Uncompetitive Starts

Sunday, June 26 2022 @ 05:56 PM EDT

Contributed by: John Northey

Given the recent bad starts I got to thinking about what is a reverse of the Quality Start? I'd call it Uncompetitive Starts.

Quality Start - 6IP and 3 or fewer runs
Uncompetitive Start - I'd say fewer then 5 innings, 5 or more runs allowed (IE: giving your team a very poor chance to win). By making it a double requirement you don't punish guys who go deep but allow a lot of runs, or guys who are openers thus won't get 5 IP under an circumstances. Not making a divider between earned and unearned runs as in the end runs are all that matter.

Manoah: 0 starts this year, 2 starts last year (2 more sub 5 IP but under 5 R allowed). Jays 1-1 in those games last year
Gausman: 2 starts this year, 2 last year. Lost both this year. 1-1 in 2021.
Berrios: 4 this year (including today), 1 last year. Jays 1-3 this year, lost the game last year.
Kikuchi: Just 1 this year (he often doesn't go 5 but is almost always pulled before 5 runs score). 3 last year. A loss in it this year, 0-3 in 2021.
Stripling: 0 this year (hasn't given up 5 runs in a game yet), 2 last year. Lost both last year.
Ryu: 2 this year, 5 last year. 0-2 last year, 2-3 last year

So the Jays this year are 1-8 in those games this year, these same pitchers teams were 4-11 in those games.

For comparison lets check a recent good year, 2015, and a recent bad one, 2019 Just guys with 10+ starts. First 2015...

R.A. Dickey: 2 - his only 2 sub 5 IP that year, although he had 6 more allowing 5+ runs. 1-1 in those 2 games.
Mark Buehrle: 3 - including that nightmare final start with 8 unearned runs in 2/3 IP when he needed 1 1/3 more innings to get to 200. Lost all 3 games.
Marco Estrada: 2 - 1 more was under 3 IP but 'just' 4 runs. Both were losses.
Drew Hutchison: 8 - but the Jays were 4-4 in them somehow - that was a good offense that year.
David Price: his only one was with Detroit, all his Jay starts were 5+ IP, only once allowing 5 runs.
Aaron Sanchez: only once allowed 5 runs, only 1 start sub 5 IP - not the same game.

So just 15 nightmare starts from the Jays core staff in 2015 (12 guys started, but the rest were 1-5 starts). The Jays somehow went 5-10 in those games, pretty good all things considered.

2019

Trent Thornton: 6 games for the rookie, team 0-6 in them
Aaron Sanchez : 4 games, team lost all 4.
Marcus Stroman : 3 games, team 0-3.
Wilmer Font : 1 games, team lost - he was an opener, never going more than 4 IP in his 14 starts
Jacob Waguespack : 2 games, team lost both, another rookie
Clay Buchholz : 3 games, Jays went 2-1 in them somehow (11-10 in both cases against Baltimore) in his career grand finale.
Clayton Richard : Just 1 somehow, could've sworn he stunk up the place more than that. A loss of course in his final season.

So 2 guys just starting their careers, and 2 guys ending it. Normal for a 95 loss team to give lots of chances to kids and old guys hoping to grab lightning in a bottle. In those 20 Uncompetitive Starts the Jays went 2-18 - only getting the 2 wins thanks to the offense going nuts and pulling out 1 run wins both times.

So good team or bad, when your starter sucks like that you are pretty much screwed. 2-18 in the bad year, 5-10 in a division winning year, 1-8 this year, 4-11 for those pitchers last year (2 were with other teams). Net of 12-47 over 4 seasons worth of data = 33-129 record - worse than the '62 Mets, but slightly better than the 1899 Cleveland Spiders (they went 26-128 - at the pace we see here we'd see a team go 31-131 in a 154 game season). So basically when your starter gives you an uncompetitive start your team is the 1899 Cleveland Spiders - the worst team in MLB history. The Jays this year, despite a killer offense, are doing worse than that - an 18-144 pace which is kind of surprising as this teams appears not to quit very often. Go figure. The 2015 team was on a 54-108 pace, still an ugly record but not Spider bad - pretty much the 1977 Jays (54-107 due to a game rained out but not made up).

So basically if your starter has a game that bad he makes your teams odds of winning, even if you are a very good team, drop to 100+ loss territory and more like worst in baseball history level. I'd say that makes it an uncompetitive start. Thoughts? Better names for it? A fairly easy concept to go with Quality Starts. Maybe Blown Start would be good - acronym would be BS then which fits. I'd love broadcasters to say that Berrios has had 4 BS starts this year. Even fans not knowing what they mean would get the idea quickly. Of course, uncompetitive starts also gets that idea across.

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