In The Interest Of Fairness
During Jarrod Washburn‘s tenure as a Mariner, we spent a lot of time talking about him. Way too much for my taste, but he was something of a lightning rod, especially last year, as he became the biggest beneficiary of the Mariners decision to build a great defensive team. While people wanted to chalk up his improved ERA to “the Dolphin” or some other magical ability to get people to hit the ball right at his defenders, we staunchly stood our ground and said that he couldn’t possibly sustain his ERA with the way he was pitching. The low strikeout/high flyball combination can look good for a while, when the ball is staying in the park and fielders are running them down in the gaps, but it’s not the recipe for long term sustained high level success.
So, since we wrote that about Washburn, it’s only equitable that we write the same about Jason Vargas. Vargas is far easier to root for than Washburn, considering he doesn’t eat up a huge chunk of our payroll and complain publicly about his catcher, but in reality, they’re basically the exact same pitcher. As David Golebiewski wrote on FanGraphs the other day, it’s eerie how similar Washburn’s 2009 and Vargas’ 2010 seasons are. They are, for all intents and purposes, the same pitcher.
So, yes, Vargas was exceptional last night, and he’s had a fantastic run to start the season. Yes, he’s a perfect fit for the Mariners, given how his skills line-up with Safeco Field and the roster the M’s have put together. And considering that he’s still both young and cheap, the Mariners should pencil him into their rotation for the next several years. But, as we warned with Washburn a year ago, this ERA won’t last. It is built on a foundation of a .259 BABIP and a 4.9% HR/FB rate, both of which are among the lowest in the league and generally have very little predictive ability.
Even factoring in Safeco and the outfield defense, the best we can hope for from Vargas is a 4.00ish ERA going forward. That still makes him an asset, but he hasn’t turned a magical corner and become a front line starter.
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I was just thinking about how similar him and Washburn are last night watching him pitch. I realize he isn’t as fantastic as he has looked, but man, this is the definition of a perfect fit.
Great post as always. So how long until he hits arbitration? I’m totally confused by the MLB collective bargaining agreement….
Was Washburn’s changeup this effective? I can’t remember. I never liked the Bus anyway.
I wish we could win all our games 1-0, 4-2, 2-0, etc. Feels like a meat-n-potatoes type of game to me. If we win 11-5 or something, it’s fun to watch lots of runs, HR’s etc., but it feels like eating cotton candy. (academically speaking, of course)
probably just me.
So this is why Z is smarter than Bavasi….
Fascinating.
I knew this rang a bell:
here
I’d love to see an article on why RSS isn’t benefiting like he was last year.
So you’re saying Vargas should earn $9.6 million a year more than he’s getting, right?
(yes I’m kidding)
BTW when I went to look up Vargas’ salary on espn.com, I was somewhat amazed to find his xFIP listed in the “player news” section. These stats are actually getting out there! Heck, I remember the big deal when Peter Gammons first mentioned OPS.
ERA is the Geoff Baker of statistics. If only we could get people to stop looking at it too.
I can live with Jarrod Washburn making Jason Vargas’s salary. It’s when you’re paying that guy 9 million a year that you have a problem.
Seems like “is not being paid tons more than he’s worth” and “is not a jerk” are some pretty significant differences.
In even more fairness, we don’t really know that he’s a “jerk”.
I don’t know him personally, all I have to go on is what the media reports and brief impressions from interviews.
if we assume someone is a jerk because of what a reporter said, then are we no better than the Cub fans that hate on Bradley?
Fister = Washburn
Vargas = Washburn
Meanwhile, Washburn is…as far as I can tell…sitting at home.
If he was in shape, willing to work for a reasonable salary…I wouldn’t necessarily be against a half-season rental of Washburn.
There just doesn’t seem to be any reason to bother. Not this year. Not these M’s.
Blaming someone else in public for your own mistakes is a pretty jerkish thing to do. 2008 especially was rife with examples of Washburn doing just that.
In the interest of fairness, you have to give credit where credit is due. While sustained success of this level is
unattainableunlikely, he has recognized the difference between his good pitch (changeup – +6.4) and his bad pitch (fastball – -0.6) and has adjusted his approach accordingly (+/- 5% change in fastball/changeup pitch selection). There is value in that.The biggest problem with all stats is that while they may describe how the average ball player played in the past, they do poorly at at predicting a specific players future performance.
xFIP can’t be expected to predict everyone’s future ERA very well to the same certainty. Some people just live on one side or the other of the mean on a bell curve. Some people are way out there and that’s their normal. Anyways, if ERA is a crappy stat, then why would xFIP, that suggests someone’s future ERA based upon fly ball percentages, be a stat worth talking about?
xFIP, as I understand it, doesn’t attempt to predict a pitcher’s future ERA, because you’re right, that would be silly and useless. It attempts to predict a pitcher’s future xFIP, and it is pretty good at that.
