Chronicles of the Lads

THE MEAK INHERIT
Adam Kennedy, suffering his worst season in years and the slings and arrows of impatient Angel fans, came through with a pinch-hit single last night that won the game 5-4.

Of course, for awhile in the game, it didn't seem like such heroics would be necessary. Jered Weaver pitched very well through five innings, allowing only two hits while walking one and striking out three (it was actually four, but it took Dale Scott at least three or four pitches to realize that sliders down the middle count as strikes, which cost Jered a backward K of Grady Sizemore to lead off the game).

But in the sixth inning, the wheels fell off, and Jered allowed more runs than he had in any previous game. No excuses or explanations necessary; he just had a bad inning against Cleveland's best hitters, and they hit the ball hard and capitalized.

There is one thing about Jered which concerns me, however, and was alluded to on last night's telecast:

Year  IP
2002  92.0
2003 133.3
2004 144.0
2005  76.0
2006 142.3

With his next start, Jered will enter uncharted territory as far as his season-long endurance goes. How will he perform?

We don't know, of course. I mean, we don't even know how he would continue to perform even if at full capacity, to trying to guess if he's not at full capacity and then trying to figure out how he might pitch in such a state is a fool's errand.

We can look at how other Angel pitchers have done in recent years while crossing into new innings-pitched thresholds. Ervin Santana, for instance, threw 154 1/3 innings in two leagues in 2003, a seasonal total he did not match again until last season, when he threw 192 innings in three levels, plus nearly ten innings in the postseason.

Thanks to David Pinto's sweet Day-by-Day Database, it's a snap to see how Ervin pitched before and after hitting the 154 1/3 IP mark (actually, just a bit above that -- and not including postseason):

                    K/BF  BB/BF  HR/BF  H/BF   FIP   ERA
First 97 2/3 IP     .161   .080   .032  .234  4.66  4.52  
Next 36 IP          .181   .075   .019  .231  3.72  5.00

FIP is Fielding Independent Pitching, a quick guide as to how a pitcher does based solely on what he is directly responsible for -- strikeouts, walks, and home runs. I show it here to demonstrate that while Ervin's ERA went up over the last few starts of the year, in many ways he actually pitched better, as you can see from his peripherals above.

Any number of things can cause a pitcher's FIP and ERA to diverge. The first thing I checked was the score rate against Ervin for each period -- basically, how often did someone who reached base (excluding home runs) score? Over his first 97 2/3, Ervin allowed 128 men to reach base (again, not counting home runs), and allowed 39 of them to score. That's 30.5%. (The league average was 29%.)

But over his next 36 innings, he allowed 17 of 49 baserunners to score, 34.7%. That indicates to me that while he was pitching better overall, when he did give up hits, they were congregated closer together, which led to more runs being scored.

Over time, that sort of thing will even out, I suspect. In the short term, is it possible that Ervin had reached some level of fatigue that caused him to lose focus or pitch poorly from the stretch? I don't know. It's possible, but it could also just be random variation, luck, a bad bounce or two, etc.

How about John Lackey?

                    K/BF  BB/BF  HR/BF  H/BF   FIP   ERA
First 83 1/3        .138   .062   .017  .236  4.10  3.65  
Next 14 2/3         .188   .116   .043  .246  5.92  3.68

Here we have the opposite as with Ervin, where Big John didn't pitch as well in terms of peripherals, but still managed to keep his ERA very good. It's hard to conclude much of anything due to the sample size, though.

One would have to perform a wholesale study on this to draw any real conclusions, but I think we can seen that there is no real set pattern. Jered will either get better, get worse, or stay the same. How's that for going out on a limb?

My guess is that he will continue to regress a bit, just because no one is really good enough to keep their ERA under 2.00 forever. I still expect solid starts, he's a hell of a lot better than his brother right now, and his future looks as bright as ever.