The 27-Batter Start

I have a theory, which I have and which is mine. It goes like this: these days, when a Major League Baseball pitcher starts a baseball game, they tend to face approximately 27 opposing hitters before exiting the game. That, of course, is the number of outs in a game, and therefore the number of batters faced in a perfect game, or another game in which the pitcher "faces the minimum" over nine innings. The theory is, in other words, the idea that a starting pitcher typically has the stamina to face a number of batters that would allow for a complete game if and only if he allows exceptionally few of them to reach base. I developed this theory just from noticing, when looking over the statistics of various baseball games on MLB Gameday, that no matter whether the starter for a team in a game pitched really well, say 8 strong innings, or really poorly, allowing several runs and a bunch of hits over 4 or 5 innings, they always tended to have "batters faced" numbers right around 27.

I just did a little bit of analysis that suggests I'm sort of on to something. R.A. Dickey has made 21 starts for the Mets this year, ranging in length three complete games (for one of which I was in attendance) to a 4.1-inning blowout in the Atlanta rain in April. On average he has pitched 6.92 innings, which means he's recorded an average of 20.76 outs. The standard deviation of his "outs recorded" number for his 21 starts is 3.75, which is 18% of the average number of outs he's recorded. Now let's consider how many batters he's faced: the maximum is 33, twice, neither in a complete-game effort; the minimum is 23, also in that dreadful Atlanta start; the average is 27.33 per start; and the standard deviation is 2.85, which is 10.4% of the average. In other words, he averages approximately 27 batters faced per game, just as I suspected, and there's much less variance in how many batters he faces than in how many outs he records, just as I suspected.

Here's another way to look at it: a graph of batters faced as a function of outs recorded.

In case the text is illegible, that's the equation for the trend-line and the coefficient of determination, roughly the percentage of variance in the dependent variable explained by the independent variable. From the equation you can see that each extra out recorded on average only results in an extra half of a batter faced. From the R-squared coefficient you can see that innings pitched explains only 48% of the variance in batters faced. That's basically another way of putting my theory, that the number of batters faced in a game tends pretty strongly toward 27, in starting assignments good and bad.

Now, of course, this is only one pitcher, and perhaps an unusual one, over about two-thirds of a season. But still, I'm pleased to have a bit of empirical evidence in support of my extremely anecdotal theory.

Don't Look Now, but the 2013 Mets Might Be Good

Matt Harvey pitched his first Major League baseball game for the Mets tonight in Arizona, allowing three hits and three walks while striking out 11 in 5.1 innings of work. He was also 2-2 with a double at the plate, and since he had at least one chance in the field and didn't make any errors has a 1.000 fielding percentage. Obviously the main point is the 0.00 ERA and the 18.6 K/9 rate, and the real main point is just that his stuff looked amazing and he didn't appear remotely fazed by finding himself in the Majors. His 11 strikeouts in a Major League debut are tied for 7th-most in baseball history, and the most since the 14 from Stephen Strasburg. Perhaps you've heard of him? Anyway, Josh Edgin, another Mets rookie from the 2010 draft class, then came on in relief and pitched a perfect 5 outs of baseball.

All of this has me thinking that the 2013 New York Mets might be a pretty good baseball team. Hopefully Johan Santana will be able to pitch a full-ish season of Johan-ish baseball, with an extra year removed from his surgery. R.A. Dickey, at this point, is just reliably good, his recent slump notwithstanding. Jon Niese appears to be getting better and better. Harvey really looks like the real deal, although I'll admit it's a bit too soon to bank on that. And having options of people like Dillon Gee and Jenrry Mejia for your fifth starter's spot isn't bad. I continue to believe in Bobby Parnell as a high-quality relief pitcher, if not really someone who can be a closer (which I'm still not sold on!). Edgin looks fantastic. The infield of Wright/Tejada/Murphy/Davis should still be intact and, as none is particularly old, still getting better. (Although it's rumored the Mets are shopping Murphy; perhaps he might be replaced by Jordany Valdespin, who's been electric in his brief stint with the Mets so far.) Maybe we're not talking 1986 Mets good, not yet anyway, but it feels like it's shaping up to be a team that has a real chance of contending for the postseason from the beginning of the season. And what with the 2012 team's recent 1-and-12 skid seeming to put the ice on that team's chances of contending, I think it's time to start getting excited about next year. Because next year looks exciting.

The Un-Peaceful Society

Actually, I have one more thing to say about the recent massacre in Colorado, or more specifically the "debate" about guns that's played out in its aftermath. The right-wing's line whenever somebody gets shot is that the way to avoid gun violence is not to try and get rid of guns, but to make sure that guns are everywhere, that all the Good Guys have guns, too, and can therefore shoot the Bad Guys when they come around with their guns trying to kill people. There are lots of problems with this argument, some of which involve the idea that it doesn't work, and some of which involve the idea of this approach plunging the country gleefully into the war of all against all, in which, as a rather famous political philosopher once said, the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. I suppose my current point is related to that second basic argument, in particular riffing on the "nasty" and "brutish" parts.

