Pittsburgh Pirates Passion?

I’m not around folks at the club level too often but when I am, the first question I’m likely to be asked is if I believe the Pittsburgh Pirates are finally headed down the right track.  Old school baseball men don’t want to hear your personal thesis on how screwed up you feel the organization is, they want a short answer – yes or no.

Then they want to tell you what they know.

Today I had one such conversation but this time he wanted to listen to me first which was a bit of a surprise.  My answer was simple – no, I don’t think we are.  Why, he asked as he settled into the rocker he was in.  Very simple, I said, we lack black-and-gold blood in the organization.  The desire is absolutely there to win, but we’re missing one important ingredient…

Passion…  Pittsburgh Pirates Passion.

Then he turned into talk mode and I got the always available lecture about how rebuilding takes many years before he wished me well and walked off to join his party for dinner.  While I was on the way out of the restaurant he made a point to come over and tell me that “without passion, the game moves too fast.”

It was the first time in eight years I felt I had been heard.

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Generalized statistics can be so misleading.  Take team starter ERA, for instance.  If you jog over to ESPN’s stats for 2008, you’ll see the Pirates had the third worst in the game last year.  It’s pretty hard for that to be misleading though, huh?

So I did a bit of general digging to compare our main five starters for 2009 against all pitching performances in MLB over the first five innings last year to see how they did.  Realize this data is from MLB’s PITCHf/x directories and they had a few periods of equipment downtime at the parks during the year.  But it’s certainly close enough to shave with.

The chart below shows the combined end result of every plate appearance for two groups: the five Pirates starters and all MLB pitchers during innings 1-5.  The third group of columns indicates the difference between the first two groups.  Focus on the percentage differences as they are the most accurate, not the number differences which are only listed to give you some sense of value.

On quick glance you can see that our five starters saw about 2.7% fewer plate appearances end via a strikeout (called, swinging, swinging strike blocked, and foul tip) than the average MLB pitchers in innings 1-5 saw.  Because of the fewer strikeouts, the batters ended up with 1% more walks and 1.1% more hits (in play, no outs), not to mention the 0.7% higher in play with runs scoring rate.

Now don’t let the smaller percentages in the difference column fool you – they add up to runs allowed fast.  Specifically, that 2.7% fewer strikeouts ending a plate appearance is one huge reason why we are getting mauled on the field.  

Until Neal Huntingon can put starters on the mound that can miss some bats, it’s unlikely we’re going to improve much on defense.  Kerrigan can preach hit-to-contact pitching to reduce the free passes and that will help because, theoretically, only one-in-three are likely to reach base.  The problem becomes how many runs will score from those additional hits where fewer runs might have scored from issuing a walk to get past a batter the pitcher wasn’t comfortable with?

Tough call.

We need toolsy flame throwers and the only way we’re going to get them outside the draft is to make some bold, risky, trades.  That’s one reason why I propose dealing Doumit, McLouth, and Maholm.

Now.  Sorry Bob.

(more than 9% walks!  Wow!)

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With everyone home for the holidays we can expect the rumor mill to slow up a bit, although it won’t come to a halt.  This game never stops. 

I haven’t heard anything new on the Wilson front, nor have I heard anything concrete on anyone else.  It’s still a bit early even on Wilson, although I’d guess he’d be the first one shipped out the door.