No.
For all the talk yesterday in the comments about "Crews should be doing better by his fancy stats" (true!) Parker is the opposite. A .191 BABIP? 85% LOB? 2.8% HR/FB rate?
These are all stats that sort of measure luck. There's skill involved to be sure, and we'll get to it but these also are pulling out luck. Last year the lowest BABIP was .220, .250 being very low. The highest LOB% was 83.6%, 79% being very high. The lowest HR/FB rate was 6.3%, 9.0% being very low. That gives you an idea where things normally sit. He's clearly abnormal and without a compelling reason to say "he's awesome now!" you say it's luck. But luck is magnified early in the season. Is he just normal and it's the vagaries of a handful of starts? Nah ah.
BABIP - 5th luckiest
LOB% - 14th luckiest
HR/FB Rate - 5th luckiest
He's lucky among the lucky. His xFIP is 4.60.
He does induce soft contact and does not get many barrels. Guys don't square up on him well. But that doesn't account for all of this, or even most of it, and with all his walks (so many!) and so few strike-outs (so few!) this can't possibly continue.
But as I often say early in the year though - he doesn't have to give this back. He doesn't have to have a 7.00 ERA over the next 4 games to even it out. Return to form means pitching like he's earned (mid 4.00s ERA) not cosmic balance. He's still a perfectly decent arm in the rotation, especially for this team.
In other news Crews hit a homer bc that's what happens when I say bad things about a guy. Ruiz keeps hitting. Wood keeps hitting for power. Good good. And they beat the Os and that makes me and you happy!
4 comments:
Obviously I agree with you that Parker isn't an ace and I agree with your reasons why, but I do find it interesting that you often assume that apparent good luck will entirely vanish and we should expect Parker's results to match his xFIP going forward but that a decent portion of apparent bad luck is actually signal and that we shouldn't expect it fully normalize.
The majors is a weird situation where there is no going higher but there is going lower. So anyone doing better than expected you can speculate just fine that they will return to the normal range, but anyone doing worse you CAN'T expect that. They might wash out. And for the people that do stay you have a level of Calvinism.
Say if Crews is good enough to hang in the majors all year he'll likely end up with an BABIP at least around .240 but he would prove he is good enough to hang in the majors by likely showing that by raising his BABIP in the next few weeks.
Also we don't have the history that suggests "this is what Crews is" like we do Parker. I might be more inclined to say a player with history but current bad fancy stats should improve than I would a player with no history and good fancy stats.
Fair enough. Certainly I have a different intuition around, for example, LOB% -- which feels entirely luck driven beyond the extent to which it's just good pitchers pitching better -- and the weak vs strong contact stats that support an ERA diverging from a FIP -- which are certainly real for some outliers, and might be real (after heavy regression) for most pitchers.
And variance needn't be, and often isn't, symmetric. Different luck driven stats could behave differently. I'll concede that the asymmetric nature of being selected for playing time is a plausible story for your baseline assumption (ie in general, bad "luck" is more likely predictive of future results than good "luck")
But that feels like a verifiable hypothesis, and not something I've seen anyone dig into. Have you looked into it?
If not, it might be worth setting up an analysis for a test case.
It would be an interesting. We probably would have to use a month+ of data using splits as opposed to 3-4 weeks which we are sitting at now but I think it could be done. There would be things to consider - how do we consider the send down? If they are sent down and brought back up does that effect our evaluation?
I think my actual first hypothesis would be bad "luck" is more predictive of future improvement during a major league season than good "luck" is of future decline because of the "self-selection" of minor leagues/DFA/waivers.
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