5.16.2012 Philadelphia Phillies (18-19) @ Chicago Cubs (15-21)
Pitching Matchup: Kyle Kendrick (0-3, 7.32 ERA) vs. Matt Garza (2-1, 2.56 ERA)
LV Money Line Open: CHC -145
LV Over / Under Open: 7.5
Human beings love to create post hoc explanatory narratives. Sports pundits are especially keen on doing this. One of my favorites involves when a team gets a long layoff after winning a playoff series quickly, because analysts like to use it as either a positive or negative depending on how the team plays in the first game of the next series. It's either "the long layoff got them out of their groove" in the event of a bad game or "the long layoff let them get rested to come out stronger" when the team plays great to start off the next series. This isn't to suggest that these narratives fail to touch upon the truth from time to time. Rather, it is to demonstrate that narrative is nice, but it is more a reflection on the human evolutionary need to idenitfy cause and effect than a statement on the realities of the world.
If this seems like a digression, it is. But only slightly. Kyle Kendrick has never been one of my favorite pitchers. I've always felt he parlayed his luck aided rookie season into his incredulous continued existence in the major leagues, a sentiment crystallized beautifully by a Matt Schwartz tweet back in April. However, his performance this year is unlike anything we've seen from him over the last several. Some like to point to the fact that Kyle finally "got paid" and that he no longer feels the need to try hard. This idea is often linked to the contract year phenomenon: the theory that a player will outperform expectations in the final year of his contract in order to cash in on that performance when he signs a new contract. This is a topic which has been consistently debated, yet it has been mostly debunked by those who have analyzed it. Here again we see the need for explanatory narrative, especially when you consider a bad season during a contract year is typically explained as the player "wilting under the pressure to perform." So is Kyle Kendrick indifferent to his performance now because he signed a 2 year, $7+ million contract in the off season? I doubt it.
Can we find anything in the last two years that would have predicted Kyle's performance would drop precipitously in 2012? Interestingly in 2010 and 2011, Kyle was basically the exact same pitcher according to his peripherals available at Fangraphs:
A good place to look is his Left on Base percentage (LOB%), which calculates the percentage of runners who fail to score upon reaching base. In 2010, his LOB% was 69%, but in 2011 it jumped to 76%. That might not seem like a lot, but think of it this way: in 2010 Kyle allowed about 225 runners to reach base (hits in play [hits - home runs] + walks + hbp, but ignoring runners reaching on error for simplicity). If he allowed 31% of those runners to score (1 - LOB%), then that is about 70 runs. If he allowed 24% of those runners to score (using the 2011 LOB%), then that is about 54 runs. If you were to subtract 16 runs from the 95 earned runs Kyle surrendered in 2010, his ERA would go from 4.73 to 3.95. Now I've dumbed down this analysis quite a bit, but the difference in LOB% helps to account for nearly a full run on his ERA.
The reason this is important is that LOB% can be somewhat random from year to year. In the past it was actually believed pitchers had no control of their LOB%, but the analysis behind SIERA helped show that wasn't actually true. Instead of regressing a pitcher's LOB% to a league average, it probably makes more sense to regress it to the pitcher's career average. Kendrick's career LOB% is about 72%. Do you know what it is this year? 63.5%. As I showed using the 7% difference between 2010 and 2011, that is a humongous big difference. It helps to explain a good portion of why Kyle is sporting a 7.32 ERA this year as opposed to something closer to his 4.50 career ERA (4.86 career SIERA). It also helps to explain why his ERA estimators like FIP, xFIP and SIERA aren't nearly as down on Kyle as his ERA would suggest we should be.
In fact, lets regress Kyle's 2010 and 2011 LOB% to his career norm of 72% to see what happens. As I said, he allowed 225 runners to reach base in 2010, and if 28% of those runners had scored - as opposed to 31% - he would have allowed 7 fewer runs. This equates to 88 earned runs and an ERA of 4.40. Kyle's 24% strand rate - another name for LOB% - in 2011 was better than his career average, so we know his 3.22 ERA is going to get worse. Kyle allowed 133 runners to reach base in 2011. With a strand rate of 24%, that is 32 runs, but at 28% Kyle would have allowed an extra 5 runs. This change raises his ERA to 3.63, a little less than half a run per nine innings, and now the 1.5 run difference between his 2010 and 2011 ERA has been halved. The rest of the difference came mostly from Kyle giving up less home runs, almost entirely due to the drop in fly ball rate since when he did give up fly balls they left the park at a very similar rate in both years.
So we have established that Kyle's 2010 and 2011 were actually quite similar, despite the difference in ERA, and that there didn't appear to be any trending that would suggest a blow up in 2012. So what gives? There are some other differences in 2012 compared to 2011, particularly a higher walk rate (9% from 6% in 2011) and a change in his batted ball numbers: a much higher line drive rate (26% from 19% in 2011) and a much lower ground ball rate (36% from 45% in 2011). Since line drives fall in for hits at a very high frequency, especially as compared to ground balls, that is bad news over the long term. But since Kyle has faced fewer than 100 batters this season (less than 75 of those have put the ball in play), the numbers are not yet very reliable. In fact, considering Kyle's age and the lack of any injury news/concern, we should assume moving forward his performances will resemble his career numbers a lot more than what we've seen from him so far this year, which is what ZiPS and other projection systems have told us. Granted it is the career stats of a 5th starter, a grossly overpaid one at that, but not the complete train wreck he's been early this season.
And to bring this full circle and provide a nice wrapper on it, you can come up with whatever narrative you want about Kyle Kendrick's performance. And depending what happens tonight, you'll have a new performance you can rhapsodize with purported causality. The truth is though that whatever randomness happens tonight or during Kyle's next start, his entire season will probably be pretty predictable, convenient narrative or not.
Oh right, that wrapper I mentioned. So all things considered, you'd probably think Kyle Kendrick vs. Matt Garza would be a matchup of David vs. Goliath proportions, or at least maybe Boom Goes the Dynamite guy vs. the teleprompter. I'm not usually someone who uses the old "the line is telling me something" trick, but isn't the CHC -145 line telling you something?!? That line equates to an approximate 59% probability of the Cubs winning, which superficially speaking seems way too low when KK is going up against one of the better, more underrated pitchers in the NL. And the Cubs are at home! But the simulator puts the fair price money line at closer to around CHC -120, which means there should actually be some value in betting on the Phils. Does it make me feel good recommending betting on the Phils? Yes. Does it make me feel good recommending betting on Kyle Kendrick? Not especially. In Bill Simmon's NFL playoffs betting manifesto the first rule is you never back a crappy QB on the road. Not a direct comparison, but I can't help feeling that at around 11:00pm tonight I'm going to be shaking my fist to the sky, lamenting that I actually recommended placing money on Kyle Kendrick. There are surely worse things I've done in my life...
Go Phils!
O/U note: it started at 7.5, but is now down to 7.0. The simulator puts it at a pretty even split when at 7.0: under the total 46% of the time and over 43%.
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