Is Bailey Ober Unusually Vulnerable to Blowup Starts, Given How Good His Other Starts Are?

[Matthew Trueblood]

It's the one apparent knock on a pitcher emerging as the unlikely ace of a team headed for a second straight playoff appearance. And it might not even be real.

Image courtesy of © Jesse Johnson-USA TODAY Sports

The visitors from an unincorporated community in the northern suburbs of Atlanta put a hurting on Bailey Ober Monday night. Mother Nature provided plenty of fireworks and loud noises, but before those even arrived, Atlanta batters did their share of the same. The Twins' starter might not have pitched past the second inning even if the weather were perfect; he gave up a whopping nine runs in those two frames.

When games like these have happened to Ober, you can pretty readily find Twins fans philosophizing about them, by saying that he's a bit prone to them. The Royals seemed to gain a tell on Ober and lit him up twice early this season. He's generally a very steady starting pitcher, but nearly by consensus, close observers of the Twins believe that he's unusually vulnerable to the blowup start, given how good he is on the whole.

Here's the thing: No, he isn't.

While Ober's blowups might be a hair more ugly than others', it's important to realize that the difference between giving up nine runs in two innings and six runs in three is functionally nil. If you give up five or more runs within the first 12 outs, as a starting pitcher, you're putting your team behind the 8-ball for that contest. Ober's especially visible hiccups are no fun to watch, but they're not more costly than other, less glaring outings. So, I created two statistical categories:

• Strong Starts: Unlike Quality Starts, a slightly old-fashioned metric that counts as "quality" any outing with at least six innings pitched and no more than three earned runs allowed, Strong Starts reflect the shifting priorities of teams playing in MLB in the 2020s. A Strong Start is any outing in which a pitcher works at least into the sixth and allows no more than two runs--earned or otherwise.
• Blowups: The opposite of a Strong Start, and considerably more rare, a Blowup is any start in which a pitcher allows at least five runs in the first four innings. Teams who score at least that many times in those innings win 86,3% of their games, so as a starter, giving up that much in such a short time is as good as giving up the game.

Ober is, as you would guess, excellent at compiling Strong Starts. Among the 77 pitchers with at least 60 regular-season starts in MLB since the start of the 2022 season, he ranks 12th in Strong Start Rate, at 59.7%. This cohort of oft-used starters comes up with a Strong Start 51.9 percent of the time, on average.

Meanwhile, the same group averages a blowup in 17.6 percent of their outings. Ober, though, comes in at 13.9%, 13th-lowest in the group. In other words, he's right in line with where you would expect him to be, given his overall quality and tendency to turn in Strong Starts. Here's a scatterplot showing all 77 of those pitchers' Strong Start and Blowup rates, with the Twins-tied qualifying hurlers highlighted.

While Ober might be more likely to give up eight runs than Joe Ryan or Pablo López, he's no more likely to put his team in an overwhelmingly unfavorable position. In fact, he's less so. Meanwhile, he's more likely than either to set them up with an especially good chance to win. The only pitchers in this group of 77 who best Ober in both Strong Start rate and Blowup rate are Blake Snell, Michael Wacha, and Max Fried.

In other words, don't sweat Ober's bizarre stumbles. Unless and until he has more than an isolated instance of ineffectiveness every few months, he should be regarded as a legitimate top-of-the-rotation starter, albeit without quite the ceiling of some true aces. He's as consistently solid as almost any starter in baseball, and the goriness of his worst defeats don't make them more actually damaging than other hurlers' less dramatic failures.

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[Craig Arko]

I’m not sure what the utility of this is.

[Karbo]

Maybe the Royals tipped off the braves about Ober's tell.

[ashbury]

B-ref's "Game Score" toy (derived from a Bill James idea 40 years ago) shows Ober with the two most putrid starts among Twins for the entire season.  I imagine it's just a statistical fluke - every pitcher sometimes starts the game to find he's got nothing, and often is able to adapt and make it through 6 quality innings but other times he and the catcher can't find the remedy and his day is done early.

A study like this one depends a lot on where you set the thresholds.  Ryan is the Twin who arguably has avoided putridness the best this year, but if you set the Game Score threshold at 50 (i.e. an average major league start) then he looks less stellar.  Pablo Lopez is the one who has racked up an awful lot of substandard starts this year.

No Twin is elite in this regard but even the best in the majors have their occasional clunkers.

Pitching is weird.

[CRF]

He's really only had two bad outings this season, which is pretty damn good overall...but both those starts were off the charts incredibly bad. 

[Rod Carews Birthday]

1 hour ago, Karbo said:

Maybe the Royals tipped off the braves about Ober's tell.

Oddly, there were a number of former Royals on that team. . . .

It's unlikely, but it does make you wonder.

I do agree that even the best have clunkers however. 

[Road trip]

"In other words, don't sweat Ober's bizarre stumbles", indeed.  I'll chalk last night up as an outlier.  Ober looked like he was absolutely drenched in sweat before the first pitch of the game.  I suspect some of his control issues were a simple inability to keep his hands dry enough to properly grip a baseball.  Pitches were either in the heart of the plate or way off the plate... no surprise Atlanta had success.

He's a very large human being.  He may sweat more than an average pitcher.  He may never have to pitch in weather conditions that hot and humid again...

