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Which Pitchers Have Been Most Dominant This Season?

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LittleOzzy
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Which Pitchers Have Been Most Dominant This Season? 

Post#1 » by LittleOzzy » Fri May 8, 2009 7:11 pm

With five weeks of the season nearly in the books, which pitchers have been the most dominant in baseball? We have seen a new story on Zack Greinke on a near daily basis, but Johan Santana has been even better, at least according to the statistic I created to identify the game's most dominant pitchers.

SWHIP essentially combines WHIP with strikeouts per nine innings pitched, and it achieves precisely this.

* Tim Lincecum led the big leagues in SWHIP in 2008 with a mark of 0.031. Pedro Martinez has the best career SWHIP amongst starters with -0.020 and also the best single season with -0.507 in 2000.

Below are the top-10 starters and relievers in SWHIP through Thursday's games.

Starters
1. Johan Santana: -0.459
2. Zack Greinke: -0.333
3. Dan Haren: -0.184
4. Tim Lincecum: -0.079
5. Javier Vazquez: -0.026

Relievers
1. Jonathan Broxton: -1.286
2. Brian Bruney: -0.875
3. Scott Downs: -0.728
4. Heath Bell: -0.625
5. Andrew Bailey: -0.471


http://baseball.realgm.com/src_wiretap_ ... is_season/
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Re: Which Pitchers Have Been Most Dominant This Season? 

Post#2 » by J-Roc » Fri May 8, 2009 7:30 pm

How about a stat where you add the most innings pitched to the number of ground ball outs. That would probably be a dominant pitcher.
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Re: Which Pitchers Have Been Most Dominant This Season? 

Post#3 » by youngLion » Sat May 9, 2009 7:27 am

Where's BJ?
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Re: Which Pitchers Have Been Most Dominant This Season? 

Post#4 » by tsherkin » Sat May 9, 2009 4:23 pm

Hmm...

SWHIP = (Walks + Hits + Hit Batters - Strikeouts) / Innings Pitched

I think that misses a lot of different things about the nature of a pitcher.

I'd want some kind of weighted linear metric that counts average IP per start, HRs allowed, groundball vs. flyball percentage...

I suppose it's a decent enough metric, though, I mean it considers all baserunners and then rewards a pitcher for having a high K rate and then pushes it out to a per-inning rate. But yeah, a lot of data is missing. I think at some point you have to jam something about opp run production in there.

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