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Publication Date: December 17, 2002
Left Tackle? Small Forward? Sweeper?
The subjects of my attention this week have a couple of things in common: They're very important to their teams fortunes, and you've never heard of them. OK, there are a couple you've heard of, but for the most part, relief pitching, especially if you're never had any of that magic closer dust sprinkled on you, is as thoroughly an unsung job as there is in baseball. To contribute even more thoroughly to that problem, relief work can be much harder to measure statistically than just about any other part of the game. ERA doesn't work very well because the most important runners a reliever faces get credited to someone else if he messes up and they score. The best-known relief stat, saves, is so stupidly defined as to be outrageous if there weren't other, sillier stats like pitching wins or RBI's around to distract from it. There have been a couple of good relief stats developed in the last few years based on play-by-play analysis and comparing how likely the team is to win when a reliever enters compared to how likely they are to win when he leaves, but those require much better play-by-play data than I can hope to gather.
There is a little hope, though. A couple of weeks ago, I took a look at the notion of defense-independent ERA -- an attempt to measure a pitcher's success independent of the defense behind him and his luck. You can re-read that study for more information, but the important piece here is that there's no inherent reason I can find that it shouldn't work just as well for relievers, especially for comparison among themselves. The reduced innings for relievers combined with the generally higher leverage of those innings makes it hard to compare them with starters still, but at least we can get some feel for how a pitcher did by looking at his DERA.
For the purposes of this discussion, I arbitrarily defined a reliever as a pitcher with at least ten appearances and no more than three starts. I'm willing to look at other pitchers who seem to be relievers but don't meet this definition if you want to point them out, but I had to start somewhere. I'm not going to spend as much time going over these as I did with the starters, since the comments would tend to be of the same sort.
Here are the top ten relievers from last year by DERA:
Team Pitcher DERA ERA Villanova James Russell 2.65 2.33 Central Connecticut State Lew Pappariella 2.66 2.52 Baylor Kyle Edens 2.66 3.44 Auburn Steven Register 2.68 3.00 Illinois State Jeremy Accardo 2.71 2.53 Texas Brantley Jordan 2.74 2.96 Illinois-Chicago David Haehnel 2.74 1.08 Princeton Thomas Pauly 2.74 1.43 Indiana Ryan Smith 2.75 3.06 New Orleans Barry Melancon 2.75 7.59
For comparision, here are the top ten relievers from last year by ERA:
Team Pitcher DERA ERA Houston Jesse Crain 4.03 0.00 Delaware Steve Harden 2.94 0.69 Texas Tech Adrian Soto 3.60 0.84 Birmingham-Southern Tyler Sullivan 3.14 0.87 Texas Huston Street 2.94 0.96 East Carolina Kieran Mattison 3.12 1.04 Illinois-Chicago David Haehnel 2.74 1.08 Dartmouth Nick Peay 2.87 1.29 Coastal Carolina Jake Hurry 2.82 1.35 Florida Connor Falkenbach 3.34 1.40
The ten most underrated by ERA:
Team Pitcher DERA ERA Virginia Military Matt Liffick 4.51 16.66 College of Charleston Phillip Wilkins 3.04 14.19 Texas A&M-Corpus Christi Danny Luna 5.02 15.79 Georgetown Travis Danysh 4.26 14.81 Canisius Tim Smith 4.17 14.43 Marshall Mickey Plymale 5.44 15.15 Wright State Eric Oberding 3.52 13.11 Vanderbilt Scott Shapiro 4.19 13.74 Furman Jon Stallsmith 3.99 13.15 California Blake Read 3.32 12.19
How do you get 12 appearances with a 16.66 ERA? Have a coach that apparently understands that you weren't actually that bad.
The ten most overrated by ERA:
Team Pitcher DERA ERA Houston Jesse Crain 4.03 0.00 Texas Tech Adrian Soto 3.60 0.84 Wichita State Steve Haines 4.66 2.28 Birmingham-Southern Tyler Sullivan 3.14 0.87 Delaware Steve Harden 2.94 0.69 George Washington Justin Orenduff 3.93 1.68 Central Florida Von Stertzbach 3.92 1.81 Kent State Ben Galbreath 4.51 2.42 East Carolina Kieran Mattison 3.12 1.04 George Washington Mike O'Connor 4.12 2.06
Again, bear in mind that none of these last guys are actually bad; they just weren't as good as their ERA's would tend to indicate.
And, as with last time, I'll close with a list of all the qualifiers.
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| Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> DERA for Relievers | About the author, Boyd Nation |