How is pitcher "effectiveness" best measured?

In my opinion whip, era are good measures then look at k's and type of hits. As mentioned 3 pitches and three outs is hard to beat. When comparing pitchers on the same team I also look at E's committed. If the same defense commits more errors behind one pitcher then another is because they are having BB's hit at them.

Phathead said:

If the same defense commits more errors behind one pitcher then another is because they are having BB's hit at them.

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I would think it would take a whole lotta games before I could draw that conclusion. A major portion of errors are throwing E's. And then if the ball is really scorched, it might be ruled a hit. I wouldn't think that there would be significant difference in the number of errors that could be attributed to how hard the ball was hit. But I've never tried to keep track of it.

Other than looking at stats, I try to adjust my expectations based on the level of competition my DD is facing. Two weeks ago she beat a lower level high school team 8-0, but all I kept harping on was the fact that she walked the #9 batter to lead off the 5th inning!

Doug Romrell said:

Yeah, stats are pretty much the wherewithal, but I first look at a pitcher's mental toughness. There is nothing worse with pitchers than being weak mentally. I would argue that mental toughness, together with the mechanics and experience, is what gets you the impressive ERA.

The pitchers I currently have lack either in mental toughness or in their desire to work hard to get the experience, or both.

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How do mentally tough pitchers prove to be the more effective pitchers? How do you MEASURE mental toughness?

Sparky Guy said:

I think the two stats that can define a pitcher's effectiveness the best are K's/7 and ERA. If you have a pitcher who average's 7+ K's a game and has a low ERA, it shows they are keeping the hitters off balance while taking care of 1/3 of the outs in the game. That makes defense's job that much easier.

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I’ve never been a big fan of K’s per game, because its so unusual in baseball that a starter goes all the way, so I’m more a fan of batters per K. But from what know about in SB, starting pitchers almost always finish games, and if that’s true K’s/game is more valid. And I’ve never been much of a fan of ERA. TRA maybe, but ERA just doesn’t show me as much as many other metrics.

So how do you put the two together to show effectiveness? If one pitcher has a K/game of 7 and an ERA of 2, and another pitcher has a K/game of 5 and an ERA of 1.25, which is the more efficient?

ERA is #1 because that reflects the goal of every pitcher. WHIP is next because it is a similar method that allows you to compare and conjecture if a pitcher was lucky or not. (ie, 2B-HR-out-out-out is 2 runs, while HR-2B-out-out-out is only 1).

But then you must struggle to put those stats into the context of 'strength of schedule.' In reality, there is no pitching stat that is as good as OPS is for hitters because hitters bat against everybody, whereas pitchers might be given very different assignments (ie, strength of schedule).

cuzmail said:

… As mentioned before, you somehow need to factor in the level of competition or the numbers aren't apples to apples.

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Why? The ML numbers the public sees don’t differentiate that way, and there are some pretty good and pretty bad teams there relative to “average”.

But I suppose the difference lies in what the numbers are being used for. If they’re being used to project for a ‘ship, that’s one thing. But if they’re being used by a manager to make decisions, that’s a totally different thing.

RubberBiscuit said:

… I am a WHIP fan too. Until the much older/higher classifications of SB I would always take the K pitcher over the weak-ground-ball pitchers as errors are too prevalent.

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So your opinion is, K pitchers are always the most effective pitchers?

Phathead said:

In my opinion whip, era are good measures then look at k's and type of hits. As mentioned 3 pitches and three outs is hard to beat. When comparing pitchers on the same team I also look at E's committed. If the same defense commits more errors behind one pitcher then another is because they are having BB's hit at them.

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That’s fine, but if you look at the OP, it asks about which STAT, not group of stats, shows effectiveness best. Your method is fine, but it means looking at 4 different individual metrics. That’s ok, but if you’re gonna look that closely at E’s, you should make sure to differentiate the fielding errors from the throwing errors, and any errors by the pitcher. What I’m saying is, when you try to include too many things, it starts to get real messy real quick.

JAD said:

Other than looking at stats, I try to adjust my expectations based on the level of competition my DD is facing. Two weeks ago she beat a lower level high school team 8-0, but all I kept harping on was the fact that she walked the #9 batter to lead off the 5th inning!

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What should be used to determine an opponent’s level of competition, and should that be relative to your team’s level?

The reason I ask is, for a long time I’ve been told that HS #’s are useless because the level of competition is so varied. Some time back I tried to include a “factor” I could use to show that difference. The thing I came up with that was reasonably easy to compute, was opponent’s winning percentage.

What I do is compute the opponent’s WPct, then I use it to factor different stats. FI, if the opponent’s WPCT is .600 and one of our batters gets 2 hits, he gets credit for 1.2 hits and if the opponent’s WPct was .400, the 2 hits would only be worth 0.8 hits. It looked like it would work too, but it didn’t take long for the fallacy in the factor to show up.

You see, we have a pretty strong program, so whenever possible an opponent will put its best pitcher on the mound against us. As I’m sure you know, there are some pretty dang good pitchers out there who happen to play on very weak teams, especially in HS where the players aren’t free to play wherever they want.

The result is, a hitter may only get 1 hit against a really good pitcher who plays on a team that has a WPct of .200, and so he only gets credit for 0.2 of a hit. Then, when we played a really good team with a WPct of .750 and got a bit lucky by forcing them to go deep into their bullpen and got a weak pitcher, if a batter got 2 hits against that pitcher he showed up with 1.5 hits. IOW, all that happened when I tried to factor in the competition, was I forced the numbers in many cases to give a wrong indication of what took place.