Because, in this world of universal armament the conservatives envision, the life of man, or woman, is inevitably violent. There is absolutely no room for anyone to live a peaceable life in it. The message sent by that social structure to every single person living in it would be, the only thing keeping you safe from violent death is your ability to inflict violent death on those people hoping to inflict it on you. Everyone very literally has a gun to their heads, and must perforce learn to point a gun back, credibly, if they want to live. Now, I personally do not want to know how to shoot a gun. Many people may not share my tastes in that regard; some of them might even find my not wanting to know how to shoot a gun morally objectionable. Obviously, I disagree with them. But the point is, a world in which I am not given the choice to recuse myself from the world of firearms is an extremely coercive world, a world in which I am being forced against my will to learn the craft of violence and to be prepared to become a killer. A killer in self-defense, maybe, but a killer nonetheless, and I'd rather like to go through my whole life without doing that. Maybe it'll happen to work out that I can't, but I'd like to be given the opportunity to try. And in the conservative vision of guns everywhere, I'm not allowed to. I have to be ready, willing, and able to kill someone, because I have to anticipate that someone will try to kill me.

That, to my mind, would be a horrible society to live in.

Gun Control, Please!

So apparently there's been another one of these random mass shootings, this one in Colorado. I have nothing to say on the subject, except that a) it's obviously a horrible tragedy, and b) can we please, please, please stop pretending that the abject failure to have any kind of meaningful gun control didn't contribute to these people's deaths? And the deaths of scores of other people who've been killed in previous such shootings? And, having so admitted, can we please decide that the whole insane gun rights thing just isn't worth all the dying? Please?

Fire Dan Warthen

The Mets' bullpen woes are, at this point, getting ridiculous. Their bullpen this year has lost 19 games, and while I don't think bullpen wins mean a damn thing and I tend to agree with the modern critique of wins and losses I do think that relief losses are meaningful. Relief pitching is an inherently situational thing, and the only way to get a loss as a reliever is to enter a game that your team is not losing and give up enough runs that they are. That's a bad thing, it's always a bad thing, and having 19 of the team's 44 losses come from the bullpen is absurd. For most of the year the starting pitching has been outstanding, primarily on the strength of Johan Santana and R.A. Dickey, but of late even they have been enduring a rough patch. In my opinion, it's time to get rid of pitching coach Dan Warthen.

Now, it's probably not necessary to go into much detail about why Warthen should be fired; he's been there since mid-2008, during which time the results have been sadly lacking, and for the last couple of years the pitching's been suspect. But just for fun I took a slightly thorough statistical look at the Mets' bullpen under Warthen, that is, from the second half of 2008 onward (a slightly rough proxy, since he got there in mid-June, but it'll do). Over that time-span, Mets relievers have had an ERA of 4.186. The total ERA for National League relief pitchers in that same time is 3.906. Mets relievers have struck out 7.7 per 9 innings, while walking 4.1 and allowing 9.0 hits; National League relievers as a whole have struck out 8.0, walked 3.8, and allowed 8.4 hits per 9. If Mets relievers had performed at league-average levels, they would have given up 55 fewer walks, 110 fewer hits, struck out 68 more batters, and allowed 68 fewer runs including 59 fewer earned runs since Warthen joined the Mets. That's around 6 or 7 wins below average for Mets relief pitching under Dan Warthen, and that's before you account for the fact that the bullpen typically pitches in higher-leverage situations so those runs below average might be even more damaging than that. (Oddly, the Mets seem to do a bit better than the league as a whole at not giving up home runs from the bullpen, though the difference is minute.)

So, long story short, the Mets' bullpen has been lousy under Dan Warthen. There's a pattern to it, namely god-awful in 2008 (which can arguably be blamed more on the loss of closer Billy Wagner, but it's just true that the team's famous bullpen troubles that year were entirely a second-half phenomenon), good in 2009 and 2010, bad in 2011, and god-awful in 2012. I'm not sure what to make of that pattern in terms of judging Warthen, but I think that at this point it's clear that, at the very least, he's not providing any value about replacement pitching coach. There's no reason not to ditch him. They should do so at soonest convenience.

Confusion over Compulsion

In the first third of the twentieth century, the Supreme Court occasionally was inspired to state that certain acts of Congress which were undeniably exercises of its enumerated powers, like the power to tax and spend for the general welfare or the power to regulate interstate commerce, were nonetheless unconstitutional because they touched upon subject areas inappropriate for federal consideration. For instance, a tax on the interstate shipment of goods manufactured using child labor was unconstitutional, notwithstanding Congress' clear power to tax things that get shipped across state lines, because (apparently!)

regulating child labor was just something Congress wasn't supposed to do. Likewise, the Agricultural Adjustment Act was struck down in 1936 because regulating agriculture was something Congress wasn't supposed to do, and a certain bundle of taxes and spending were considered to be regulations of agriculture. This approach was, of course, pretty much abandoned after 1937 in all post-New Deal jurisprudence, and for good reason: it was silly, it was confusing, and it lacked any foundation in Constitutional text. How is one to know, looking at the text of the Constitution, which subject areas are or aren't appropriate for federal treatment? Moreover, if Congressional exercise of its enumerated powers is subject to such censorship on the basis of old-fashioned notions of propriety, the government will be perpetually unable to meet the needs of a changing world, not because it lacks the authority to do so under the Constitution, but because the needs are new and people are unaccustomed to thinking of Congress using its powers in that way. Categorical federalism, as it was called, was a mess, and was rightly abandoned.

