Why are innings pitched such a big deal?

[AngelsLakersFan]

45 minutes ago, Dochalo said:

your're not buying it because of a couple of anecdotal examples?  and you don't do it with Max Scherzer or Clayton Kershaw or Strasburg or Cueto or any other pitcher that is a true #1.  You only do it where the numbers play out.  Like in your 3, 4, and 5 rotation spots.  (maybe #2 as well in our case).  And then you don't need to pay a truck load of money for those guys.  Instead you pick up a couple of meh relievers with options and stash them at AAA.  Now your meh reliever and your mediocre starter have effectively produced at the same level as Max Scherzer and you've allowed Arte to keep more of his money which should make you very happy.  

If we can save Arte a few more dollars, I think Calzone will get behind the idea.

[Brent Maguire]

4 hours ago, Jeff Fletcher said:

You're going to wear out your relievers if you go too much in this direction. 

You can't just look at a pitcher's performance over 60 innings and say it would be the same over 80 innings or 100 innings. 

In 2015 specifically I recall the Angels bullpen imploding down the stretch because of overuse, at least that was Mike Scioscia's belief. 

Hence the reason why I included Meyer and Ramirez for this particular thread. If Ramirez is really going to be stretched out as a starter and Meyer has had injury issues, why not use those two for 80-100 innings each? You also have those struggling starters w/ injury issues in AAA with Banuelos and Campos. Maybe they can potentially be used in a similar role?

I realize that this situation defies baseball logic and what we've all been taught. But for a staff that may struggle with injuries and performance in 2017, I think trying to use the heck out of the bullpen and AAA guys in a different role could be a positive impact. 

[Brent Maguire]

1 hour ago, CALZONE said:

Mike Witt was a better pitcher in innings 5-8 than he was 1-4. So I'm not buying this at all. It's a case by case issue. We have been hit with a bad streak of hard throwing starters like Richards, Heaney, Skaggs and Trop that all got injured in the same time period. We can't control that. Imagine if Max Scherzer was a free agent and we told him he that we would only allow him to pitch 4-5 innings per game. He would pass on us.  

Mike Witt career numbers:

Innings 1-3: 3.74 ERA, 2.12 K/BB, .694 OPS

Innings 4-6: 3.80 ERA, 2.06 K/BB, .700 OPS

Innings 7-9: 4.03 ERA, 1.43 K/BB, .703 OPS

You were saying? 

[Oz27]

5 hours ago, Jeff Fletcher said:

You're going to wear out your relievers if you go too much in this direction. 

You can't just look at a pitcher's performance over 60 innings and say it would be the same over 80 innings or 100 innings. 

In 2015 specifically I recall the Angels bullpen imploding down the stretch because of overuse, at least that was Mike Scioscia's belief. 

Doc has gone through this at length but the statistics really don't back this up at all. Street and Smith struggled but they had been used in a pretty standard late inning reliever way. You wouldn't look at their innings/games totals and think they were overworked. Plus the Angels bullpen came in 23rd in 2015 in innings pitched, with a mere 483 innings. Admittedly their usage increased as the season went on, but not in an abnormal way - they were 15th in IP in the second half and 16th in September/October. That bullpen didn't perform that badly anyway. In September/October they had the 13th best ERA and the third best xFIP.

Anyway, every team is carrying at least seven relievers. The number of relievers teams carry over the past decade or so has increased, yet bullpen innings pitched has not followed. In 2004, the median bullpen IP was 497. This year it is 526.2. So yeah, it has gone up, but not by that much. That is a six per cent increase in IP, but bullpens are now 16.67 per cent bigger because teams were carrying six relievers then and are now carrying seven. So the workload per reliever has gone down, not up. I really don't buy the theory that the modern, massive bullpens could not handle more work - and I would guess they could actually handle a lot more.

[Bruce Nye]

Excellent analysis, Doc.  

 

[Ohtaniland]

2 hours ago, Dochalo said:

your're not buying it because of a couple of anecdotal examples?  and you don't do it with Max Scherzer or Clayton Kershaw or Strasburg or Cueto or any other pitcher that is a true #1.  You only do it where the numbers play out.  Like in your 3, 4, and 5 rotation spots.  (maybe #2 as well in our case).  And then you don't need to pay a truck load of money for those guys.  Instead you pick up a couple of meh relievers with options and stash them at AAA.  Now your meh reliever and your mediocre starter have effectively produced at the same level as Max Scherzer and you've allowed Arte to keep more of his money which should make you very happy.  

So we need to just schedule three pitchers per game to work 3 innings each.

Richards / Morin / Street

Skaggs / Guerra / Bedrosian

Shoemaker / Alvarez / Bailey

Nolasco / Wright / Street 

Meyer / Alvarez / Bedrosian

Richards / Chavez / Bailey

Skaggs / Morin / Street

Shoemaker / Wright / Bedrosian.

