There’s no accounting for tastes, right? I think Jamie Foxx is the greatest living American actor. Angelina Jolie doesn’t really do it for me (Claire Forlani, however…). I’d rather fall down the stairs or sleep in a tuxedo than listen to a Bob Dylan album. It’s a long-held belief of mine that outdoor activities not named “golf” are mostly for suckers. And so on, and so on. More germane to the Web site at hand is that I’ve always preferred Ivan Rodriguez to Mike Piazza. I know that for most of their careers Piazza has dated more Playmates and put up notably better numbers with the bat in far less accommodating environments. I’m also aware that Piazza’s defensive infirmities have been overstated in many circles. If pressed, I’ll probably concede that Piazza’s offense has been so otherworldly that it more than makes up for his paltry glovework and establishes him as the best catcher of his generation. But I still prefer Pudge. So please allow me to try to account for this particular taste of mine.
I tried to get inside Roger Clemens’ head before his last final start, which turned out to be a mistake. I won’t do that this time; I have no idea how this being his current final start will affect him. None. I do know that, this being Game Four, it is his final final start. There can’t be a next final start unless.you know, I don’t even want to imagine what kind of scenarios Bud Selig and Jeffrey Loria might concoct to bring us a Game Eight.
I do know that he was up in the zone in his Division Series outing against the Red Sox, which was his seventh or eighth “final start” after his final regular-season start, his final start at Fenway Park (which was only his next to final start at Fenway Park), his final start in the All-Star Game, his final start at Yankee Stadium (also just his next-to-final), his final start in a foreign country, his final start in front of a record-low crowd and his final start with nasty heartburn.
This matchup isn’t as bad for the Marlins as Mike Mussina was. Clemens works up and down with the splitter and fastball, and has shown a fairly persistent reverse platoon split since joining the Yankees. With a bunch of right-handed hitters who can drive a good fastball but who will chase once they fall behind in the count, Clemens’ success will again come down to getting ahead in the count and avoiding leaving his fastball up in the zone. There’s not a lot of middle ground here; look for a 3.2-7-6-6-4-2 line, or a 7-4-1-1-2-10 one.
Last time, we cooked up a way to remove park effects when looking at Bill James’ Defensive Efficiency, a stat that measures the percentage of balls in play fielded by a team’s defense. The new metric, tentatively called PADE, ranked teams on a zero-centered scale, showing how well a team performed against the league average with their given schedule. The intent was to more fairly judge defenses against each other rather than punish teams like Colorado and Boston for having to play in more difficult venues.
As stated before, defense can be broken down into many facets, but the three most prevalent parts are park factors, pitching, and actual defensive performance. Since we’ve already figured out how to remove the first one–park factors–the next logical step is attempting to correct for pitching, leaving us closer to a metric that measures only defensive performance.
To do this, we’ll take a similar approach to the first version of PADE, but instead of defensive park factors, we’ll use defensive pitcher factors. The first step is to determine an expected defensive efficiency for every pitcher, based on their career history.