scherzerGreat article in the Arizona Republic this weekend detailing Max Scherzer’s apporach to pitching and how he uses statistics.

During a road trip last month, Scherzer was scrutinizing a site that charted umpires’ ball/strike tendencies, viewing it as a piece of information he could bring into his next start.

See that’s just awesome.  There’s tons of resources out there for any pitcher that realizes that baseball has its quirks so it’s nice to know that a player is willing to put in the time to work the system to his advantage…legally.

But are there any stats that Max uses to improve his pitching?  I mean, umpiring sites is just raw data, it doesn’t really require any theoretical baseball—

And earlier this year, he helped rationalize a string of seemingly incongruent performances by citing his batting average on balls in play (BABIP).

For Scherzer, the Diamondbacks young right-hander, the realm of throwing a baseball in the major leagues is more complex than wins, losses and ERA. He embraces baseball’s golden age of information and analysis of advanced statistics.

I think I just came a little.  BABIP?  Really?  That’s remarkable.

Have you ever considered though that a lot of baseball players use but are hesitant to talk about it?  Imagine you’re a big league pitcher after a really tough outing, let’s say you gave up 8 ERs in 4 IP,  and you say something to the effect of, “I’m not worried because these guys got really lucky off of me today.  They can’t keep roughing me up forever.”  Would that make you feel better or worse?

As such, he values the pitching statistics that take fielding out of the equation and recently has become particularly interested in a stat called tERA, which assigns values to every batted ball based on trajectory, velocity and location. He also has taken time to examine his Pitch-f/x data, the information drawn from cameras that trace every pitch thrown in every big-league game.

You would value these things too if you went winless in your first 10 starts because you didn’t get any run support or your defense shat all over you.  True story.

For his first full season in the majors, Scherzer has set the goal of being at least a four-win pitcher. As in, four Wins Above Replacement Player (WARP), a stat that tries to express the difference between a player and an average fill-in type, such as a readily available Triple-A call-up. For context, Chicago’s Ted Lilly and St. Louis’ Adam Wainwright were roughly four-win pitchers last year.

That’s just remarkable.  A guy who doesn’t say he wants to win 15-20 games.  This is a guy who wants to be, in his first full season, worth 4 wins more than some replacement level scrub.

Too bad his eyes are all fucked up.

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