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An example of a bit of wackiness in our current system:Tim Hudson was the 24th rated pitcher in 2010. He induced 443 ground balls, which was 1st among pitchers and 60 ground balls ahead of 2nd place. However, 189 of those ground balls were hits, and all of those hits counted as points towards Hudson's final score. Tim Hudson scored better than Mat Latos, David Price, C.J. Wilson, Jonathan Sanchez, among a couple more top pitchers in 2010 based on most league's scoring formats.Other notable pitchers in the top 50 in 2010 that can be argued should not be there, since they weren't on any other league's top 50 that I have seen:27. Edwin Jackson - 1.39, 4.47 ERA33. Gavin Floyd - 1.37 WHIP, 4.08 ERA35. James Shields - 1.46 WHIP, 5.18 ERA37. John Lackey - 1.419 WHIP, 4.40 ERA39. Justin Masterson - 1.50 WHIP, 4.70 ERA49. Randy Wells - 1.40 WHIP, 4.26 ERA50. Jason Hammel - 1.39 WHIP, 4.81 ERAAll of these pitchers were either better than or roughly equal to David Price, Max Scherzer, John Danks, Matt Cain, Jonathan Sanchez, C.J. Wilson, and Wandy Rodriguez last season. Do we really want these kinds of pitchers in the top 50, simply because they issued ground balls?
Awarding outs (ie: IP) is something I am undecided on - I'm honestly not sure what the research says about IP. One would think a pitcher has significant control over their durability, and there is definitely a perception that teams sign specific pitchers for their 'rubber arms' to 'save the bullpen'. However, there are metrics out there such as xIP, because if a pitcher gets knocked out early on bad luck they miss out on innings they might 'deserve', or if a pitcher gets really lucky through say 8 innings, when they 'should' have been knocked out after say 5.
I like this. Either penalize hits allowed or awarding outs recorded would work. It's a matter of coming up with the correct weights so that GB & K are still important parts of the scoring system
Lowering the innings limit may make teams pick and choose which starters to throw each week a bit more strategically, but I don't think that will necessarily solve the 'Niemann vs. Price' dilemma, since they will still be scoring the same.Just an idea, but what if Baserunners Allowed was brought into the picture as a negative stat? This is simply Hits + Walks + Hit Batters, but this might correct the Niemann vs. Price issue, as Price's score would have went down heavily due to this.
This article from BP goes on to say that a pitcher can control whether a hitter hits a fly ball or a ground ball, so I'm thinking maybe adding fly balls to the equation - as stated above. If anyone (Mike I think you volunteered to do some research) would care to do the following for the two starts (Davis - Price) - 2 points for fly balls - outs or otherwise, 4 points for GBs, outs or otherwise, keeping the rest of our scoring the same. Just curious what the difference would be.