Mephistopheles

It's ridiculous to compare Marquis and Suppan's dERAs to ERA together. They were on the same team.

im still in a state of shock that people are defending marquis.

Not necessarily true. See: Perez, Neifi. Even Neifi isn't all bad. It's how he's used. Some people pay more attention to reputation than results. all of them seem to reside in the front office of the cubs :(

Other than the k/BB, that jives pretty well with what I remembered. Do you remember the rate for hr/9? i just had a spreadsheet and quickly ran it. this is from 72 to 93, i think. just r ERA BABIP HR/9 K/BB BB/9 K/9 .2286 .2177 .3289 .5720 .6192 .7955

no i dont

umm iirc year to year BB is around (r not r^2) .7, K/9 is around .8. ERA is around .3, normalized ERAs can get near .5. K:BB is in the .4s i think.

man some of you missed the point. i didnt start sandcastles in the sky!

for a guy who eats innings hes gone over 200 twice in his career and never over 210.

fogpog sounds like some fifth grade game i played

well, that was a mature response. (directed to the same post seth quoted above)

says the guy who obviously doesn't understand what's going on and, as such, decides to make fun of the argument he's not comprehending What argument, the ludacris statement that we should expect nothing more than a "trash" performance from Marquis? :roll: I am going re-read this thread 10X's tonight, because I really want to buy such logic...I do. this response is utterly insane unless you didnt read the post above yours.

eh take this all with a grain of salt. assuming FIP and ERA and FIP-ERA are normally distributed (they are) i went and looked at all pitchers since 2004 in the NL with similar innings as Marquis (sample size alert). On average their FIP ERA was .05 less than their actual ERA (Note: league averages in the two are defined to be average in the formula). The standard deviation for the difference between their FIP and actual ERA was 0.45. This means that about 2/3rds of the pitchers had a difference of at most half a run. Jason Marquis' first two seasons were about 0.75 away meaning each of them have about a 8% chance of happening, assuming a nuetral park and a nuetral defense. First looking at Cardinals NOT including Marquis: We get on average their ERA was about a .29 better than their actual ERA. The standard deviation was .37. This would give about a 10% chance on probability of it happening. If we throw in Marquis we're looking at a 20% or so chance of it happening. It doesn't seem all that likely, especially considering he was spot on last year. Secondly, I ran correlations between several stats and FIP-ERA. The only thing statistically significant was LOB%. This makes since given that if you're for whatever reason allowing less runners to score than you should you're ERA is going to be lower than it "should" be. So I know some of you are thinking DOUBLE PLAYS FROM GROUNDBALL PITCHERS. Next I ran some correlations to LOB%, only one was signficant. Drumroll please....strikeout rates! And of course it was positively correlated. More Ks is good for it. Ironically enough the GB to LOB correlation is essentially zero, but it is ever so slighly inversely correlated - meaning less GBs means a higher LOB%. Granted it's essentially no correlation, but the sign means...something. So obviously, there's nothing in his GB magic that leads him to leaving guys on base, is there? I should note that the second highest correlation to FIP-ERA was pitches per PA. Where more pitches meant your FIP-ERA was better. Oooh strike another one against guys like Marquis. Now you're wondering about 2004. You can't believe it. His LOB% is the reason his ERA was such an outlier. His LOB% was 79.3%. That's better than any of the three seasons since 04 by Carpenter or Zambrano. He got LUCKY. There's NO way around that. His LOB% has fallen to like 66% last season, which is more where it was expected. His LOB% in 04 should have been about 70%. When you calculate that 10% of the runners he allowed that didn't score who "should" have you'll find some interesting stuff. So really it more or less appears that his previous "magic" was not getting grounders as much as it was getting purely lucky in the "clutch" - something that is NOT a repeatable skill. If you really want to dig behind the numbers some more. In 2004 with RISP the BABIP he allowed was a shockingly low .231 over 236 PA leading to a OBAA under .200. In 2005 that same split was .295 and in 2006 it was .335. Once again it's pure luck. That's all it is. Luck.

edit: oops

fip or dera isn't probability based in itself. over the long run they should average out, but in the short run there's something there. i havent done those things in like five years. Maybe there's something I am forgetting. I always remember population stuff with those methods. Like I said the best way would to look at the standard score, but it's hard because there are a lot more things at work. I guess they should balance each other out, but it's a limited sample size, five seasons? With those sorts of data analysis i think the sample size has to be like 30. I could be mistaking. lets also mention that the cardinals defense is greater than average so we would expect something lower. fip factors that out. sure i guess we can factor that back in but yuck.. PECOTA is different. They DO have their percentile prediction system. And as far as I know they've shown that for hitters the 50 percentile, 25 percentile stuff is pretty accurate. The pitchers havent been so accurate, but i think they overhauled or are overhauling them.

i wasnt considering either of them, but who knows about cole's status. he can say what he want but it's mid march and he's yet to debut.

