuild the Dodgers. They built their rotations by having 8 or more options for starting pitching. Many of them have a long history (or strong recent history) of not being able to pitch a full season, but usually can be "relied" on to pitching a dozen or two games each year, as they bounce on and off the IL.  

It's like the MPT theory of diversifying investments: the idea is that the risks of all your investments will balance each other out, reducing the risk overall of losses, and enabling a steady return on investment, overall.  And it has worked for starting pitching, between all their options, at least five okay or better starting pitchers are available to fill the rotation out. Between all their options, they kept the rotation going, for the most part, and when there were too many starters healthy, they would stash them in long relief or use them as long openers for bullpen games, as necessary (Maeda was their key swing starter, bouncing from rotation to the bullpen and back; but he was not happy about that). 

It's tag team version of starting pitching, if a SP tags out, there's usually someone ready to be tagged in and take their place. It has worked marvelous in the regular season. The proof is in the pudding based on the Dodger's regular season success.

Major Problem: MPT Don't Work in the Playoffs 

My huge issue is that MPT works well in a random way, over a long stretch of time (much like MPT), but when it's time for playoffs, that's not the time to be relying on pitchers being randomly available (like when you enter retirement and need your capital to not be subject to wide fluctuations).  Because if they are not available, you then have to go to perhaps your fifth, sixth, seventh or eighth option as your playoff starter.  And there is no way to control this easily, it is just luck/fate when your pitcher is not available.  

The playoffs is not when you need the luck of fate to have your best pitchers available. The odds are against you anyway, because they are pitchers and even the healthiest and youngest of pitchers have injuries or just loses it (like Bumgarner did in the middle of the 2012 playoffs, before he straightened out for the World Series, or even Ortiz in 2002, he, like pitchers before and after - like Lincecum vs. Texas - was too amped up in his first World Series start, and had a horrible game).  

For the playoffs, you have to thread the needle: abilities most of all, plus the ability to do it when it counts (see Jake Peavey, I've documented in prior posts how well he pitches during the regular season and how he melts down in the playoffs; Hudson too, though not as bad), and on top of that, being relatively healthy, which for pitchers is basically random luck as well, because you don't know when a particular body part, whether rotator cuff (Nen), elbow (Cain), hip (Lincecum), wrist (Lowry), or head (Peavy) will strike the pitcher down when his team is in the playoffs (I'm mostly illustrating body parts here, Lowry never pitched in the playoffs0. 

On top of all that, to put on another layer of risk by filling up your rotation with significant injury risks, is not the way to build a rotation that is playoff ready. I think the Dodgers level of futility given how well they have played in the regular season for so many years shows the dangers of such a strategy of building a starting rotation.

And I understand that Zaidi appreciates the beauty of having a great young rotation. That is just Baseball 101 of fandom, you want a whole team of young stars.  As the Giants baseball ops leader, he's constrained greatly by the fact that such talent is hard to obtain.  Hence why I wrote in my baseball business plan that focusing on pitching in the draft is a great way to rebuild a team.

The Beauty of Focusing on Pitching Quality and Quantity

A major advantage I will repeat here is that an overabundance of developed pitchers will result in a great pitching staff. Each new great arm simply makes the pitching staff better and better, without any value loss until your starting rotation is filled and you are forced to use a good starter as a reliever (which could also still work out, if he becomes your closer).  This especially is good since pitchers are the most injury prone of baseball players, this gives you a steadier supply of talented arms so that you aren't reduced to using replacement level AAAA pitchers. And especially good per the studies of playoffs, as noted above, that's the way to go deep into the playoffs, winning more games than other teams.

If you go the position player route, you add in more risks. The risk of needing to trade away an actually good player that you would otherwise love to have as a starter, but can't because you have another better player playing that position, and he can't move. Think McCovey/Cepeda. Or the example I used in my business plan, when the Rangers developed Teixiera, A-Gon, and Hofner, and they all could only play 1B, so the other two got traded. 

As many studies have shown, teams generally know who the keepers are and who the non-keepers are, and for the non-keepers, teams tend to either trade them or let them go as free agents, rather than keep him. But if you are faced with needing to trade because you got too many, you end up giving up an actually good player you want to keep, for someone's not as good player, who they are willing to give up.

Billy Beane's Sh!t

And this has been the problem long term with Billy Beane's strategy for the A's. He found good pitchers but not dominating (i.e. strikeout artists) and considered closers to be fungible and easily replaced. And I'm not slamming his strategy totally, for as a lower revenue team, they had to find the marginal value pitchers in the draft who can be crafty pitchers without being dominant strikeout pitchers. Still, that just introduces too many more variables into the crazy mix of who is your starting pitchers in the playoffs, and who to rely on as the closer in the playoffs.

