Mets Looking for Pure Quality Pitching

Quality Starts (QS) is one of the more misleading statistics to measure a pitcher by. To earn a quality start a pitcher must pitch a minimum of 6 innings and give up no more than 3 earned runs. This means that a pitcher can earn a QS in a outing where he pitches a complete game shutout, allows 3 hits, strikes out 10 batters, and walks 1. That pitcher would be very deserving of a quality start. But on the flip side another pitcher could earn a QS by logging 6 innings, giving up 9 hits, walking 4, striking out 2, and allowing 3 earned runs. It’s not difficult to figure out which pitcher had a better performance but the problem with this statistics is that they both earned a quality start and from that standpoint, they are equal. Quality starts is a very kind and forgiving statistic by which to measure a pitcher’s performance.

In response to the leniency of quality starts, Ron Shandler developed a more complete method of measuring the value of a pitcher’s outing through Pure Quality Starts (PQS). PQS looks at a pitcher’s individual start and measures their ability to dominant, display command, exhibit prevention, stamina and to keep away from home runs. A pitcher can earn a maximum of 5 points by exhibiting each of these attributes. A dominant performance is classified by a pitcher getting a 5 and a terrible day would be graded with a zero.

So how does a pitcher earn these points? Well, there are rules attached to earning these points and they are as follows:

1. A pitcher will earn a point if he goes a minimum of 6 innings. If the pitcher fails to complete 5 innings, he will get an automatic zero for the outing and none of the other ways to earn point will count.
2. A pitcher will earn a point if he allows no more than an equal number of hits to the number of innings pitcher. 6 innings pitched and 6 hits would earn a point but giving up 7 hits would result in a zero.
3. A pitcher will earn a point if his strikeouts are no fewer than 2 less his innings pitched. If he strikeouts 4 batters in 6 innings that will earn him a point. But striking out 4 batters in 7 innings will receive a zero.
4. A pitcher will earn a point if he strikes out a least twice as many batters as he has walked. If he strikes out 6 batters and walks 3, he’ll earn a point. If he strikes out 6 and walks 4, he’ll earn a zero.
5. A pitcher will earn a point as long as he has allowed no more than 1 home run in a game. That’s pretty straight forward, right?

The point breakdown can essentially be categorized as follows:

• 5 points = dominant start
• 4 points = very good start
• 3 points = good start
• 2 points = average start
• 1 point = poor start
• 0 points = disastrous start

So ideally, we would want a pitcher to score more 5′s and 4′s than 1′s and zeroes.

So let’s try this out for size and see how it looks with an actually pitching performance. We’ll use a game that Johan Santana pitched last season against the Red Sox on May 22. In that game Santana’s line looked like this:

7 IP, 7 H, 2 ER, 1 BB, 8K, 1 HR allowed.

In this game, Santana would have earned the full 5 points for this dominant start. He met the criteria for rule #1 by pitching more than 6 innings. He met the criteria for rule #2 as he gave up an equal number of hits or less to innings pitched. He met the criteria for rule #3 as he actually struck out more than his innings pitched. Rule #4 was met because he had more than twice the amount of strikeouts to walks and #5 was met because no more than one home run was allowed.

PQS allows a finer measurement of what excellence is, unlike quality starts which can reward mediocrity. With quality starts it’s possible for a pitcher to go the whole season and have a .500 winning pct. and a 4.50 ERA and still have 25 quality starts. Is this really a quality pitcher? PQS is more demanding in its requirements and really helps to identify not only how well or poorly a pitcher pitched in a single game, but also helps us to measure the consistency of a pitcher through multiple starts or even over a whole season.

Which brings us to the Met pitchers. Ah, yes…the Met pitchers! The Mets had 11 different pitchers start games for them last season. Obviously, some of the pitchers were fixtures in the rotation (Santana, Pelfrey) where others were used more randomly (Misch, Niese, Parnell). Below is a breakdown of how each pitcher faired during their starts for the season using PQS. Keep in mind that some pitchers had more data to work with than others simply because they had the opportunity to start more games and the pitchers with lesser starts could have greater variances.

No surprise that Santana offered the Mets the most consistency from start to start with only a 4% chance of having a performance that would be considered poor/disaster. Over the course of the season, he averaged 3.68 points for his starts, putting him on the cusp between very good and good. Nelson Figueroa was the only other pitcher for the Mets that scored in the “good” range with 3.1, but with only 10 starts for the year, it’s difficult to give that much as credibility as we would like. And not surprising that Oliver Perez showed a penchant for poor outing as he was only able to put together an average point value of 2 for all of his starts.

Now let’s look briefly at the cumulative output of all the pitchers together.

From the information above, we can see that for almost every dominant/very good outing the Mets had, there were almost an equal number of poor/disaster outings that cancelled the dominant/very good ones out. And let’s not forget that all too often, we saw dominant/very good outings wasted and wins squandered by bullpen failures to hold leads which is not reflected in the data above. The highest percentage was in the good/average department which illustrates the mediocrity of the Mets pitching as a whole.

By a point of comparison, let’s take a look at the Dodgers’ starters and their cumulative P’QS numbers. The Dodgers had arguable the best starting rotation in baseball, leading the Majors in ERA and notched 95 wins for the year.

The Dodgers starters scored almost 20% more dominant/very good starts than the Mets and almost 10% less poor/disastrous starts. What’s interesting is that the Mets actually had more starts in the 3-2 point range which is really more of a testament to the mediocrity of the Mets’ starters and the excellence of the Dodger’s pitchers.

Since it’s evident that Santana is by far the most reliable and consistent pitcher the Mets have, for fun, let’s see what the team overall numbers would look like if we removed his starts.

When comparing the Mets numbers with and without Santana, notice how the poor/disaster percentage barely changed, going down just a little over a half of a percent without Santana’s starts. But the biggest swings were in the other categories where we see a cumulative drop of almost 15% between the two. In fact, in this scenario the poor/disaster starts outnumber the dominant/very good starts. This is what life for the Mets would look like without Santana.

Granted, that the above information contains significant contributions from pitchers who are no longer with the Mets (Hernandez, Redding). But the Mets haven’t introduced any one new to the rotation to balance out the contributions that Santana makes on a consistent basis. It really illustrates that once you get past Santana, there isn’t much reliability with the rest of the staff. If the Mets have any chance of competing this season, Pelfrey, Maine and especially Perez will need to significantly pick up the slack and take some of the burden off of Santana’s shoulders. If they don’t step up, we will continue to see the significant disparity in talent between the top of the Mets rotation and everyone else and the results in the standings will more than likely reflect that.