Wednesday, Baseball Prospectus introduced what must be the most sophisticated measure of pitching performance in the history of these things, including everything you might think of and some you probably wouldn't. From one of the two long introductory articles:
Today, we are transitioning to a new metric for evaluating the pitcher's responsibility for runs that crossed the plate. We call it Deserved Run Average, or DRA. Leveraging recent applications of "mixed models" to baseball statistics, DRA controls for the context in which each event of a game occurred, thereby allowing a more accurate prediction of pitcher responsibility, particularly in smaller samples. DRA goes well beyond strikeouts, walks, hit batsman, and home runs, and considers allavailable batting events. DRA does not explain everything by any means, but its estimates appear to be more accurate and reliable than the alternatives. As such, DRA allows us to declare how many runs a pitcher truly deserved to give up, and to say so with more confidence than ever before.
I am absolutely not qualified to judge the merits of the method. I do applaud the whole team for what seems like an incredible amount of work and thought, plus letting us see behind the curtain. There are people out there qualified for peer review, and one assumes the methodology will only be improved with a few more smarties looking at it.
I do have just one suggestion: Explain Jason Schmidt.
Schmidt ranked among MLB's best pitchers in 2003 and '4, finishing second and fourth in Cy Young balloting. His ERAs were excellent: 2.34 and 3.20. His FIPs were right in line with those: 2.64 and 2.92.
Before today, I would have assumed that those FIPs were smarter than the ERAs, with Schmidt's superior strikeout-to-walk ratio in 2003 suggesting that he did indeed pitch slightly better in the earlier season.
But then here's the DRA leader board for the last 25 years, which begins like this:
1. Pedro Martinez, 2000 - 1.03 DRA
2. Jason Schmidt, 2004 - 1.23 DRA
With Schmidt's 2003 not showing up in the top 25, which ends with Curt Schilling and his 2.27 in 2002.
The two introductory articles are tremendous, but there's one thing missing: a practical example, working through all the math with one pitcher. And I nominate Jason Schmidt and his (apparently) tremendously underrated 2004 season.
