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October 28, 2009

Changing Speeds

Smoltz, SOMA, and the Series

by Ken Funck

For the first time since 1926, the most powerful offenses in each league will be facing off in this year's Fall Classic, and fans and media have been busy pondering the ability of either pitching staff to hold up. Both the Yankees and Phillies boast deep and powerful lineups that can easily convert a few mistakes into crooked numbers on the scoreboard, and Joe Girardi and Charlie Manuel have surely spent anxious hours trying to determine the optimal way to ensure their best available arms pitch the most and, most important, innings. The countdown to Game One has included speculation on whether the Yankees will stick with a three-man rotation, how much gas Pedro Martinez has in his tank, whether CC Sabathia and Cliff Lee can be effective through three starts in a seven-game series, and whether Manual will continue his careful use of volatile "closer" Brad Lidge.

But according to Sports Illustrated's Tom Verducci, one veteran player believes a radically different approach could be used to combat such deep and powerful lineups. John Smoltz, proud owner of a 15-4 postseason record, surprised Verducci with this description of how a team could best face the Yankees. "I would treat it like a spring training game with my pitchers," Smoltz said. "I would keep bringing in a fresh arm to pitch to them, rather than asking my starting pitcher to go deep into the game trying to get them out two, three, four times. They just wear out a pitcher. I know nobody would ever do it, because what message would people think you were giving your starting pitcher? But their lineup is so deep I would change pitchers every two or three innings, just like you do in spring training."

Verducci's fans at SI may be tempted to call this idea the Smoltz 'One Matchup' Axiom, or SOMA for short. But frequent readers of BP might recognize this as being very much like another SOMA: the "Shorter Outings, More Appearances" usage pattern I wrote about this summer. The idea behind SOMA is to have starting pitchers work in tandem, each pitching three or four innings in a given game every third day—resulting in a similar innings workload for the season, but spread over a greater number of games. The main benefit of SOMA, granting the large assumption that such a usage pattern wouldn't increase arm fatigue and cause injuries or loss of effectiveness, is that it allows pitchers to avoid facing the same batter more than once or at most twice. Most pitchers show a significant drop in effectiveness with each spin through the batting order, so applying SOMA might allow pitchers currently used as starters to continue to work 200-plus innings, with every one of those innings, unlike now, featuring the pitcher at his most effective.

Verducci himself noticed the increased production of Yankees hitters with each successive turn they took against Angels starters in this year's ALCS—for example, their aggregate OBP jumped from .333 to .396 to .421 the third time through. But Verducci describes this as a feature of the Yankees lineup itself and its propensity to wear down pitchers by driving up pitch counts, and mentions that the Phillies have a similar approach. When I wrote about SOMA last July, I looked at pitchers individually and in aggregate and saw similar (but less pronounced) results, but I didn't look at specific hitters or lineups.

So, is Verducci onto something here? Do the Yankees and Phillies produce a more rapid and pronounced erosion of starter effectiveness than other teams, and if so, is this due to their approach? To test this idea, let's take a look at the 2009 numbers for our World Series protagonists in relation to their respective league averages:

     2009 Batting Totals By Times Facing Starting Pitcher
               AL Totals              |  Yankees Totals
                             Changes  |                  Changes
Times Faced   AVG/ OBP/ SLG  OBP SLG  |   AVG/ OBP/ SLG  OBP SLG
Starter 1st  .263/.329/.420           |  .274/.342/.444
Starter 2nd  .274/.336/.444   +7 +24  |  .280/.350/.464   +8 +20
Starter 3rd  .281/.345/.462  +16 +42  |  .283/.362/.497  +20 +53
Reliever     .255/.335/.404           |  .286/.377/.487

               NL Totals              |  Phillies Totals                              
                             CHG CHG  |                  Changes
Times Faced   AVG/ OBP/ SLG  OBP SLG  |   AVG/ OBP/ SLG  OBP SLG 
Starter 1st  .250/.315/.392           |  .246/.319/.431
Starter 2nd  .265/.331/.422  +16 +30  |  .265/.326/.456   +7 +25
Starter 3rd  .283/.348/.458  +33 +66  |  .286/.353/.506  +34 +75
Reliever     .249/.333/.387           |  .246/.339/.418