Just confused myself into a brian cramp reading the MLB collective barganing agreement and I come away with the idea that Jason will be arbitration eligible this winter. Would it be worth look at a 3 years deal with him?
Vargas may not be a frontline starter, but there’s some evidence he’s better than Washburn. His 5.91 K/9 is higher than anything Washburn put up except the 2001/02 seasons. It’s a small sample, but so far this year Vargas has been throwing his changeup, a pretty good pitch, 25.7% of the time, up from 20.1% last year.
The .259 BABIP ought to regress some, but then again Washburn ran a .280 career rate, never exceeding .309 (Vargas’ career, by comparison, is .288). BABIP may generally have little predictive value, but as mentioned in that Fangraphs post, Vargas’ career IFFB is nearly twice the league average. Washburn always ran a high IFFB%, which no doubt contributed to his low BABIP rates. It’s not unbelievable that Vargas’ BABIP rates will trend lower than the norm.
That said, I don’t think I’m disagreeing with your overall conclusions, Dave; the Washburn comparison probably just put a bad taste in my mouth. They’re definitely similar, but I see areas Vargas is outperforming him–in fact, his seasonal line, if anything, looks very much like Washburn’s ’01/02, which were his peak years.
I missed something here. Is Vargas the one rumored to be a jerk, or was that Washburn?
It just seemed like that “jerk” comment came out of nowhere – I was wondering about the context.
Dave:
Swinging Strike rate:
Vargas (2010): 8.7%
Wash (2009): 7.2%
OOZ Swing rate:
Vargas (2010): 32.3%
Wash (2009): 24.9%
tERA:
Vargas (2010): 3.03
Wash (2009): 4.80
K%:
Vargas (2010): 16.1%
Wash (2009): 13.8%
BB%:
Vargas (2010): 6.18
Wash (2009): 6.76
I’m not going to disagree with the overall assertion (xFIP, BAA, and LOB% all show favorable luck in Vargas’ favor, etc), but I don’t think they’re “basically” the same pitcher. Vargas has other things going for him that Washburn didn’t that seem to point to an overall better skill set. Perhaps not HUGELY different, but enough that I could see Vargas sustain some success beyond Washburn’s mediocre bologna.
Washburn got lucky against opposing handed batters. Vargas has a weapon he can use against them.
Washburn’s nickname around here is “The Bus” because of his tendency to throw his teammates (Kenji Johjima especially) under it when things don’t go well for him.
I haven’t seen anyone claim that Vargas is a jerk, and since I’m the one who brought the word into this particular thread, I can say with some assurance that it was Washburn who was being referenced. : )
Actually, I’d argue that “the biggest problem with all stats” is that they get abused and misapplied, usually out of ignorance but sometimes out of malice. Some stats certainly are only useful as a historical record; but some are indeed predictive — though which ones, and of what, requires some study. xFIP, as georgmi notes, isn’t intended to predict ERA (though amusingly it does a better job of that than ERA does). But that’s fine, because we really shouldn’t care about ERA (at best it’s a team stat that just gets assigned to a pitcher, and unless you know the defensive players will be the same next year you’re not going to be doing a good job of predicting it anyway). What we should care about is how good a pitcher is (independent of things like defense and park, though obviously you want to tailor your pitching staff to the strengths of your park and defense, and vice versa). Knowing how good a pitcher is right now tells you something about how good he should be in the future. Which also helps you determine if he’s overpaid, as Washburn mostly was and Vargas clearly isn’t.
Well, in the interest of fairness, I don’t think anyone here immediately hated Washburn because he was Caucasian.
It’s funny how perceptions of pitchers are coloured by whther you like them. I would have sworn that Washburn’s K% was at least half of Vargas’. But this perception of Vargas’ performance seems to be based on him not complaining, having a small child,and being part of the Gutz trade rather than any facts.
Some people just live on one side or the other of the mean on a bell curve.
Produce a list of the pitchers who have sustained an ERA two runs lower than their xFIP over a significant period of time. I’ll wait here while you look for one.
Confirmation bias in action. : )
Thanks. It’s funny because I knew who “The Bus” was, but somehow I never actually thought about the origin of the nickname.
Dave –
I’m curious, with all of the comments about people who “find” a pitch or suddenly perform better than previous years…
I don’t disagree with your assertions, but how long does someone have to sustain a higher level of play (as reflected in their statistics) before we give them credit for improving or reaching a new level – as opposed to just having “a good season” or “getting lucky” (BABIP aside)?
I am really enjoying this whole new statistical side of Baseball, but the one thing I see is that new stats seem to be used to establish a player’s value pretty early on, and other than a big change in WAR over many years I don’t see a mechanism whereby players’ value or skill-level is shown to have improved. There seems to be an (understandable but dogged) attachment to looking at the past few years of a player’s career and using that as the sole measure of what the person is capable of. Does history show that players’ skills are really that stable and unchanging once they reach the Bigs (other than injury or decline due to aging)?
