Finding Aces Part IIII: Luck Regression Candidates
February 3, 2020 | Top 100 Starting Pitchers | 20 Commentsby: Pat
This week, I’d like to focus on the benefits of a contrarian mindset. It helps make clear life choices without needing the approval of others. It helps maintain an even approach to the highs and lows of life. Most importantly, it helps in predicting outcomes. One of my favorite contrarian principles is regression to the mean, the philosophy at the heart of this week’s finding aces segment. When I introduced the series and background group of pitchers, the term luck was mentioned regularly. Quantifying luck is a difficult premise. However, in leveraging regression to the mean we can increase our chances. If a pitcher suffered from poor luck in 2019, that same pitcher is more likely to benefit from good luck in the future. We hope that future is the 2020 season.
In order to identify young pitchers who suffered from poor luck in 2019 I performed the following:
- Gathered all starting pitchers with over 50 innings pitched in 2019. Thanks, Fangraphs.
- Removed any pitchers with more than 400 career innings pitched to isolate for Youthful Jumps.
- Sorted to find only pitchers whose ERA was 0.5 greater than one of FIP, xFIP, or SIERA.
- Eliminated any pitchers who did not have a metric under 4.5.
The result? 10 pitchers. I’ve removed 5 of those for reasons noted at the bottom. The rest of the group is evaluated below:
Please, blog, may I have some more?