.................

 

 

 

 

[Docwaukee]

14 minutes ago, Angels_Baseball said:

Hence the reason why I included Meyer and Ramirez for this particular thread. If Ramirez is really going to be stretched out as a starter and Meyer has had injury issues, why not use those two for 80-100 innings each? You also have those struggling starters w/ injury issues in AAA with Banuelos and Campos. Maybe they can potentially be used in a similar role?

I realize that this situation defies baseball logic and what we've all been taught. But for a staff that may struggle with injuries and performance in 2017, I think trying to use the heck out of the bullpen and AAA guys in a different role could be a positive impact. 

My primary consideration in thought was to put Meyer and Skaggs in a position to succeed where they could pitch 100-120 innings without the burden or concern for having to get deep into games.  Plus, pitching the 5th, 6th and/or 7th makes those innings meaningful.  

Ramirez, Banuelos, Campos, and Pounders etal would play a critical role in the success of this potentially.  As would your depth of pen guys 6-10.    

The hardest thing to get over here is perception.  Because the new perception is that a reliever has to have an era below 3 to be considered effective.  

120 inning seasons from a couple of those guys with an era in the low 4's would accomplish what I am talking about.  

You still need a couple more clean peanuts and probably a starter, but that starter doesn't need to be all that great.  

 

[Ohtaniland]

1 hour ago, Angels_Baseball said:

Mike Witt career numbers:

Innings 1-3: 3.74 ERA, 2.12 K/BB, .694 OPS

Innings 4-6: 3.80 ERA, 2.06 K/BB, .700 OPS

Innings 7-9: 4.03 ERA, 1.43 K/BB, .703 OPS

You were saying? 

I said 5 thru 8.

[Ohtaniland]

1 hour ago, AngelsLakersFan said:

If we can save Arte a few more dollars, I think Calzone will get behind the idea.

Can they pay a Richards type pitcher setup man pay because they only need him for 3-4 innings per game? 

[AngelsLakersFan]

16 minutes ago, Dochalo said:

My primary consideration in thought was to put Meyer and Skaggs in a position to succeed where they could pitch 100-120 innings without the burden or concern for having to get deep into games.  Plus, pitching the 5th, 6th and/or 7th makes those innings meaningful.  

Ramirez, Banuelos, Campos, and Pounders etal would play a critical role in the success of this potentially.  As would your depth of pen guys 6-10.    

The hardest thing to get over here is perception.  Because the new perception is that a reliever has to have an era below 3 to be considered effective.  

120 inning seasons from a couple of those guys with an era in the low 4's would accomplish what I am talking about.  

You still need a couple more clean peanuts and probably a starter, but that starter doesn't need to be all that great.  

 

Another anecdotal point. The Angels did quite well despite Garret Richards injury when they had Rasmus going ~2-3 innings and the bullpen doing the rest of the work. I was livid when Scioscia opted to throw CJ Wilson in the post season rather than stick with this plan which had been so effective.

[AngelsLakersFan]

9 minutes ago, CALZONE said:

Can they pay a Richards type pitcher setup man pay because they only need them for 3-4 innings per game? 

No.

[Blarg]

The Angels and most of baseball would require far more talent than they currently have on their roster to limit their starters to two lineup rotations per start. 

It works on short series like the playoffs but if you really examined what those teams were doing it was tax only three arms in the bullpen every game, effectively burning these guys arms up to the point even Chapman was getting hit. You would not be able to do that over the course of the season and would expose arms that are more effective in match ups to failures that leaving a starter in would not experience.

Hypothetical is not real world when you expect your small sample size to expand like raster independent fonts. Hey, bodini bold looks just as crisp in 30 point as it does in 150. So your bullpen is going to just expand innings pitched and give you the same results, on paper.

I would much rather see if a starter is able to navigate innings 5-7 than make it a policy to clip his wings. It creates the small fish in a small bowl pitching staff.

[AngelsLakersFan]

7 minutes ago, Blarg said:

Hypothetical is not real world when you expect your small sample size to expand like raster independent fonts. Hey, bodini bold looks just as crisp in 30 point as it does in 150.

Graphic design references FTW!!

Angels bullpen needs to be redesigned in vector format!

[Ohtaniland]

7 minutes ago, AngelsLakersFan said:

No.

I'm sure Richards would be amused getting pulled after 4 solid innings every game and get zero wins recorded. 

[Troll Daddy]

1 minute ago, CALZONE said:

I'm sure Richards would be amused getting pulled after 4 solid innings every game and get zero wins recorded. 

Haven't you heard ?  Wins are bogus

[AngelsLakersFan]

6 minutes ago, CALZONE said:

I'm sure Richards would be amused getting pulled after 4 solid innings every game and get zero wins recorded. 