But in the last third of the twentieth century, and continuing right through June 28th, 2012, the Court has developed a new standard by which to judge Congressional exercise of its taxing, spending, and regulatory powers against some notion of state sovereignty: the compulsion test. The basic idea is that Congress may not compel or coerce states to behave a certain way. South Dakota v. Dole, among other cases, upheld a law in part by finding that it wasn't coercion. New York v. United States struck down one provision of a law on the grounds that it was compulsion of state legislatures. Printz v. United States held that Congress couldn't conscript state law enforcement officers into the administration of federal regulations. And, a few weeks ago, the Court in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius held that changing the conditions of a federal/state jointly-administered spending program could amount to coercion, if the dollar figures involved were big enough. In my opinion there's a tremendous amount of confusion in this whole area, mostly because the Court has declined to pursue one of the two clear, coherent paths of reasoning on the issue.

The Mets Are Idiots

Finally, a break from con-law! Unfortunately, it's not a particularly refreshing break. The news today is that the Mets fourth starter, Dillon Gee, has been hospitalized with numbness in his fingers, then was discovered to have a blood clot in his pitching shoulder, and then hit the disabled list. This is bad; Gee has sported a 4.10 ERA thus far this year, but as that's around his career ERA and his strikeout and walk rates have both improved dramatically this year, it looks like he's really been pitching better than that. For instance, SIERA, considered by many to be the most sophisticated peripherals-based ERA estimator, pegs Gee as a 3.53 pitcher this year. That's what we call "good." The Mets have already been dealing with one rotation spot whose designated occupant, Mike Pelfrey, is out for the year, and while Chris Young has filled it rather well so far it's a real shame to have another one. (Obviously, the more major concern goes something like "blood clot?!? Eeeep!" with the focus being on his own personal health.) The Mets' plan is apparently to use Miguel Batista as Gee's replacement; Batista has a 4.92 SIERA to go along with his 4.20 ERA this year. This will not end well, although I guess it has the upside of getting Batista away from the eighth innings of games started by R.A. Dickey, Johan Santana, or Jon Niese.

But consider that it didn't have to be this way. The Mets have, after all, a highly regarded pitching prospect who has prospered this year as a starter for their AAA team, the Buffalo Bisons. No, I don't mean Matt Harvey, although that description fits him too; he's widely regarded as not quite ready yet, and I have no way of second-guessing that judgment. I mean Jenrry Mejia, rehabbing from the Tommy John surgery that knocked out his 2011 season. Overall, in his journey from the High-A St. Lucie Mets to the AA Binghamton Mets to the AAA Bisons, Mejia made 7 starts this year, with a combined line that looks something like 35.0 IP, 26 H, 15 R, 10 ER (although admittedly the 5 unearned runs were on his throwing error), 9 BB, 23 K, 3 HR. That's a 2.57 ERA, a 5.9 K/9 rate, a 2.3 BB/9 rate, an 0.8 HR/9 rate, and a 2.55 K/BB rate. All of that is pretty damn good. His strikeout rate was lower at Buffalo, but that's largely because he appeared to be working on pitch efficiency, getting through his short-ish starting assignments with sparklingly low pitch counts and dozens of ground ball outs. Pitch efficiency, of course, is something you look for in a starting pitcher. As is the possession of multiple effective pitches, which Mejia has.

So, what did the Mets do with poor young Jenrry? They converted him to a reliever, of course! The thinking behind this was something about how the Major League team's bullpen has sucked this year, and they want help there, and people have always been tempted to think of Mejia as a reliever anyway, for some strange reason. Anyway, it hasn't gone very well. In ten relief appearances with Buffalo, Mejia's thrown 11.2 innings, allowing 11 runs, 10 earned, on 16 hits, 2 of which cleared the fence, walking 8 while striking out just 6. Those numbers make Miguel Batista look like a good pitcher. And now, of course, that they've put Jenrry in the bullpen, he's not available, not immediately anyway, to come up and start games for the Mets. Which they could use him to do. Because the alternative is Miguel Batista.

In any event, I do see Mejia as a starter down the road, so here's hoping they realize that just because the bullpen has been so awful and just because they had been having a period of relative rotation stability doesn't mean they should mismanage their players. That means stretching Mejia out to be a starter again, and then down the road when Batista's struggles have reached the point where they can't be overlooked any longer, bring him up. As things are, though, I'm having trouble not considering this a big fat error on Sandy Alderson's part.