Pitching by the Numbers: deGrom's dominance

I’m switching over to the Fantasy Football beat, so this has to be my last baseball column of the season. But I’m not saying goodbye. You can still fire away with your baseball questions by simply dropping me a tweet @MichaelSalfino.

I want to leave you with something big enough to last you through the coming weeks as you commence your championship push. So I again turn to Inside-Edge. I’ve sorted the qualifying pitchers (1,400+ pitches) by dominance but noted their overall score, too, to give you the entire picture in really two numerical grades that, like in school, are scaled basically from 60-to-100 points.

Inside-Edge defines dominance by performance relative to the league average in three statistics: 1) percentage of innings that are 1-2-3, 2) percentage of outs that are strikeouts in four pitches or less and 3) missed swing percentage.

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The grades you see are an average based on the scores in those categories. And the list is headed by a personal favorite that I long touted here and at the Wall Street Journal as being 100% real in his excellence: Jacob deGrom, who leads the major leagues with 52% innings being 1-2-3 (the last starter to finish a season with a rate over 50% was Derek Lowe in 2008).

Here’s the full list.  

As sometimes happens, a pitcher another stat (Ks minus BBs over the last month) said to dump just last week is now landing on the plus side of the ledger in this season-long dominance stat. So what this comes down to with Garrett Richards is whether you want to buy the recent dominance or the full-season dominance.

Sonny Gray is a guy I’ve been wrong on all year but he’s an outlier in not needing strikeout dominance to dominate. Tanaka and Ventura are lagging badly in translating their dominance score to overall pitching effectiveness. Remember, this doesn’t measure strikeouts in a vacuum but rather the efficiency of the strikeout, as well as the three-up-and-three-down innings and missed swings.

Erasmo Ramirez sure seems rosterable and is currently just 20% Yahoo! owned. Taijuan Walker makes the buy list for the second-straight week.

Why is Bumgarner so close to average in our dominance category? This is troubling. Johnny Cueto we know is really good at limiting hit quality (batting average minus slugging average). Harvey has a ratio of about 1.00 and an ERA well under 3.00 and seems to be getting a second wind suddenly (based on his last two starts). I’d hold him. Cole is another unpleasant surprise, but remember I’m giving you overall grades, too. You guys are smart. You know these are not overall rankings but rather stat rankings. But taking Cole, for example, wouldn’t we want our pitchers to not just pitch well but to also be solid in those three dominance stats?

Lance Lynn is among the trailers in pitches per inning, which will catch up to you eventually either in runs or injury because the more pitches you throw per inning, the more stressful a fair number of those pitches are likely to be.

You see why I can’t buy Wacha ever. Dominance generally defined is the first thing I look for in a pitcher. It’s the easiest path to greatness. You can produce without it short-term, for sure, and sometimes even long-term, but that’s simply unlikely.

One of the things we can do with these numbers is check on variance. The average gap between dominance score and overall score is about 3.5 points. If you believe they should correlate for all pitchers by about that much, you then have to think Tanaka, Walker and Ventura will pitch much better in our game going forward.

The list of guys much worse than their overall stats (in other words, their dominance significantly lags their overall grade) are Carlos Martinez (a shocking 20-point gap), Hector Santiago (18), Brett Anderson (17), Mark Buehrle (16), John Lackey (15), Alex Wood (15), Jake Odorizzi (14), Gio Gonzalez (14) and Nick Martinez (14). I have to say I dislike this group a lot, though I am flabbergasted by the degree to which Martinez (a 66 dominance score) lags in these categories.

We also have innings limits concerns with Martinez and a number of other pitchers. These limits are so dumb,and have been completely debunked in recent medical studies, but we still have to live with them.

In closing this season and even in moving forward in football, where I hope you join me, I get that these articles by their nature seem pretty declarative. Know, however, that these stats are merely tools in your toolbox to aid you in your decisions and to provide grist for your player evaluation mill. Most of these columns amount to projection models and those are meant to merely increase our overall success rate with the entire group of pitchers, accepting that there will, of course, be individual outliers. There is no secret stat that will work for every player every time but that doesn’t stop us here from using the ones that do work best and always striving to find even better ones.