White Sox Bullpen Brings The Heat

Kenny Williams has a reputation as being a schizophrenic GM in terms of the talent he chooses to supply the White Sox any given season. One year he is playing Ozzie Ball the next he falls in love with the Long Ball. After several seasons of having DJ Carrasco and Ehren Wasserman tossing whiffle balls out of the bullpen, Williams decided to load up on nothing but fireballers. If you don't throw 94, you can't get a parking space in the dome the White Sox call a stadium (take that Sox fans!). Shockingly, only one member of this elite group is a product of the Sox minor league system, and he was just drafted a month ago in the 2010 draft. And as fangraphs has shown, increased velocity is correlated with increased strikeouts, especially at higher velocities. So here is the breakdown of the White Sox bullpen.

Matt Thornton - 96.1 mph, 12.17 K/9

Sergio Santos - 95.8 mph, 9.15 K/9

Chris Sale - 95.5 mph, 11.37 K/9 15K in 6IP in AAA

Bobby jenks - 94.9 mph, 11.3 K/9

Tony Pena - 94.3 mph, 4.89 K/9 WTF?

JJ Putz - 94.0 mph, 10.53 K/9

Scott Linebrink - 93.9 mph, 8.44 K/9

Fastest Fastballs

As Fangraphs previously noted, strikeouts and velocity are correlated. Who packed the heat in 2009? Even Matt Lindstrom's K/9 improved last season and Bill James expects it to go up even more in 2010. So who packed the best heat in 2009?

Starting Pichers (min. 100 IP):

Excluding the 3 pitchers at the very bottom of the list, who combined to be 120 years old (Jamie Moyer, Livan Hernandez and Tim Wakefield), no pitcher who logged 100+ IP in 2009 had a fastball slower than 85 MPH. And people wonder why I refuse to call Rich Harden's "change up" (85.5 MPH) a "change up." Could once uber prospect Homer Bailey be a sleeper in 2009? He did post a 2.08 ERA/3.07 FIP with 42 Ks and 4 Ws over his last 43.1 IP.


Relievers (min. 30 IP)


With a fastball that averages near 100 MPH, its no wonder Zoom-Zoom walked the crap out of batters in 2009 (6.39 BB/9). Maybe he needs to Randy Johnson a few hitters. Thorton and MacDougal each seemingly have one pitch. Too bad MacDougal has absolutely no command of his only pitch.

Oh, and because google images is our number one referral, enjoy this hilarious picture I found of Barack Obama:

Bringing the debate out of the comments

From Sabernomics:

Here are the year-to-year correlations for pitchers throwing back-to-back 100+ innings seasons from 1980–2006.

Metric  Correlation
Strikeout Rate 0.79
Walk Rate 0.64
WHIP  0.42
ERA  0.37

All measures are correlated, but the correlation is lower for the metrics that include fielder contributions. The season-to-season correlation between individuals pitchers’ WHIP and ERA are quite similar. Also, both metrics vary similarly: the average coefficient of variation (mean/standard deviation) for the pitchers in the sample is 2.46 for WHIP and 1.99 for ERA.

Here is a graph of ERA and WHIP by age for Roger Clemens on that using connected scatter plots and quadratic fit curves.

The metrics tend to move in concert (correlation = 0.9), and the small difference in quadratic fit seems to be explained by a few more-extreme deviations in WHIP.

Thus, if WHIP has any advantage over ERA, it is slight...

Yup.