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October 25, 2005

Call it a Comeback

Best Rebound Seasons

by Ben Murphy

With the recent publicity around the comeback players of the year, Ken Griffey Jr. and Jason Giambi, I thought it would be interesting to look at an objective way to pick these awards. So, I set up a basic structure for finding players who had established a notably high level of performance, then suffered a setback in performance and rebounded to be solid contributors again.

This bounceback comes in three steps: the first peak, the valley and the second peak. In order for a player to qualify for our 2005 Objective Rebound Award (or ORA, because we love acronyms and we're hoping that the winner has that special something about him), the second peak should come in 2005. For the initial run, we're only going to consider players whose first peak came in 2003 and valley came in 2004. Later, we'll open it up to look at larger windows, up to five years from peak to peak. Although the subjective Comeback Awards are given out by league, we'll make no such distinction here, to avoid having to split playing time across leagues.

Overall, the level of the rebound is measured by the distance dropped plus the distance gained back, or (Peak 1 VORP - Valley VORP) + (Peak 2 VORP - Valley VORP). Although this method would leave us open to having some rebounds that appeared large because of one large peak on either end, there are so many seasons in question that the highest rebounds end up having large peaks on each end. Once we start to limit the sample sizes down to three consecutive years ending in 2005, you get some interesting "rebounds." Although we could place limits on these, it would take arbitrary cut-offs, and since it's an inexact science and simply a toy at this point, we can eliminate these by sight as they come up.

Since the nature of pitching entails more fluctuation than hitting, the two are separated in these charts (also perhaps because cross comparison isn't necessarily helpful). In the data, I've included the year of each first peak, the valley and the second peak, in addition to the player's VORP total for that year. I also thought it might be interesting to see the player's age and playing time in the valley season (indicated by a *), to help indicate possible causes for the drop off, so I've included total IP or PA for pitchers and hitters, respectively.

Here is the data for three-year rebounds that covered 2003-2005:

Hitters

NAME            AGE*   YEAR1  PEAK1   YEAR2  VALLEY   PLAYING* YEAR3  PEAK2    REBOUND
Jason Giambi    33     2003   63.487  2004    4.56    322      2005    58.338  112.705
Richie Sexson   29     2003   58.66   2004    7.297   104      2005    56.158  100.225
Morgan Ensberg  28     2003   43.207  2004   11.416   456      2005    61.516   81.89
Carlos Delgado  32     2003   83.279  2004   41.37    551      2005    71.63    72.169
Alex Rodriguez  28     2003   96.319  2004   62.323   698      2005    99.708   71.381
Derrek Lee      28     2003   51.61   2004   43.325   688      2005   105.896   70.856

The graph makes the trend is easily visible. All six of these guys have huge "V" shapes in their graphs for the period from 2003 to 2005, with the exception of Derrek Lee, who gets on here because his 2003 VORP is higher than his 2004 VORP, and his 2005 VORP is the best in the league and 22nd best since 1972 (this graph also shows six seasons better than his, Alex Rodriguez in 1996, 2000 and 2001, Giambi in 2000 and 2001 and Carlos Delgado in 2000). There aren't too many other interesting stories, as basically all of these hitters were good to great in 2003, suffered setbacks in 2004, and rebounded to different extents in 2005.

Pitchers

NAME            AGE*  YEAR1  PEAK1   YEAR2  VALLEY   PLAYING  YEAR3   PEAK2   REBOUND
Esteban Loaiza  32    2003   77.982  2004    2.763   183      2005    42.156  114.613
Hideo Nomo      35    2003   56.23   2004  -23.199   84       2005   -16.831   85.797
Shawn Chacon    26    2003   13.737  2004  -11.875   63.3     2005    37.382   74.87
Derek Lowe      31    2003   24.436  2004  -11.536   182.6    2005    25.27    72.779
Andy Pettitte   32    2003   31.816  2004   16.161   83       2005    72.478   71.972
Kevin Millwood  29    2003   37.552  2004    9.309   141      2005    52.296   71.229