Pitchers who are good but not dominating are forced to rely on BABIP luck to get through games and win them.  That's similar to the MPT for pitching I noted above, it works over the career of a pitcher, it works over a long 162-game season, but in a 7-game (or less) series, you want to avoid giving away any games due to pitching that is otherwise good, but just unlucky, due to BABIP luck.  

You also ideally want dominating pitchers because they tend to have less disaster starts, due to their dominance.  The best only have disaster starts under 10% of the time, which means that it rarely happens in the playoffs.  But even good pitchers have disaster starts in the 20% range, and average pitchers range in the 20-30's. Once you get into the 30's in disaster starts, it just hurts your numbers too much, overall, in the playoffs. And that is what you get from pitchers who can keep their ERA low, while not striking out a lot of batters.

To confirm these ranges, I took a quick look at Giants PQS from 2006 to 2017, covering 12 years. Okay pitchers are in the 15-29 range, like Morris in 2006 (16%), Lowry 2006 (27%), Correia 2008 (26%), Hudson 2014 (17%) and 2015 (19%), Peavy 2015 and 2016 (29%), Stratton 2017 (22%), Cueto 2017 (16%).  As you can see, the average pitchers were usually in this range. 

Looking at average type pitchers that had highs and lows over a period of time showed this tendency too.  Zito was a classic average pitcher.  Starting in 2008, he had in succession: 34%; 24%; 33%; 25%; 28%; 52%. Dirty Sanchez from 2008: 31%; 24%; 18%; 28%. Vogelsong was a step above, from 2011: 7%; 13%; 32%; 10%; 38%. Samardzija from 2016: 16%; 9%. 

So if you have average pitchers, disasters happen every 3 to 5 starts.  That means at least one in every playoff season. And if it happens to be their first playoff start, you are really in bad luck, because that's a five game series, and that loss means you need to go 3-1 in the rest of the games. As we all know, each loss tilts the balance of the series greatly towards the winning team, so the requirement to minimize as much as you can losing in the playoffs is countered by the Beane strategy of great but not dominant pitching.

Beane's Pitching Strategy: Good Pitchers But Not Dominant

Another way to view Beane's pitching strategy: what place are they in the AL in ERA and Strikeouts. If you look at the A's from 1998 to 2019, the A's were usually in the top 5 for ERA: 16 of 22 seasons. Pretty dominant in terms of keeping runs off the board. And they were 6th twice more, for 18 of 22 in Top 6.

But as the BP study of playoff success showed, you not only needed to keep runs allowed low, you needed to do that in a dominant way, by striking out hitters in an elite way. They gathered data across around 35 seasons, did their data analysis that enables comparison across eras, and found that teams that were among the leaders in strikeouts, standardized across the history of all playoff teams, were the ones who found more success in going deeper in the playoffs.  

So Beane's A's were Top 5 in Strikeouts only 3 times in those 22 seasons, and the last time was in 2005, or just before the BP study was published. Even though the chapter in the book was about why Billy Beane's sh!t didn't work in the playoffs, he never took any of it to heart because he rarely bothered to fill his pitching staff with strikeout pitchers.  

Zaidi Pitching Strategy

Obviously, don't have a long track record with the Giants, and the results were muddled for the first couple of seasons by leftover contracts that were still on the roster. Still, by 2021, that was clearly his creation:

• 2019: 9th in ERA; 14th in strikeouts; 14th in SO/9; 8th in SO/W (all below league average)
• 2020: 8th in ERA; 12th in strikeouts; 13th in SO/9; 9th in SO/W (all below league average)
• 2021: 2nd in ERA; 7th in strikeouts; 8th in SO/9; 1st in SO/W (all above league average except SO/9)
• 2022 so far: 9th in ERA; 10th in strikeouts; 10th in SO/9; 4th in SO/W (above average in ERA and SO/W; below for strikeouts and SO/9)

And it is not like his only influence is Beane and the A's. He helped build the Dodgers as Friedman's GM, and they have been #1 across all these metrics for the whole period he's been with the Giants. Still, while ERA has been okay, about average (except for 2021), so has his strikeouts, they have not been dominant at all, basically average. However, with their high SO/W ratio, that enables the team to be better in run prevention.