[mikelink45]

We'll take them now, but if they do it to him in the playoffs we're going to have a real question on our hands and I would hope somebody on our team can study what he does. Patterns and body science and figure out what it is that might give away his pitches 

[insagt1]

I have always felt without exception that the most useless marker for a starter is the Quality Start. On what planet has allowing 3 over 6 innings ( an ERA of an unacceptable 4.50) ever been a standard of excellence. How many games are won when you allow 4.5 runs? Used to be for years when starters pitched far deeper into games that any ERA over 3.00 was not good enough. That clearly has changed. I wish they would ashcanthe stat completely or modify it to allowing just 2 runs over 6 innings. Feel completely free to disagree keeping in mind dinosaurs have been extinct for a long time!!

 

 

[LambchoP]

Part of this has to be on Rocco. Yes our bullpen sucks and is overworked so we have to get as many innings out of our starters as possible. But when a guy clearly is having an off day and getting absolutely crushed, leaving him out there to get rocked and basically throwing the game is not going to help with his or the teams confidence. I feel like there have been way too many games this year that Rocco has basically waived the white flag and given up on.

[IndianaTwin]

16 hours ago, insagt1 said:

I have always felt without exception that the most useless marker for a starter is the Quality Start. On what planet has allowing 3 over 6 innings ( an ERA of an unacceptable 4.50) ever been a standard of excellence. How many games are won when you allow 4.5 runs? Used to be for years when starters pitched far deeper into games that any ERA over 3.00 was not good enough. That clearly has changed. I wish they would ashcanthe stat completely or modify it to allowing just 2 runs over 6 innings. Feel completely free to disagree keeping in mind dinosaurs have been extinct for a long time!!

I know others who share your perspective. I don't consider it the best stat for measuring overall excellence, but rather a quick-and-dirty way of considering whether the guy has done his job. In general, good pitchers are going to have a higher percentage of QS than bad pitchers. It's a bit like save percentage in that regard. It's kinda helpful, but doesn't give a full picture of how good a reliever has been. Or even wins. We can point to all kinds of reasons why wins isn't the best indicator of pitcher success, but in general better pitchers are going to have more wins that bad pitchers.

So while not a sole indicator of any kind, I think there is some value of having such a quick-and-dirty measure of effectiveness. In that you'd accept the modification of it being two runs in six innings, it seems you agree at some level.

So if it has some level of helpfulness, the question is what to use as the standard. If I'm remembering the original premise, there were a couple of key questions Bill James was trying to get at. The first is the definition of "quality." I highlighted your words "standard of excellence." I don't think he was intended it as something to count "excellent" stats. That's where the OP started to go with the notion of a "strong" start.

Rather, I think he intended to consider "quality" as "kept the team in the game, gave the team a chance to win, both that day and in the future." And if you think about it, a starter that gives up 3 runs in 6 innings has generally done that. Hopefully the team's offense can score that many, and he generally hasn't overextended the bullpen in a way that affects future games. 

The second part is that as a "quick-and-dirty" stat is has to be easy. To be, it has to use round numbers rather than partial innings. So then, the reasonable permutations to consider are probably 3 runs in 7 (3.86 ERA), 3 in 6 (4.5), 3 in 5 (5.4), 2 in 6 (3.0) or 2 in 5 (3.6). 

Mathematically, 3 in 7 or 2 in 5 may be the best of the bunch as minimums. In practical terms, however, few pitchers go 7. Almost by definition, going a full 7 in today's game, even if you give up four runs, is some level of excellence, just for the fact of saving the bullpen. Conversely, only going 5 is going to overextend the bullpen if it happens regularly, even if you never give up more than two runs. So 6 innings feels like the standard to use in terms of length.

If that's the case, the next question is whether to use 2 runs or 3 allowed as the standard, and here it goes back to the definition -- are we measuring "excellence" or are we measuring "kept the team in the game and didn't shoot the bullpen." If it's the latter, I think 3 is okay. 

A final comment that I have found helpful from others is to think of what a season would look like if every start was a quality start. Not "every start was the minimum for a quality start" (i.e., each start was 3 in 6), but rather a season where the worst start was a 3 in 6. That starter would almost certainly end the season with good overall numbers, because they would have had some starts where they went 6+, even 7 or maybe an occasional 8. They also would have had starts with just two runs, even some ones and maybe an occasional 0 runs. Each of those would push the overall ERA down. I'm sure it's out there somewhere, but I wonder what the ERA is for pitchers if you only count their "quality starts." I wouldn't be surprised it's 3.50 or better.

 

[JD-TWINS]

On 8/27/2024 at 3:05 PM, mikelink45 said:

We'll take them now, but if they do it to him in the playoffs we're going to have a real question on our hands and I would hope somebody on our team can study what he does. Patterns and body science and figure out what it is that might give away his pitches 

Nobody has to steal a sign or see a tendency to hit a waist high change-up. I think it’s coincidental bad pitching v. Royals. If it were able to be picked up in video all of baseball would be lighting him up. Some days a pitcher’s command isn’t there ……..3 terrible outings out of maybe 26 so far this year - understandable.

[JD-TWINS]

Mike, the article clearly states his poor/blow-up starts are in the bottom 13% of 60 qualified pitchers……..3 starts in a season (25 starts) & you really think he’s tipping his pitches?

You don’t think that maybe the Royals are choosing to hunt a certain pitch?

He gave up 7 runs over previous 4 starts - he averaged 6.25 innings per start over those 4 games - 15 hits in 4 games.

In his recent start, he gave up 7 hits & 9 runs in 2 innings……I really doubt that’s a result of pitch stealing. As I mentioned before, at least one of the drives I saw, catching up in the 2nd, was on a waist high change-up. Guys hit those.