Comments on: Lowest WHIP for middle relievers, 2005-2007

By: spartanbill

spartanbill — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 17:09:32 +0000

I duplicated your study and restricted it to lefties and found 34 qualifiers with the median WHIP being 1.409. Doing the same survey for righties gave me 102 qualifiers withe a medium of 1.368

Using the top 15th percentile cutoff I found the lefty cutoff to be 1.256, and the righty cut off to be 1.179

Using the top 85th percentile cutoff I found the lefty cutoff to be 1.563, and the righty cut off to be 1.521

I don't know waht to draw from this, perhaps the scarcity of lefties causes a manager to give chances to less effective left handers, or perhaps this simply reflects left-handers being at a platoon disadvantage more than right handers.

I guess that's a topic for another day.

By: spartanbill

spartanbill — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 16:55:56 +0000

Hi Andy

I thought about that too, but I did a quick informal study of run of the mill lefty relievers; Orosco, Groom, Embree, Stanton, Villone, Rincon, Eure and they seemed to have no problem meeting the 100 IP threshold.

By: Andy

Andy — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 16:32:25 +0000

I guess this list is slightly biased against lefties because of the 100 IP requirement, since many lefties are used for fewer batters overall.

By: spartanbill

spartanbill — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 16:24:25 +0000

I wonder if there has ever been a list of 21 pitchers pulled from the P-I that had only 2 lefties.