Historical Twins Pitch-to-Contact Pitchers

[gil4]

Note:  This was originally going to be a reply to one of the Blogosphere blogs in the sidebar, but I couldn't figure out how to put my table into the comments section.  Here is the link to the original: http://twinstrivia.com/2015/12/30/some-historical-twins-pitch-to-contact-pitchers/  

 

Edit: It took some doing, but I finally got the table to work by saving it as a JPG.

 

It wasn't meant to be a serious piece with accurate methodology, but it also produced a list of pitchers who were just bad pitchers rather than pitching to contact.  I decided that I would try to come up with a better list.  I had the following problems:

1. I needed to statistically define a pitch-to-contact pitcher

2. I needed to compile the information

3. I wanted to avoid buying a subscription to Baseball Reference

 

First, for the definition, I decided to go with BB/9 + SO/9.  That should give the number of batters per nine innings that completed plate appearances without making contact.  I could have tried to factor in HBP as well, but that was too much work and I doubt it would have made much difference. I also decided to use a minimum IP of 30, because I had to draw a line somewhere and I wanted to be sure to catch relieves who pitched half a season.  It ended up with only one pitcher below 50 IP making the list.

 

For compiling the data, I used the Baseball Reference play index (http://www.baseball-reference.com/play-index/season_finder.cgi?type=p) with various combinations of SO9 and BB9 as filters (and various combinations of ascending/descending sorts to get all the entries).  Then I dumped the data into an Excel spread sheet, inserted a column to add the SO9 and BB9, sorted by the new column, deleted duplicate entries, and here is the result:

 

 

 

Just a couple of surprises, the biggest being no Radke/Blackburn/Pavano/Joe Mays.  (Pavano is #21, Mays #23; Those four account for 12 entries from 21 to 56)

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Thrylos]

Good stuff.  You even caught  one of the co-hosts of my favorite morning radio show

 

Really surprising not to see Radke there.

Wonder how many of those are in the top 50 of all time.

 

One more thing that would be interesting it to normalize vs. league average BB9+K9.  Back in the days there were really not that many strikeouts.

Bet if you normalize the Radkes and Pavanos of the world will pop out more

[gil4]

That's a good point about normalizing for league averages, but Radke still won't be in the same league as Silva.  That 3.82 SO+BB/9 is unreal.  I'm pretty sure Radke beat that just with SO every year.

 

OK, I looked it up.  Radke's SO/9 was 3.7 his rookie year (2.3 BB/9).  He was 4.6 or higher every other year, and even broke 6 twice.