Richards will go as long as he can go.

[Docwaukee]

1 minute ago, CALZONE said:

So we need to just schedule three pitchers per game to work 3 innings each.

Richards / Morin / Street

Skaggs / Guerra / Bedrosian

Shoemaker / Alvarez / Bailey

Nolasco / Wright / Street 

Meyer / Alvarez / Bedrosian

Richards / Chavez / Bailey

Skaggs / Morin / Street

Shoemaker / Wright / Bailey

.................

 

 

 

 

I would still let the starter go a bit longer than 3ip.  That's still, potentially only once through the order.  It took an average of 4 innings for the angles pitchers to get twice through the order last year.  I would hope that the average could bump to 4.5 ip with some health.  

ok, because it might be fun here's a scenario.  

guys like bailey, bedrock, street, alvarez, morin, guerra, and the other traditional pen guys would still perform in similar roles to how they have in the past.  It would be guys like Skaggs, Meyer, Ramirez, Campos, Pounders, Nate Smith, Lamb, and a couple others I am forgetting would be candidates for the RS role (relief starter).  With them going 2-3 innings every 3rd night.  

Richards/Skaggs

Shoe/Pounders

Nolasco/Meyer

Chavez/Skaggs

Fister/Pounders

Richards/Meyer

Shoe/Skaggs

Nolasco/Pounders

Chavez/Meyer

Fister/Skaggs

Richards/Pounders

Shoe/Meyer

Nolasco/Skaggs

Chavez/Pounders

Fister/Meyer

and then it starts over every 15 games.  SP avgs 4.5 innings per start.  RS avgs 2.5 innings per appearance.  Rest of the relief core absorbs the additional innings on a situational basis.  You have about 12 players to fill in the role of SP or RS that occupies 8 slots.   You have probably 10 other more conventional relievers to cover the additional 350 innings.  

This is an exercise in futility of course as the above would never happen.  What I am really getting at on a more general basis is that if you could put the guys like  Skaggs and Meyer as well as maybe one of your other clean peanut fringe starters with durability issues in a position to pitch about 100 innings each over the course of the season but in extended relief as opposed to the traditional SP or RP roles where the expectation is that you go every 5th and get to 180ip or you could go every night but you'll only log 60 innings.  

You don't have to wait for injuries to make use of mediocre depth when you absolutely know you are going to have to use it as some point during the season.  Put your mediocre players in a better position to succeed on the front end and your talented yet not so durable players a chance to last through the season at a level that optimizes their ability.  In a nutshell, it amounts to using the players you don't want to need but are going to regardless in the right spots from the beginning and minimizing the exposure of the players you want to use in situations where they are most vulnerable to fail and sustain injury, fatigue or relative poor peformance.  

[Docwaukee]

17 minutes ago, Blarg said:

The Angels and most of baseball would require far more talent than they currently have on their roster to limit their starters to two lineup rotations per start. 

It works on short series like the playoffs but if you really examined what those teams were doing it was tax only three arms in the bullpen every game, effectively burning these guys arms up to the point even Chapman was getting hit. You would not be able to do that over the course of the season and would expose arms that are more effective in match ups to failures that leaving a starter in would not experience.

Hypothetical is not real world when you expect your small sample size to expand like raster independent fonts. Hey, bodini bold looks just as crisp in 30 point as it does in 150. So your bullpen is going to just expand innings pitched and give you the same results, on paper.

I would much rather see if a starter is able to navigate innings 5-7 than make it a policy to clip his wings. It creates the small fish in a small bowl pitching staff.

Nope.  your scenario entails the do or die situation of the playoffs.  Read the entirety of what I wrote and you will recognize like I did that even a mediocre reliever (or even one that isn't very good) is actually more effective than just about any starter the third time through the order.  You aren't burning up 3 guys in particular as much as you are sharing the wealth among a bunch of other guys that normally would pitch as many innings.  That's the hurdle though.  Perception.  Getting past the idea of a reliever being ineffective because he has an era of 4.  But if that reliever pitches to an era of even 4.5 and chews of the 120 innings where your starter would be facing an order the third time through and put up and era between 7 and 9, then it's an effective measure of run prevention and it's cheap as shit because you can bring in a bunch of guys to fill that production who are making league min.  Even if you use 3 guys to eat those 120 innings and they are on a perpetual shuttle between the major league club and AAA, their production is still better.  

I know it's hard to believe, but I mapped it out pretty well above.  

[Ohtaniland]

Dochalo > Scioscia 

 

And I'm being serious. This pitching scenario could actually workout for a lot of teams.

