Quality Verification from Baseball Prospectus

Chris Carpenter (Image via Wikipedia)

Just finished reading an article on Baseball Prospectus by Jay Jaffe, Prospectus Hit and Run: A Quality Stat, Better than Wins. Lots of amazing information in this article, beware of lots of statistical analysis. Since it seems that we are in this new era of pitching over hitting, understanding the effect on winning that a starting pitcher’s ability to go deep into a game and hold the other team to only a few runs or less has never been more important.

Here is my favorite part of Mr. Jaffe’s article:

“pitchers delivering quality starts have left their teams with excellent chances of winning. Since 1950, teams have won at a .677 clip in games where they received a quality start, with the range running from .642 in 1968 to .717 in 1950.”

So, this re-affirms what I have been saying all along: Quality Starts Lead to Wins.

Related articles

• A statistician rereads Bill James (stat.columbia.edu)

Quality Starts – Why?

Back in 1985, a Philadelphia sportswriter introduced the world to the ‘quality start‘. Nowadays, I have gotten curious, do quality starts in Major League Baseball lead to wins? Baseball Prospectus looked at this in 2002. So lets set up the criteria and the goals of this project?

Definition: quality start

A quality start is awarded to a starting pitcher who completes at least six innings and permits no more than three earned runs.

Many have complained that this result, 6 IP and 3 ER, gives a starting pitcher a 4.50 ERA. Well, in 2006, that would have been better than the league average for all pitchers in the American League (4.64). Also, Bill James discussed this in his 1987 Baseball Abstract, and noted, wisely, that this is only one of the many possible outcomes, and in fact, was the least likely of all of the outcomes.

So what are we trying to prove here. Well, I’d like to answer two questions.

1. Does a quality start by a starter give his team a better chance to win? Do some teams take better advantage of this than others?

2. Will teams with more quality starts win more consistently and get in the playoffs? How will that translate in the playoffs? Will the team with the most QS in the playoffs win it all?

That is the project. In the coming days, I will get us up-to-date on the results for the first few weeks of the season, start the Daily QS Roll, and take a look at the Boston Red Sox (my favorite team) and their hot start on the mound…..

More to come. (Quality Start leaving the Blog, headed for the Clubhouse)