And, as a relative newbie, I’ll as a similar question to what some other commenters have asked: Besides someone’s career averages, are there any measurable statistics out there that can help predict a player’s possible change in value/skill if they have changed in some way over the last year/off-season (i.e. a pitcher starts throwing a new pitch that either matches their style better or changes their style, a change of position by an infielder, etc)? This last question may be more of a fishing-expedition than something that can be responded to in a simple manner – I’m having a hard time expressing what I’m looking for and I am certain that its a complicated topic given all the possible permutations and contributing factors.
Thanks!
To me, the difference between the two is the change-up. Washburn’s was pedestrian, Vargas’ is a plus pitch. I expect Vargas to regress some, but not as much as I expected Washburn to regress. Seems like Washburn had more balls hit on the button.
I wonder if something such as flyball strength or weakness could be applied. Something as simple as distance might do it at a rudimentary level.
To throw out a name in regards to Daves 1:35 post I would speculate that Ryan Franklins last few years with the Cards would be as close as a person would come. Besides that, no one that I can think of.
nwade, I am not an expert but I’ve seen a few approaches used in concert to determine if there is a legitimate change in a player’s skill set and if a change in performance is legit.
The first is to try to isolate the new skill such as a new pitch. Look at how often it is thrown and how effective it is. A large enough sample size needs to be used to determine a baseline for the new skill. If possible, you can try to determine if the new offering is having an impact on the existing skill set like how adding an effective change might make a fastball more effective. Jeff at lookoutlanding tends to do a great job of this type of analysis.
The second is more a macro level approach and looks at the recent history. I’ve most often seen a 3 year average used for this purpose.
If Vargas is a little bit better than Washburn, does that mean he’s going to throw a perfect game one of these days?
It is good though to think he can settle into being a legit #4 / #5, rather than the #4 or #5 spots being used for questionable converted long relievers, unmovable contracts, reclamation projects, etc.
Shopping for a legit #2 / #3 starter, knowing that Felix is the ace and Fister/Vargas should be cheap and predictable, is kind of nice. We know what we’re getting, as opposed to slotting people based on spring training performances and praying. They don’t have to over-promote Fister/Vargas to be #2 and 3 starters and pick up whatever dregs they can to round out the rotation.
It could be baby steps towards the FO being able to look for quality during the entire offseason, rather than just a couple big-ticket items early on and then bargain-basement-shopping their way to the rest of the roster.
I always thought Jarrod Washburn was nicknamed “The Bus” because he looks so much like Jerome Bettis.
He doesn’t have to be a frontline starter. If he stays like this- a good #4-#5 starter for us- for years, I’ll be ecstatic.
It can be a pain in the watusi to shore up the bottom of the rotation, too. Having some good answers there instead of having a bunch of untested arms do “The I-5 Shuffle” is a blessing of its own.
If where he’s at is all Jason Vargas will ever be, I shed no tears.
There was a nice big article on Brian Bannister in USA today yesterday, about how he breaks down his starts after every one using PITCHfx,
and uses it to make adjustments. Interesting article in that Bannister knows he’s not a great talent, so he wants to use any advantage he can. Apparently Max Scherzer is doing this too, using Brooksbaseball.net. It’s great to see fringe guys open to methods that will help them. Just seems like common sense.
xFIPis formulated usning a constant. Just change the constant and everyone’s xFIP could be 2 runs higher than their ERA. Simple.
Jerome Bettis looked like an angry chipmunk?
Funny. And the serious, intelligent answer would be…?
Yeah, Bannister is kind of a sentimental favorite in the stats community because he’s “one of us” (he has been talking about using advanced stats and PitchFX for a while now). Everybody wants him to succeed because he’ll be the ultimate refutation of the “get out of your parent’s basement and watch a game,” “if you’d ever actually played the game” canards.
Of course compiling information on opposing batters is nothing new — Moyer’s probably the best example of a marginal pitcher with a huge “book” on batters he uses to get an edge, but he’s far from the only one. Many pitchers, and not just the marginal ones, have been doing the same thing forever; back around the turn of the century Schilling had hired a guy to send him DVDs every week containing video of the AB’s of the guys he would face in his next start.
Using the advanced stats (particularly things like O-zone%, etc) and PitchFX is a new wrinkle, though, and it’s not surprising that it’s bubbling up from the bottom with the young, fringe-y guys rather than coming down from the old pitching coaches. Of course it’ll get there eventually, and then the comparative advantage of the smart guy with fringe-y stuff will be reduced again. Mind you, the pitchers with good stuff should probably just throw it — it’ll be up to the Crash Davis’s of the world to figure this stuff out and call pitches based on it, leaving the Nuke LaLoushes to just throw and not think (because “it hurts the ballclub”)