Update on the Bartolo Colon Saberhagenometer

It's, uh, not going well. In our last update, which was also the first update, Bartolo Colon had five wins on the season against just one walk. Since then, though, he's got a 5-10 record and has walked 13 batters, dropping him to 10 wins and 14 walks on the season. His Saberhagen score is, thus, -4. Now, he's closed that gap a little bit recently, with no walks in his last four starts, one of which he won. And if he were to pitch really really well the rest of the way it wouldn't be crazy to see him climb back toward positive territory here. But it's really not very likely. If you want a Saberhagen, you really can't afford three-walk games, or back-to-back multi-walk games, or five starts in a row with a walk. Bartolo's had all three (and none of them overlapped). So, it's not looking good.

However! Five of his walks have been of the intentional variety, and in a sense it's not really fair to penalize him for them. In a sense it is, as it was his pitching that created the need to issue the walk, but they also don't represent his inability to throw strikes or anything like that. So if we define the Modified Saberhagen, defined as Wins minus (Walks minus Intentional Walks), then Colon is still at +1, and has a much more reasonable shot at it. Interestingly, Saberhagen had no intentional walks in 1994, so his Modified Saberhagen score was identical to his normal Saberhagen score at +1. Of course, the Modified Saberhagen isn't really as impressive as the proper Saberhagen, but it's still got some validity.

It's a bit trickier to get a sense of who else has pulled off the Modified Saberhagen, since the "unintentional walks" stat often isn't kept as its own thing. I was able to make a rough stab at it using some custom FanGraphs leaderboards, though, which reveal two other completed seasons that just barely pulled it off: 2005 Carlos Silva (9 W, 9 BB, 2 IBB) and 2014 Phil Hughes (16 W, 16 BB, 1 IBB). Then there's 1997 Greg Maddux, who won 19 games and walked 20 batters, but six of those were intentional, giving him a Modified Saberhagen of +5! As much as all the other Saberhageners put together, counting 2015 Bartolo Colon. Maddux finished second in the Cy Young Award voting that year, to Pedro Martinez's last season with the Expos, and deservedly so, but only because peak Pedro was insane.

Now, this list only includes players who qualified for the ERA title and who played at a time when they keep track of intentional walks. So there may be others who have pulled off the Modified Saberhagen who don't show up here. (I could check for those with fewer innings, but that would just be more work so I'm not going to.) I think it's pretty clear that the Modified Saberhagen is orders of magnitude less impressive than the proper one, even if Saberhagen himself didn't care about the difference. Still, at least Colon's season isn't entirely lost.