SG Senior Writer Ray Flowers' work on baseball has been featured the past two years at SportsIllustrated with his weekly fantasy mailbag column (Ray also writes a weekly column for SI on hockey). The originator of SWIP and ABA (Average Bases Allowed), Ray often proposes counterintuitive ideas that are formed from in-depth statistical analysis that have helped lead to, amongst other things, a championship in the CBS Sportsline Experts Mixed League and a second place finish in the FSTA AL Only Experts League in 2006. .
If you really care, and if you have read this far you probably do, here are the breakdowns by league for the past six years:
YEAR
NL
AL
2006
0.37
0.36
2005
0.36
0.35
2004
0.37
0.34
2003
0.36
0.33
2002
0.36
0.33
2001
0.41
0.36
2000
0.32
0.28
Average
0.37
0.34
Conventional wisdom is that the NL is the “pitchers league”, and while SWIP certainly is too basic a metric to support or reject such a claim, on its surface at least, SWIP appears to support that conventional wisdom (or is it really reflective of “better” hitters in the AL who put the ball in play more? That question cannot be answered here with the limited amount of data we are discussing).
Now that I have enumerated what SWIP is, and how it is figured, I will spend a brief moment detailing its one major flaw. As almost every metric out there that measures anything, SWIP is limited somewhat, because of its simplicity. The major flaw of SWIP is that it favors pitchers without strikeout potential, while often short changing those pitchers who might be better “pitchers.” We all know that this type of pitcher, the one who gets by more on guile than stuff, but SWIP is concerned with “stuff”, so it favors pitchers with power arms. Let me briefly explain what I mean.
Starting Pitchers (SP) have multiple innings to set up batters, vary pitch sequences and the time needed to work themselves out of trouble. This freedom allows SP to pitch with a variety of styles, all of which can be successful. On one end of the spectrum you have knuckleballers like Tim Wakfield and soft-tossers such as Kenny Rogers and Paul Byrd. Obviously these pitchers do not record strikeouts at the same rate as the power pitchers, their stuff simply isn’t overpowering enough, but they still manage to get outs, and in the end that is the name of the game. But SWIP is not concerned with those pitchers who nibble at the strikezone with less than dominating stuff, because when they are “on” they can produce stellar results, but when they are “off”, they simply don’t have the stuff to win. The result is often one of those 5 IP, 10 hits allowed, 4 BB with 6 ER outings that are fantasy killers.
All pitching styles can be successful whether they rely upon the K or the groundball if the pitcher has enough time to work out of “jams.” However, the more often that a pitcher can limit a batters ability to put the ball in the field of play, the more often he has “control” over the at-bat, so everything being equal, a pitcher is better off by not allowing the batter to hit the ball. Hence, SWIP attempts to record how successful each pitcher is at limiting the batters ability to put the ball in play.
As far as Relief Pitchers (RP) go, they operate under a different set of “rules.” RP usually don’t have multiple innings to set up batters and they often come into games when there are already runners on base. They don’t have time to find their grove and work on touch pitches like change-ups and curveballs. They need to come in and throw strikes…now. Therefore it appears that SWIP might be an even more useful tool to pass judgment on pitchers who rely mostly on “hard stuff” (fastballs, sliders and forkballs). These pitchers, as a general rule, tend to congregate more in the bullpen than in the starting rotation where they can come in, throw gas, and not have to worry about pacing themselves.
Therefore, SWIP can be termed a “dominance stat” in that it helps us to track which pitchers are best at limiting hitters ability to hit that ball. So in what you are about to read don’t take my analysis to mean that I think that Boof Bonser is a better pitcher than Brandon Webb because he had a better SWIP mark in 2006. Take the analysis for what it is, and remember this simple axiom…
Everything being equal, the pitcher who limits hitters ability to hit the ball, as well as limiting the free passes he allows, is the pitcher more likely to be consistent from year-to-year.
Again, a better SWIP mark does not mean that Bonser was a better pitcher than Webb in 2006, it just means that Bonser did a better job of producing strikeouts while limiting his walks in relation to his IP. In the long haul that would probably translate into better numbers, though obviously in this case it did not (Webb had a better ERA and WHIP in 2006).
So in PART II, you can read about how this SWIP thing is applied and we can go about trying to find a few pitchers who could be potential sleepers for the 2007 season.