Well I guess that makes it official. With that type of analysis, its hard to imagine why everyone isn't just merely agreeing with you? its not like i havent posted it before in this thread....

Not trying to argue the point, but have you done statistical analysis on that year with regard to the rest of his career to see, statistically, how far outside the trend it ranges? Its been too long since my stats class to remember the term I'm referring to, maybe T-test and/or chi-square testing (thanks Wikipedia), but basically, to see if the values are truly inconsistant, or within some % of validity? Eh, there's a HUGE problem with doing that: Third variable/confounding variable/lurking variable/etc. Those methods you used are probability based, not this. When you run the regressions I think you come out to that 25% of run prevention is controlled directly by the pitchers (Ks/BBs,GBs, etc) the rest is dumb luck, park and defense. So trying to do anything on it is tough. There are ways to try to isolate these, but let's just say it's a pain and it won't tell us anything we don't already know. Mainly because the sample size will suck. One thing I can do is estimate the stdev for dERA or FIP minus the actual ERA. See how often he's on the extremes. Granted all that's going to tell us is that the cardinals defense is good, we already knew that.

Ironically enough the god, Shawn Estes is better than him in DERA. Granted, it's not end-all be-all but when we're comparing him to Estes, we're comparing him to guys who can't keep their jobs as a starter, so the logical conclusion is that he's among the worst pitchers.

if you want to grade his level of sucking and the degree of "worst" be my guest. It's a waste of time. He sucks. Besides if your look at his PERA's or anything close to it you're going to find his career one near or above 5.00. that's enough to label him one of the worst pitchers in the game. and dont bring up 2004. it's been slammed down more than enough times.

no one's looking at one year. im not beating a dead horse again. there's no reason to expect him to be anything useful. he's trash.

Huh? Adkins was never listed as a top ten pick. I don't believe BA had him in the first round at all before the season. He was in the top ten for college prospects of his class before last season. I do think he's rising fast. He had a great freshman season with Ks. His ratios were all the same the next season and thus far he's made strides with the biggest hole in his game - the walks. Granted he hasn't started the meat of his SEC schedule and that's going to mean a lot to where he goes. Adkins is out to a great start. Weak competition? Probably. Does he have the stuff to be a first rounder? Absolutely. He's a 6'6" lefty with a 90 MPH fastball and a knockout breaking pitch. He's going to go relatively early. Top ten? Probably not. He's gotta be the fourth rated lefty starter behind: 1. David Price 2. Joe Savery 3. Nick Schmidt Is that going to sneak him into picks 25-30? Maybe to a team who wants a guy who can move fast. If his K:BB makes it through the SEC schedule over 3:00, I'd be shocked if he's not gone in the first round.

the pitchers job is to prevent runs from scoring. K:BB has been shown to predict run prevention in the future better than previous run prevention. That's all that matters. It's not like ERA violated me sexually when I was a kid and I hold a grudge against it. Anybody arguing that Marquis is useful is just wrong. Every single shred of statistical reasoning shows he's among the worst pitchers in the game. If you want to go against that, fine.

id like to visit sandcastles in the sky

as wrong as he usually is, hes right on this one

the cubs scored more than four runs a game last season, but for 4 ER over 7 innings to be useful, it would mean that the bullpen would have to have an ERA of zero. Under no circumstances is an ERA of 5.14 good enough for the Cubs, Yankees or '27 Yankees. I said an average of 4 ER. Like anyone else, he will pitch better in some starts than others (likewise, the offense will have days when it is producing more or less than 4 runs). Marquis can be a very serviceable pitcher. The way you are describing the situation, we should expect to lose the majority of his starts. I don't believe that to be the case. We should expect to lose the majority of his starts. Marquis, over his career, hasn't been a very good pitcher. He's extremely unlikely to magically improve. Marquis hasn't been stellar but he has shown an ability to keep his team in most games he pitches (which is a huge improvement over a last year). The only thing he'll be asked to do is limit the damage; the best way he can do that is by keeping the ball on the ground. He had a nightmare year with the Cardinals in 2006 because, among other things, he gave up over 30 homeruns. here is his "ability" to keep teams in games: http://mlb.mlb.com/images/2007/03/02/gflCRSLs.jpghttp://mlb.mlb.com/images/players/mugshot/ph_113744.jpghttp://mlb.mlb.com/images/2007/03/02/FfAGoGVk.jpg