Glass Half-Full: Mets' Rotation Trending Towards Bounce Back 2010

It’s time to put on our rose-colored glasses and take a look at the “Glass Half-Full”. Today, we’ll take a look at the Mets’ starting pitching staff and some plausible reasons why the rotation may be on an upward trend for 2010. It’s no secret that the Mets starting rotation last season was a hodge-podge of ineffective arms, simply trying to make it through a game without getting injured. The Mets were 14th in the N.L. in ERA, utilizing the likes of Tim Redding, Livan Hernandez and Pat Misch along with some other mediocre starters. Johan Santana, Oliver Perez, John Maine all had injuries that presumably hampered their effectiveness and Jerry Manuel had to rely heavily on Nelson Figueroa and Fernando Nieve to carry the weight. It was not a good season for Met pitching and who could blame any Met fan for being pessimistic about the outlook for the upcoming year. So let’s sprinkle at little pixie dust on the situation and take a look at some positive trends of hopefully what will be a better season.

One of my favorite statistics is Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP) and Batting Average on Balls in Play (BABIP). These two statistics, when used together can help to identify possible trends of what to expect down the road. I’m not going to get into too much detail on these but you can read more about them here (FIP) and here (BABIP). In a nutshell, FIP measures a pitcher’s effectiveness on what he can control: strikeouts, walks, home runs allowed. It doesn’t take into consideration any fielding plays where a position player is involved. It’s useful to look at a pitcher’s FIP and ERA together and we can tell if this pitcher actually pitched better than his ERA would indicate. A pitcher who can dominate with a strikeout can take matters into his their own hands and that would definitely be reflected in the pitcher’s FIP. BABIP is all about the balls that the batter makes contact with that are in play. A hit, an out, a fly ball are all batted balls and as we know some batted balls are caught and some are not. A pitcher with an infield of Swiss cheese is going to take a beating on his BABIP while a pitcher with a fleet footed outfield is going to probably look better. But the main idea behind BABIP is that eventually the law of averages catches up with the player somewhere down the road and his luck will eventually normalize. .303 was the MLB average for BABIP last year and so we can use that as our benchmark to figure out if a pitcher was lucky or not. So by using these two stats, we can get a good idea of who was lucky and should have done worse, (a possible downward trend) and who was unlucky and deserved a better fate (a possible upward trend).

Now that we’ve laid the groundwork, let’s get to the potential pitching rotation for the Mets in 2010: Santana, Mike Pelfrey, Maine, Perez and we’ll assume that either Jonathon Niese or Nieve will grab the last spot. First, let’s look at Pelfrey’s FIP, BABIP and ERA last season.

When we compare Pelfrey’s FIP and ERA, we see that he actually pitched almost three-quarters of a run better than his ERA reflected. We also see that he was pretty unlucky with a BABIP of .321, compared against the .303 normalized figure. So with this data, we can probably expect Pelfrey to have a better year than last season. I threw in a 3 year average because getting that kind of history over the last 3 years is significant because a pitcher could have one season that’s an anomaly. For Pelfrey we see that his 3 year average FIP is still lower than his ERA and he has been more effective than his ERA would suggest. If we even compare last season’s ERA (5.03) to his FIP 3 year average (4.13), we can really see that Pelfrey could be due for a promising season.

Now we’ll look at the other 5 pitchers mentioned above and get their data.

So what we see in the information above is that Santana could be due for a slight tick up on his ERA from last year but history also tells us that this is the way Santana rolls. Look how consistent the difference between his 3 year average and last year when comparing his ERA and FIP. Plus traditionally, Santana’s BABIP tends to be below the norm. With Perez, we can certainly expect improvement as his 3 year averages say he is better than what he was bringing to the mound in 2009. When not injured, Maine looks like his performance will be in line with last year but his BABIP is very low so we may actually see a slight regression. Niese (my candidate for the 5th starter) appears due for a solid upswing and is trending to an improved season if he gets the opportunity. And finally, Nieve…well, he looks like he was pretty undeserving on his fine ERA last year as his FIP was significantly higher and his BABIP was on the low side. If he makes it as the 5th starter, he may not be in the position for long.

Overall, this is good news. We see much of the rotation trending to what could be a more promising season or at the very least, staying the same. The rotation is obviously a cornerstone for success and if the injuries can be kept to a minimum, there is a least some promise of better things to come in 2010.