Look at Kerry Wood out there all by himself.

http://me.woot.net
My favourite ever quote about Halladay comes from Leigh: "He could throw a ball-bearing through a cheerio from 100 yards."

I'm happy to see that this graph backs up Leigh's observation.

Wow, I knew Ryan Franklin was lucky, but LOOK at that. Lots of walks, not many strikeouts, and a big fat dot. Good thing they have Rafael Soriano pitching 1 inning every few days instead of starting. :)

Interesting stuff. Anyone else notice just how similar the Oakland Big Three are? Zito gave up a few more walks, Hudson a few less homers.

I knew Ryan Franklin was lucky, but LOOK at that. Lots of walks, not many strikeouts, and a big fat dot. Good thing they have Rafael Soriano pitching 1 inning every few days instead of starting. :)

Franklin is an extreme flyballer and had the best defensive outfield behind him in a hitter's park. It was the best possible situation for him.

I don't think those numbers would be as extreme in a different situation, but Franklin got to pitch to his strengths and he took advantage...

I've done something similar to that for a few years now (mostly for fantasy purposes) once I read about DIPS. It's a pretty simple formula so you can do it in your head if you have the ratios handy.

Z = K/9 - BB/9 - (HR/9 *3)

There isn't any evidence that the weighings of the ratios are correct, I just made it up thinking that a K is as good as a BB, and HRs are much worse. I wanted one number that I could use to rank pitchers.

The cool thing about this is that an average pitcher ends up being right around 0 (a coincidence). A result over 3 (11 last year) is an All Star pitcher (Pedro was #1 last year at 6.7).

When you plot the results (Z on the Y axis, ERA on the X axis) you end up with a pretty linear result. From there you can see who underperformed and overperformed on their ERAs.

Basically, it's a cheap version of DIPS or component ERA in a different form.

FWIW - Batista was a hair below both Mulder and Hudson last year at #16 overall among starters (Escobar was #19)

Pistol -- if you're interested, TangoTiger introduced a fielding-independent pitching equation -- FIP = (13*HR+3*BB-2*K)/IP -- that is mentioned here: http://www.geocities.com/tmasc/drspectrum.html and perhaps elsewhere.

A TTO graph for hitters would also be very cool. Adam Dunn would probably be the Kerry Wood of the hitters.

Thanks Greg. I saw that one time and forgot where it was. Looks like HRs are more damaging than I give credit for.

i think you guys mean wayne franklin of the brewers not ryan franklin of the mariners.

Yeah, the "fat dot" was Wayne. Ryan Franklin's not listed.