A New Name in Seattle Transportation

by Matthew on Oct 25, 2011 10:00 AM PDT in Seattle Mariners History

Time for pitching! Huzzah for some of the team's strong points. Alright, one of the team's very few actual strong points. StatCorner uses tRA to judge pitching and therefore the series previews use tRA and therefore these graphs use tRA (actually an offshoot* of tRA).

*pRAA = (league's tRA - pitcher's tRA) / 27 x pitcher's expected outs recorded

Here is last season's starting rotation post. 2010's graph looked like this:

They stumbled out of the gate and then began a fitfully start-and-stop, but somewhat undaunted, climb toward positive territory. Until the end of the season when they crashed, which the above graph is missing (the team finished at -1.7 in 2010). Here is this year's:

From the beginning, the Mariners' rotation seized the lead on the team and though they dipped in the second half, the collective unit never dropped into below average territory. That dip mirrored a bit was what seen in 2010 when the middle of the season saw the departure of Sir Cliff Lee and his gentle smile while 2011 had us fans bidding adieu to Erik Bedard and Doug Fister which chopped the good part of the rotation in half. Also, oh man, Anthony Vasquez, your pitching makes it difficult for anyone to join the AV Club.

Just for enlightenment purposes, I re-did the 2011 graph from 22 August onward and replaced all of Vasquez's starts with a league average performance. Just so that you could grasp how much of an impact he had even over such a small time period.

Later this winter, King County officials will announce that the stretch of Interstate 5 between Tacoma and Seattle shall forever on be colloquially referred to as The Vasquez Gap.

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Small sample size disclaimers aside,

Vasquez’s numbers (according to Fangraphs) are quite impressive. In 7 stars covering 29.1 innings, 3.99 K/9, 3.07 BB/9, 8.90 ERA, 9.23 FIP, -1.1 WAR. Yep, -1.1 WAR in only 29.1 innings…

by urchman on Oct 25, 2011 10:28 AM PDT reply actions

Are we the first team in history to have both the least valuable position player and least valuable pitcher in the same season?

by seattlebruin on Oct 25, 2011 11:10 AM PDT up reply actions

I doubt it.

You’d have to come up with the metric you’re going to use (evaluation, minimum plate appearances, whether you’re going for rate or quantity stats, etc.), but it probably wouldn’t be extremely rare. Assuming completely random distribution you’re looking at a 1 in 30 chance of the worst hitter being on the same team as the worst pitcher, and greater chances before expansions. And talent isn’t randomly distributed, it’s biased into (generally) teams of good and bad players. Plus, the bad teams are going to be more likely to call up less promising players from the minors that may be completely overmatched.

by Sidi on Oct 25, 2011 1:15 PM PDT up reply actions