How High-Quality is a Quality Start?

One of the easier-to-understand new metrics is the Quality Start, a statistic invented by Philadelphia Inquirer sportswriter John Lowe in 1985 (according to Wikipedia). (I suppose something that's been around 29 years isn't all that new.) A starting pitcher gets credit for a quality start if he pitches six or more innings and allows three or fewer earned runs. That's it.

The criticism you hear of a quality start is that three runs in six innings is a 4.50 ERA, which isn't very good. Of course, a perfect game's a quality start too. Do quality starts indicate pitching excellence or mediocrity?

I looked at quality starts in 2013. Here are a few tidbits:

• There were 2,431 games last year, so 4,862 games started. There were 2,556 quality starts. That means about 53% of starts were quality starts. That doesn't sound that impressive. But wait.
• The leaders: Clayton Kershaw and James Shields had 27, Adam Wainwright had 26, Cole Hamels and Max Scherzer had 25. By percentage of starts: Kershaw had quality starts in 82% of his starts, Shields 79%, Scherzer 78%, and Cliff Lee, Bartolo Colon, Chris Sale, and Matt Harvey all had 77%. Those are all good pitchers, including both Cy Young Award winners. That sounds good.
• Teams that got a quality start won 65.6% of their games last year. That's the equivalent of going 106-56. That tells you that a quality start gives a team an excellent chance to win. 

All well and good, you're thinking, but do pitchers in quality starts actually pitch well? It turns out the answer is: Yeah, do they ever.

The major league average ERA and WHIP for starters last year were 4.01 and 1.306, respectively. The six-inning, three-run outing with a 4.50 ERA cited above would thus be below-average.

But that's not the norm. In their 2,556 quality starts last year, pitchers compiled a 1.93 ERA and 0.986 WHIP. The closest to those figures: Kershaw's 1.83 ERA and Jose Fernandez's 0.979 WHIP. Yes, it's true that a starter can get a quality start with a 4.50 ERA. That happened 213 times last year, 8.3% of quality starts. But on average, you're getting something like Kershaw and Fernandez when you get a quality start.

UPDATE - Reality Check: Milwaukee Brewers

Yesterday, the Brewers entered play with a 9-2 record, making them the 51st team since division play began in 1969 to start 9-2 or stronger. I ran a table showing that teams starting 9-2 since then have a slightly better than 50% chance of making the postseason. Now they're 10-2. Here's a list of teams since 1969 to start the season 10-2 :

  Year  Team       End of Season
  1971  Giants       Lost NLCS
  1978  Royals       Lost ALCS
  1981  Expos        Lost NLCS
  1981  Dodgers        Won WS
  1984  Padres        Lost WS
  1988  Indians        78-84
  1989  Rangers        83-79
  1990  Reds           Won WS
  1998  Padres        Lost WS 
  1992  Pirates      Lost NLCS
  1992  Blue Jays      Won WS
  1996  Orioles      Lost ALDS
  1998  Indians      Lost ALCS
  1998  Orioles        79-83
  1999  Indians      Lost ALDS
  2003  Yankees       Lost WS
  2005  Dodgers        71-91
  2011  Rockies        73-89
  2012  Rangers       Lost WC
  
The Brewers are getting into an elite field. They're only the 20th team to start the year 10-2 since 1969. Of the 19 predecessors, all but five were still playing in October. So 74% made the postseason. At this point we can say that if the Brewers don't make the playoffs, it won't be unprecedented, but it will be a bit of a surprise. Teams that start the year 10-2 are generally good teams.

Reality Check: Milwaukee Brewers

The Brewers are the surprise team of the season so far. (Note to Reds and Red Sox fans: I'm talking about positive surprises.) They enter play today with the best record in the majors at 9-2. Last year, the team was 74-88 and was not considered to be contender this year (projected wins: Baseball Prospectus 80, FanGraphs 79, ESPN 75, On The Field of Play 79).

After just writing that the first week of the season doesn't mean anything, I'm not going to say that the Brewers' hot start means they're a lock for October. But let's look at teams from the divisional era (1969-present) that've started the season 9-2 or better:

  Year  Team       Record  Playoffs?
  1969  Braves       9-2      Yes
  1969  Cubs        10-1      No
  1971  Giants       9-2      Yes
  1972  Astros       9-2      No
  1972  Dodgers      9-2      No
  1974  Expos        9-2      No
  1975  Royals       9-2      No
  1977  Dodgers      9-2      Yes
  1978  Tigers       9-2      No
  1978  Royals       9-2      Yes
  1980  Reds        10-1      No
  1981  Dodgers      9-2      Yes
  1981  A's         11-0      Yes
  1981  Expos        9-2      Yes
  1981  Cardinals    9-2      No
  1982  Braves      11-0      Yes
  1982  White Sox    9-2      No
  1984  Tigers      10-1      Yes
  1984  Padres       9-2      Yes
  1987  Brewers     11-0      No
  1988  Indians      9-2      No
  1988  Yankees      9-2      No
  1989  Rangers     10-1      No
  1990  Reds         9-2      Yes
  1990  A's          9-2      Yes
  1992  Pirates      9-2      Yes
  1992  Blue Jays    9-2      Yes
  1994  Braves      10-1      No
  1996  Orioles      9-2      Yes
  1997  Orioles      9-2      Yes
  1998  Orioles      9-2      No
  1998  Indians      9-2      Yes
  1998  Padres       9-2      Yes
  1999  Indians      9-2      Yes
  2001  Twins        9-2      No
  2002  Indians     10-1      No
  2002  Giants       9-2      Yes
  2003  Royals      10-1      No
  2003  Yankees      9-2      Yes
  2003  Giants      10-1      Yes
  2005  Dodgers      9-2      No
  2006  Mets         9-2      Yes
  2008  Diamondbacks 9-2      No
  2009  Marlins     10-1      No
  2011  Rockies      9-2      No
  2011  Rangers      9-2      Yes
  2012  Dodgers      9-2      No
  2012  Rangers      9-2      Yes
  2013  Braves      10-1      Yes
  2013  A's          9-2      Yes
  
