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Post by dewey1972 on Oct 13, 2014 21:56:38 GMT -5
Secondly, a knuckleball is very difficult to master and throw consistently well. It's said that a knuckleballer could regularly load the bases with walks and then strike out the next three batters on nine pitches. There have been seven knuckleballers to debut in the last 20 years, and every single one of them had at least one strong season in the high minors. But only one of them, R.A. Dickey, became a regular starting pitcher.Charlie Zink appeared to have achieved some sort of mastery over the knuckleball in 2008 when he achieved a very decent strikeout to walk ratio of 2.16 over 174 innings. For the rest of his career, the ratio was .45, a near 80 percent collapse. That sort of thing usually dosen't happen to pitchers unless they are injured, but it does happen to knuckleballers. I'm generally more on Eric's side on this. It seems to me that Wright has a very good chance of being a solid starting pitcher for several years, which should put him somewhere in the top 20. I'm not sure where he gets the "#2 starter ceiling, #4 starter floor, #3 starter projection." That seems optimistic to me. On the other hand, the bolded part above seems true and that makes me much less confident in Wright. A quick search (and an over-reliance on that bastion of unerring truth, Wikipedia) gives me six of the seven: Dennis Springer, Steve Sparks, Jared Fernandez, Dickey, Charlie Haeger, and Charlie Zink. Sparks has three seasons of over 2 wins and of course, Dickey's been quite good, but the other four have really not done much. What is it, Eric, that makes you so confident that Wright will be Dickey and not one of the other five? I haven't looked into it closely enough, so maybe he's got much better, more consistent numbers, but that list certainly gives me pause. |
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Post by moonstone2 on Oct 14, 2014 22:18:07 GMT -5
Give me ONE example of someone actually doing this. I mean one.....assuming it's so simple and all.
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ericmvan
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Posts: 8,911
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Post by ericmvan on Oct 30, 2014 12:04:54 GMT -5
Secondly, a knuckleball is very difficult to master and throw consistently well. It's said that a knuckleballer could regularly load the bases with walks and then strike out the next three batters on nine pitches. There have been seven knuckleballers to debut in the last 20 years, and every single one of them had at least one strong season in the high minors. But only one of them, R.A. Dickey, became a regular starting pitcher.Charlie Zink appeared to have achieved some sort of mastery over the knuckleball in 2008 when he achieved a very decent strikeout to walk ratio of 2.16 over 174 innings. For the rest of his career, the ratio was .45, a near 80 percent collapse. That sort of thing usually dosen't happen to pitchers unless they are injured, but it does happen to knuckleballers. I'm generally more on Eric's side on this. It seems to me that Wright has a very good chance of being a solid starting pitcher for several years, which should put him somewhere in the top 20. I'm not sure where he gets the "#2 starter ceiling, #4 starter floor, #3 starter projection." That seems optimistic to me. On the other hand, the bolded part above seems true and that makes me much less confident in Wright. A quick search (and an over-reliance on that bastion of unerring truth, Wikipedia) gives me six of the seven: Dennis Springer, Steve Sparks, Jared Fernandez, Dickey, Charlie Haeger, and Charlie Zink. Sparks has three seasons of over 2 wins and of course, Dickey's been quite good, but the other four have really not done much. What is it, Eric, that makes you so confident that Wright will be Dickey and not one of the other five? I haven't looked into it closely enough, so maybe he's got much better, more consistent numbers, but that list certainly gives me pause. Yes. He's been throwing the knuckler for just four years, the last three years all in the high minors, with ERAs of 2.54, 3.46, 3.27 (including his 21 IP in MLB). It's hard to know when other guys started throwing the pitch, but that's a better track record than any of the seven, many of whom were simply not that good as minor league pitchers. And as I've noted, it's more or less as impressive as Wakefield's path to MLB. |
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ericmvan
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Supposed to be working on something more important
Posts: 8,911
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Post by ericmvan on Oct 30, 2014 12:31:05 GMT -5
Give me ONE example of someone actually doing this. I mean one.....assuming it's so simple and all. How could I possibly know if this had been done? And you're missing my point, which I admit wasn't made clearly. You made a comically ludicrous assertion that it was impossible to judge a knuckler except by its results -- without, of course, giving a single reason why this would be true. In fact the opposite is true: it ought to be easier to judge the quality of a knuckler just by watching it than any other pitch. (Only inexperience by the scout would make the knuckleball tougher to judge.) I think that's probably something that could be done with the naked eye; doing it via slo-motion video would in fact give you very precise estimates of the pitch quality, better than you could get for a conventional pitch by any methodology. Because the pitch breaks at random, and because the break size is a direct function of the rotation speed, you've eliminated all the other variables. Of course, the whole point is moot, because the very notion of a knuckleball that, in general, AAA hitters couldn't hit but MLB hitters could is wrong. If it's well-thrown, no one can hit it except by luck, from God himself down to Little League. If it's a mistake, then it's completely hittable, with a steeper difference between AAA and MLB than average pitching. And of course the percentage of mistakes is going to largely determine the AAA performance, with control being the other big factor, of course. Hence a really good AAA knuckleball pitcher will put up almost identical numbers in MLB, and the more mediocre he is in AAA, the less well he translates (q.v. almost all the guys you cited earlier). You can also measure this by times-around-the-order splits --flat splits indicate fewer mistakes, and Wright appears to have very flat ones. |
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Post by dewey1972 on Mar 16, 2015 22:15:19 GMT -5
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Post by charliezink16 on Mar 17, 2015 10:24:02 GMT -5
Not one to complain about rankings, but Wright behind a reliever like Heath Hembree is disappointing. |
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Post by Oregon Norm on Mar 17, 2015 23:42:47 GMT -5
Something to warm Eric's heart... A new FIP variant published in Hardball Times: FIP In Context (cFIP). It's by the same researcher who co-authored the article at BP on catcher framing. This one also uses a mixed model to include all the stuff that modulates every at bat against a pitcher, for the batter faced and the park, and it conditions the results of the at bat on a variant of run expectancy if the pitcher was removed at that point. So a relevant chunk of every result is included, whether the pitcher stuck around or not. Now that's a lot of stuff to digest, but it's just part of what's in there, so I'd suggest people read the article. It's another example of mining big baseball data to get at some fine-grained results. When I checked out the calculations for 2014, Wright ends up looking quite good, with an 88 on a scale that has 100 as the norm. The smaller the number the better the pitcher. And this one looks like it's very good at estimating that pitcher's "true talent", regardless of sample size. Now that's something right up your alley, guy! |
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