6-4-2 — an Angels/Dodgers double play blog

Snarky retorts at BTF.

Update: Also at BTF's Transaction Oracle:

Hendrickson

Year           BABIP     ERA
==============================
Career       .301        5.21
2006         .252        3.81

Hmmm, something's different, I just can't quite put my finger on it...

Hendrickson, of course, remains Mark Hendrickson. He's still really tall. He still has no fastball. He still has a few other pitches of varying quality that batters swing out mainly out of boredom.

Update 3: I've shied away from making any kind of snap judgments on these trades, but, as I mentioned in the comments below, Steve (formerly of Fire Jim Tracy) characterized the trade as a replay of the Edwin Jackson and Chuck Tiffany for Danys Baez and Lance Carter trade. Navarro is all of 22, and a solid hitting catcher. At 22, there are plenty of guys who only now got drafted. Mark Hendrickson is 32 and has been consistently below average every single year he has pitched (given enough opportunities). Worse, he's only got one more year after this one of arbitration eligibility, and he won't likely be good enough to earn whatever salary he's liable to make. Toby Hall is nothing special defensively, and offensively, he's an aging (30 years old) nonentity. That is to say, the Dodgers just paid the D'Rays to take out their garbage while getting a hard kick to the groin and a "thank you sir, may I have another" besides.

There's a strong temptation to read into this a Frank McCourt moment of weakness, the idea that if the team's near contention, they need to do everything they can this very instant to help that along. But tossing aside kids like Navarro for garbage like Hendrickson and Hall, and before them, Jackson and Tiffany for Baez and Carter, makes me question the sanity of Ned Colletti. Almost certainly, Hendrickson won't be pitching well the rest of the way for the Dodgers, and if he is, the absence of Billingsley-grade, near-major-league-ready prospects in the Dodgers minors will ensure another year's worth of his mediocrity. Navarro was flawed, to be sure, but this flawed?

Update 4: Two quotes, one from the retired blogger Tom Meagher at Jon's:

"No, it's not something he will keep up," Meagher said. "In fact, it's kind of a sign of a stronger collapse to come. Pitchers do not wake up one morning with the ability to keep batters from hitting line drives. In terms of persistence of skill, LD% is at the bottom with HR/Fly, behind K, BB, and G/F. While the fluctuation Hendrickson is seeing is at the extreme, it is just fluctuation. ...

"Now, I don't mean to imply that it is impossible that Hendrickson has made some major change and that his pitching has improved considerably this year because of a change in his skills. It's not just his LD% that's down, he's also getting more Ks and BBs this season, so one could look at his line and decide that he's changed. However, to do so requires a great deal of naivete and wishful thinking. If he truly had made a significant change - had added velocity, came up with a new pitch - then we might assume there was a reason for the change in his line. But I've heard nothing about that being the case, and the team who would know best whether it was true is the one that just sent him packing. ...

"Performance fluctuates greatly all the time, and the fact that a perfect storm of fluctuations away from his career norms has only yielded Hendrickson a 3.81 ERA should be disquieting enough."

Allowing fewer line drives is not a skill.

Yes, it is.

There's a structural problem when standard statistical methods are used that makes it appear as though LD rate is not under the pitchers control (the same problem exists with BABIP). A pitcher with a high LD rate *has* to get better at it in order to keep pitching in the majors. When he does get better at it, statistically it looks like a regression to the mean.

When you look at pitchers that allow more LD than average as a group, they tend to allow more LD than average year in and year out. When you look at pitchers that allow fewer LD than average as a group, they tend to allow fewer LD than average year in and year out. That evidence suggests that LD rate (or more precisely, keeping balls in play from being hit hard) is in fact part of a pitcher's skill set.

// posted by Rob @ 1:14 PM link  //  7 comments