Introducing Starting Pitcher Ratings

There is no sport that is dissected like baseball. There is a statistic for everything. Heck, there are ten statistics for everything if I’m going to be honest about it.

If you look at the “old school” stats, you are considered simple and out-of-touch. But even Bill James has said that the new advanced metrics sometimes go too far. They leave out the human element of the game.

It seems like baseball stat geeks want to try to neutralize everything to be able to remove things like the era in which a game was played, the stadium where the game was played, and even the opponent that was played. They go through a lot of trouble to try to eliminate the things that make baseball interesting in order to be able to compare players. The intent is admirable. The execution is off.

I understand the intent of wanting to neutralize all stats. It sounds like it makes sense, but it’s wrong. Pitchers have to succeed regardless of where they are pitching, who they are pitching against or when they are pitching. It might not be fair, but life isn’t fair. You have to play with the cards you are dealt.

Many modern baseball statistics make it difficult to understand just how good the player is compared to the other players available. There are books written to explain the statistics they want you to follow.

Look at it this way. If you and I are drafting pitchers, and I get the first pick, which pitcher am I going to take? Of course, I’m going to take the best pitcher. It doesn’t matter how much better he is than the second-best pitcher. I’m simply taking the best pitcher. That’s what my rating system tells you.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for understanding the game better. I am always looking to learn. But I want a way to make it easy for people to understand just how good a player is at doing something compared to the other available players.

That’s why my ratings assign a number between 1 and 99. If you see a 99, it means the player was better than 99% of the other players in the category. So, as you probably can guess, a 73 rating means the player was better than 73% of the players in that category. It’s simple.

Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk specifically about my starting pitcher ratings. I currently have three ratings for starting pitchers:

Recent Strength

Recent Strength is my rating of how well a starting pitcher is performing compared to all other starting pitchers in the recent past. I currently consider the recent past to be the past ten weeks. With each past week, I give less weight to the performance. So, a start made five weeks ago, has half the weight of a start made within the last week. I want to know how the pitcher is currently performing.

Is ten weeks the right time span? I’m not sure. These ratings are new and I am analyzing that as we go. I might decide that we should only look back eight weeks, or six. But for now it’s ten and we’ll see how that goes.

Season Strength

This one might be obvious. This is a rating that looks at how a starting pitcher has performed compared to all other starting pitchers over the entire season. A start in early April is worth as much as a start in September.

Composite Rating

The Composite Rating is simply an average of Recent Strength and Season Strength with each rating making up 50% of this final value. That’s it.

So what do these ratings tell us? Recent Strength tells us who is pitching the best right now. Season Strength tells us who has pitched the best over the entire season. And Composite Rating obviously combines these to give you the best of both worlds.

So that’s it. That’s where I’m starting. I will make changes as needed, but this makes sense to me right now. If I find out that the ratings put great pitchers way down the list, I will obviously look at where I have gone wrong. I don’t expect that to happen. I just want to let you know that this is a process and I’m always looking to improve.

I hope you enjoy the ratings. I am glad you are here.