So if I counted those right, the Brewers are the 51st team to start the year 9-2 or better since 1969. Of those 50 teams, 27 of them, or 54%, made the postseason. (Of the teams that were exactly 9-2, 22 of 37, or 59%, made the postseason, as only 5 of 13 teams starting 10-1 or better were in the playoffs. Good thing the Brewers didn't win more than nine games!) So the Brewers have put themselves into a position in which they have, on paper, a little better than a 50/50 chance of making the postseason. They have as good a chance of continuing to win 82% of their games, though, as they do of sustaining their 1.87 ERA to date.

And Blake, the Much Despised...

You hear about it, now it's actually happened. In last night's White Sox-Indians game, Chicago rookie Jose Abreu had his second consecutive two-homer game. But the coolest thing he did was on a foul ball. As Fox Sports Ohio reports,

But that wasn't even the most shocking part of his night. That came off a foul ball -- a foul ball that was in the process of disintegrating as Abreu literally ripped the cover off it he hit it so hard.

(If you don't get the headline, you really need to brush up on the classics)

Please, Let Him Get On Base.

Because when he does, Billy Hamilton has to be the most entertaining player in the game when on the basepaths.

What We've Learned So Far

We're a week into the season. What can we conclude from the games that've been played so far?

NOTHING.

It's only a week, for crying out loud. 

In the week ending last April 24, NL Cy Young Award winner Clayton Kershaw was 0-1 with a 4.35 ERA and a 1.74 WHIP. Did that tell us anything? In the week ending last June 12, AL MVP Miguel Cabrera batted .167 with one extra-base hit in 27 plate appearances. Did we learn anything from that? In the week ending last May 7, the eventual World Champion Red Sox were 1-6, outscored 47-22, and dropped three straight to the lowly Twins. What did that indicate? A span of seven days over a six-month season is tiny. It is far too small a sample to mean anything. 

It's a long season. We're less than 4% into it. Don't read anything into anything quite yet. Just enjoy the play.

Reality Check: Stretching Them Out

I enjoy The Will Leitch Experience podcast (though I usually skip the episodes involving sports I don't care follow, i.e., pretty much everything other than baseball). Last week he had three consecutive appearances by Joe Sheehan, whose newsletter I strongly recommend. Joe previewed the 2014 season for all 30 teams. When discussing the Cardinals, he and Will talked about plans to move young pitcher Carlos Martinez from the bullpen to the rotation.

Joe mentioned that giving a young pitcher experience in the bullpen to prepare him for a starting role has become rarer in baseball due to the predominance of one-inning specialists. In 1965, the Baltimore Orioles had 19-year-old pitcher Jim Palmer in 27 games: six as a starter and 21 as a reliever. In those relief appearances, he pitched 56 innings, an average of exactly two and two thirds innings per relief appearance. That workload helped prepare Palmer for a Hall of Fame career as a starter.

Since the speaker here was Joe Sheehan, one of the top analysts in the game, the purpose of this Reality Check is not to determine whether Sheehan's assessment is correct. It is. The question is, how right is he?

I looked at five-year periods of baseball beginning in 1965, Palmer's rookie year. I used Baseball Reference's Play Index (invaluable research tool) to count the number of seasons in which a pitcher younger than 25 had at least 15 relief appearances of at least two innings. These appearances, we could reasonable conclude, are better than a shorter stint at preparing a young pitcher's arm for the rigors of starting. Here are the results. In the table, "# Seasons" means the number of seasons within the date range in which a pitcher younger than 25 had at least 15 relief appearances of at least two innings:

   Years   # Seasons   Prominent example
  1965-69     30       Ferguson Jenkins, 25, 1966
  1970-74     59       Bill Lee, 24, 1971
  1975-79     60       Jack Morris, 18, 1978
  1980-84     39       Rick Sutcliffe, 16, 1980
  1985-89     38       Chuck Finley, 16, 1987
  1990-94     15       Pedro Martinez, 31, 1993
  1995-99     15       Chan Ho Park, 15, 1996
  2000-04     13       Johan Santana, 18, 2000
  2005-09      5       Brandon McCarthy, 18, 2000
  2010-14      2       still waiting
Source: Baseball Reference Play Index. 

As you can see, over the past 50 years, there have been several cases of Hall of Fame and All Star-caliber starting pitchers who have begun their career pitching long relief. As the bullpen has evolved into a series of one-inning specialists, Sheehan's right: it's become hard for a relievers to develop the arm strength to move into the starting rotation. We may be looking a future with fewer stars starting out in relief like Ferguson Jenkins and Pedro Martinez and more promising youngsters who break when they try to move out of a short-outing relief role like Joba Chamberlain and Neftali Feliz.