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Saving The Pen

Posted by Steve Lombardi on December 19, 2007

Here's an interesting little report that you can run with Baseball-Reference.com's Play Index Pitching Game Finder - the number of games, in this case, during 2007, where a team had their starting pitcher go six innings or more:

 Tm  Year Games Link to Individual Games
+---+----+-----+-------------------------+
 CLE 2007   123 Ind. Games
 CHW 2007   123 Ind. Games
 BOS 2007   108 Ind. Games
 LAA 2007   105 Ind. Games
 TOR 2007   104 Ind. Games
 ARI 2007   103 Ind. Games
 OAK 2007   102 Ind. Games
 MIN 2007   102 Ind. Games
 HOU 2007   102 Ind. Games
 SFG 2007   101 Ind. Games
 SDP 2007   100 Ind. Games
 PIT 2007   100 Ind. Games
 MIL 2007   100 Ind. Games
 TBD 2007    99 Ind. Games
 PHI 2007    98 Ind. Games
 COL 2007    98 Ind. Games
 CIN 2007    98 Ind. Games
 CHC 2007    98 Ind. Games
 SEA 2007    96 Ind. Games
 NYM 2007    96 Ind. Games
 NYY 2007    93 Ind. Games
 ATL 2007    91 Ind. Games
 DET 2007    90 Ind. Games
 LAD 2007    89 Ind. Games
 BAL 2007    89 Ind. Games
 STL 2007    87 Ind. Games
 KCR 2007    80 Ind. Games
 FLA 2007    73 Ind. Games
 WSN 2007    72 Ind. Games
 TEX 2007    69 Ind. Games
Games found: 2,889.

Note:  This does not reflect the "quality" of those six-plus innings in a start.  But, it does tell you which team's starters ensured that their bullpen was not over-worked last season.

Related posts:

    Saving Their Own Wins

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 19th, 2007 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Game Finders. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

6 Responses to “Saving The Pen”

  1. David in Toledo Says:

    It would be interesting to correlate this column with the team's won-loss record. I know New York Mets fans were beside themselves because their team was trying for the playoffs while ranking 20th. If you have a really deep and strong bullpen (LAD?) maybe you can overcome this handicap, but of course that wasn't the 2007 Mets.

  2. Correlation is .257 which is pretty low. 1.0 would mean there is a perfect positive correlation while -1.0 would mean there is a perfect negative correlation. .26 means there is a positive relationship but not very strong. Things like bullpen strength, runs created and your point about this measuring long starts not necessarily quality starts are explantions. Look at the White Sox at 123- they only won 72 games. The Yankees, Nationals and Rangers were the only teams that won more games than they had games that their starter made it to the sixth.

  3. OscarAzocar Says:

    Team records in 2007 in games when their starter went 6 or more innings.

    TEAM W L %

    NYM 69 - 27 0.719
    PHI 68 - 30 0.694
    LAD 61 - 28 0.685
    NYY 63 - 30 0.677
    BOS 73 - 35 0.676
    TOR 70 - 34 0.673
    CLE 82 - 41 0.667
    LAA 70 - 35 0.667
    SEA 64 - 32 0.667
    CHC 65 - 33 0.663
    SDP 65 - 35 0.650
    ATL 59 - 32 0.648
    STL 55 - 32 0.632
    ARI 64 - 39 0.621
    DET 55 - 35 0.611
    COL 58 - 40 0.592
    MIL 59 - 41 0.590
    FLA 43 - 30 0.589
    MIN 60 - 42 0.588
    PIT 58 - 42 0.580
    KCR 46 - 34 0.575
    OAK 58 - 44 0.569
    BAL 48 - 41 0.539
    HOU 55 - 47 0.539
    TEX 37 - 32 0.536
    TBD 53 - 46 0.535
    WSN 38 - 34 0.528
    SFG 53 - 48 0.525
    CIN 51 - 47 0.520
    CHW 62 - 61 0.504

  4. Wow, interesting about CHW tying for the most 6+ inning starts, but having the worst record in those games. It almost makes you think they'd have been better off pulling some of their starters, except of course their record in the other 39 games was much worse.

  5. Speaking of 6 inning starting pitching, I remember how Sid Fernandez used to have the most amazing first 4 or 5 innings only to louse it up before the 6th or 7th. I remember thinking he'd be Cy Young if games were only 5 innings long.

  6. I found some stats on that for Sid Fernandez, and you are most certainly right about that. I'll make a post on it.