[ettin]

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-rockies-interesting-rotation-experiment/

 

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/a-more-radical-pitching-staff-proposal/

 

http://www.billjamesonline.com/the_three_man_starting_rotation/

 

http://www.espn.com/blog/sweetspot/post/_/id/66690/the-three-man-rotation-could-be-the-future-of-baseball

 

If you are having trouble with the concept some of these articles will help.

[AngelsLakersFan]

Some potentially interesting data for you @Dochalo

Replacement level for pitchers (fWAR) is set to .380 winning% for starting pitchers vs .470 winning% for relief pitchers. So roughly 1/10th of a win per 9 innings for the same performance by virtue of starting vs relieving...

That puts replacement level reliever FIP at about 4.30, and starting pitcher replacement level at ~5.30. (got these from eyeballing the Angels roster)

The third time through the order Angels starting pitchers put up a 5.27 FIP (22nd in MLB) in 207.2 innings, which is almost exactly replacement level.

If relievers were used for those innings and put up the exact same line it would result in a loss of roughly 2 war for the exact same performance. This is war trying to account for roster limitations and general pitcher usage.

If the team were to place replacement level relief pitchers in those roles it would account for the win bump you are describing. 

Whats interesting is that war is treating the two types of pitchers differently, when there really isn't any reason to, they simply aren't giving enough credit to the innings pitched, and instead giving credit to starters based on the difficultly of facing an order the 3rd and 4th times through.   

To add to that last thought, using relievers in these situations is the definition of 'increased productivity.' The difficulty simply disappears, and is replaced by the challenge of managing the roster and finding out whether or not 'replacement level' is truly 'replacement level.'

[Brent Maguire]

2 hours ago, CALZONE said:

I said 5 thru 8.

The numbers don't prove that your original statement is true. Like most pitchers, he got worse throughout the game. 

[Docwaukee]

2 hours ago, AngelsLakersFan said:

Some potentially interesting data for you @Dochalo

Replacement level for pitchers (fWAR) is set to .380 winning% for starting pitchers vs .470 winning% for relief pitchers. So roughly 1/10th of a win per 9 innings for the same performance by virtue of starting vs relieving...

That puts replacement level reliever FIP at about 4.30, and starting pitcher replacement level at ~5.30. (got these from eyeballing the Angels roster)

The third time through the order Angels starting pitchers put up a 5.27 FIP (22nd in MLB) in 207.2 innings, which is almost exactly replacement level.

If relievers were used for those innings and put up the exact same line it would result in a loss of roughly 2 war for the exact same performance. This is war trying to account for roster limitations and general pitcher usage.

If the team were to place replacement level relief pitchers in those roles it would account for the win bump you are describing. 

Whats interesting is that war is treating the two types of pitchers differently, when there really isn't any reason to, they simply aren't giving enough credit to the innings pitched, and instead giving credit to starters based on the difficultly of facing an order the 3rd and 4th times through.   

To add to that last thought, using relievers in these situations is the definition of 'increased productivity.' The difficulty simply disappears, and is replaced by the challenge of managing the roster and finding out whether or not 'replacement level' is truly 'replacement level.'

the phenomena of how this is calculate is exactly why I think WAR does a poor job of assigning value to relievers.  It is also why I think we have seen teams invest a lot more money and farm talent in relievers than would be expected relative to their WAR value.  ie, teams and their more comprehensive supply of data have figured out the discrepancy and that relievers are actually worth more than the data available to the general public shows.  

[Oz27]

2 hours ago, ettin said:

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/the-rockies-interesting-rotation-experiment/

 

http://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/a-more-radical-pitching-staff-proposal/

 

http://www.billjamesonline.com/the_three_man_starting_rotation/

 

http://www.espn.com/blog/sweetspot/post/_/id/66690/the-three-man-rotation-could-be-the-future-of-baseball

 

If you are having trouble with the concept some of these articles will help.

It's kind of funny that these theories get much less play in sabermetric communities now, not because anybody believes them less but just due to everyone being kind of tired of the argument because it has been floated for so long now. But at the same time as the theory gets talked about in saber circles less because of that, it seems to be getting a bit wider attention.

[AngelsLakersFan]

5 minutes ago, Dochalo said:

the phenomena of how this is calculate is exactly why I think WAR does a poor job of assigning value to relievers.  It is also why I think we have seen teams invest a lot more money and farm talent in relievers than would be expected relative to their WAR value.  ie, teams and their more comprehensive supply of data have figured out the discrepancy and that relievers are actually worth more than the data available to the general public shows.  

I actually didn't realize that they were calculating it that way, I thought the difference was always due to the significant difference in innings pitched. This means if you have a reliever that managed to throw 90 innings those same innings were they done as a starter would've earned him an additional 1 war for the season. A guy like Delin Betances in 2014 goes from a 3 war pitcher to a 4 war pitcher.

This all goes to show that there is a non-linear value to each inning pitched, which may also give credence to the idea of a closer creating additional value.