Sunday, April 27, 2003

 

The Giants got no-hit today. This sucks. I'm glad I missed most of it to go to an A's game with my girlfriend.

The stories tonight will be about Kevin Millwood, and "his" no-hitter. No-hitters are almost always portrayed as an individual achievement, and a measure of a pitcher's skill. But are they really?

A couple of years ago over on Baseball Prospectus, Voros McCracken published a study that shows that there is no significant difference between major-league pitchers in their ability to prevent hits on balls put into play. He explains it a lot better than I can, but the idea is pretty clear. Ignore the home runs, and the strikeouts, and the hit batsmen, none of which involve a batter putting a ball in play. Look at the success rate (batting average) of what's left--the grounders, the pop-ups, the fly balls, all of that. You'd think that for the better pitchers, the batting average on balls in play would be lower. But it's not. The numbers show that every pitcher is pretty much the same in that regard. What it really means is that strikeouts are the pitchers' best friend, as those are outs that are never put in play.

What about hitters, though? Are their batting averages on balls in play the same, too? No. McCracken found that better hitters have higher averages on balls in play. This makes sense. Of course not all major-league hitters have the same batting average! So what it boils down to, if I'm not totally mangling his ideas, is that the strikeouts are the realm of the pitcher, and everything else depends on the skill of the hitter, or the defense, or luck.

Think about what this means as regards a no-hitter. Unless a pitcher strikes everybody out (which has never happened), a no-hitter is not all about a pitcher's skill that day. It's about the failure of the hitters, or luck, or defense, or some combination of all three. The fewer strikeouts a pitcher gets in a no-hitter, the more this is the case.

To me, this is pretty radical, and hard to wrap my brain around. I suppose you could graph career K/9 and no-hit totals for a ton of pitchers and look to see if there's really a correlation there. Nolan Ryan's near the top of the K/9 list, and he has 7 no-hitters--but Randy Johnson is tops, but he only has one no-hitter in his long career. That's the same number as Bud Smith and Jose Jimenez. Koufax is fifth on the all-time K/9 list, though, and he had three no-hitters. So a cursory look says that strikeouts do help get no-hitters, but you still need to be lucky. That means there's still hope for that Kirk Rueter no-no.

Finally, if a no-hitter is really more about luck, does it matter to the guy who threw it? Probably not to Kevin Millwood, who I would imagine is having a heck of a party tonight.

Lost amongst the no-hitter hoopla was a good outing by Jesse Foppert. Foppert pitched 6 innings, giving up 3 hits, 4 walks and only 1 run, striking out 5. Any other day, he probably gets the win.

Jefferson 6:14 PM

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