Which I think makes clear that while having a dominant pitching staff helps teams win more in the playoffs (as per BP's playoff study), having a reliable pitching staff, that is dominant, is the better formula (per my PQS study), because the Dodgers, for all their success winning during the season (much like the A's), was only able to win the World Series once in that period (and the A's never even made the World Series, let alone win), and only in the shortened season, which arguably helped their chances, because their pitchers, who generally have health issues they need to deal with, was not overworked as they would have been in a normal season, and thus could be more relied upon in those playoffs.

And he has followed the Dodgers' strategy here in San Francisco. As he noted in an interview before this season (and undoubtedly in other interviews; plus I noted at the very beginning), he's not looking for starting pitchers who are capable of being good for 30+ starts, he's looking for starters who can help the Giants reach 162 starts. 

I'm Still on the Fence, But Still Happy We Hired Him

I love having Farhan Zaidi leading the Giants, he's done a lot that I am ecstatic about (like all the additional pitching expertise), and I think that they are thus in great hands. Still, I'm not fully sold on him until I see that building a rotation of young great pitchers is his M.O. 

This MPT strategy for the starting rotation works when rebuilding a team on the fly, like Giants ownership has asked Zaidi to implement (based on what I've seen so far).  He made it clear from the start that the Giants goal is to be competitive each season, and yet clearly, winning and making the playoffs is not the number one goal, because he has not been spending much money on free agent players.  

And to rebuild requires developing young talent, of which the farm system has a lot of interesting young prospects, though most of them have took a hit on their prospect status this season (Bart, Ramos, Luciano, Matos, Hjelle, and others; only Harrison is truly shining).  

But the last two drafts have been eye opening. In 2021, 9 of 9 and 10 of 12 were pitchers. In 2022, 6 of 6 and 10 of 12 were pitchers. So they overloaded on pitching in the past two drafts, especially in contrast with the two prior drafts in 2019 and 2020, when they spent more draft capital (higher picks) on hitters than pitchers.  

I don't recall the Giants under Sabean/Evans (Tidrow/Barr) ever drafting so many pitchers.  What I do recall is that under Tidrow, the vast majority of first round picks were spent on pitchers, but with Barr, there was a greater mix of hitters and pitchers, about even.  But that was why he was hired, to bring in hitters into the farm system, and he did, Posey, Belt, Crawford, Duffy, Panik, Duvall, Reynolds were all hitters who did well in the majors. 

However, among the players developed among the Barr draftees, few pitchers really developed, only Wheeler and Webb, as Stratton, Bickford, Beede and others all flamed out in one way or another.  Only Rogers is another notable find, and a minor one so far, at that. There is still hope for Hjelle, and Corry is young enough to possibly figure it out (but he has been horrible post-Covid, so I suspect he damaged his arm when the 2020 season was shut down, and he was practicing on his own).  It is pretty barren compared to the list of hitters.

For the Giants right now, Kyle Harrison is the star of the farm system, by far, especially among starting pitchers, and also overall, due to injuries and disappointing performances for the others. The only other interesting starting pitcher is Mason Black, and even as he dominated in A-ball, he's been ordinary in Advance A ball. And pitchers like Ryan Murphy seemed like they were ready to break out last season, hit the speed bump and aren't doing as well in 2022, and he hasn't pitched since July 6th.

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

That's the risks of focusing on pitchers. We saw that early in the Sabean era, as pitchers like Williams, Ainsworth, Foppert, and Lowry flame out for one reason or another. But when you hit on the pick, as he did with Cain, Lincecum, Bumgarner, Sanchez, Wilson, Romo, that forms a great pitching staff for a good period of time. 

To build a dominant pitching staff, you have to draft a lot of pitchers, and focus a lot of coaching personnel on developing and improving the pitching. But obstacles, like especially injury, but also other factors (mindset being a particular roadblock), will stop some pitchers from advancing to the majors. So a team is stuck between a rock and a hard place: to build a strong team for winning in the playoffs, you have to focus on developing pitchers, but there's a two step forward, one step back, aspect to this because pitchers have a lot more issues with injuries and other developmental roadblocks, than position players. 

That's why draft studies have shown that college hitter provide more value than others (college pitchers, and high schoolers), and especially high school pitchers.  But as the Giants have shown, it is not an absolute rule: they have developed high school pitchers from Cain to Bumgarner to Wheeler to Webb (and hopefully Harrison), so it is not impossible, but it is very tough, nonetheless. 

But it's a strategic choice: do you just want to be good in the regular season, and accept that the playoffs is then a crapshoot for your team, or do you reach for the stars by focusing on pitching, accepting that the best way to win the World Series is to focus on great pitching, knowing that random injuries will knock your plans to the ground sometimes, and perhaps often (see the Giants pitching development until Cain)?