Chukars Corner

No one is making much contact off of Great Falls Voyagers pitcher Terry Doyle.

The 6-foot-4 right-hander from Boston College has toyed with hitters in four Pioneer Leauge starts. In 20 2/3 innings, he’s struck out 34 batters, including 14 in a seven-inning outing July 3 and nine in six innings Thursday.

And it’s not like this is the first time he’s pitched this well. His numbers this year are pretty similar to his numbers from the rookie-level Appalachian League last year.

So why has he morphed from a top prospect with a 1.71 ERA last year to a guy playing with the prospects and sporting a 5.22 ERA this season?

He hasn’t changed. His luck has.

Thanks to research over the past 30 years, which has accelerated in the past 10 years, we can see which stats actually mean something in baseball. Won-loss record always weighs heavily into traditionalist thinking since the goal is to win the game.

That’s true, but a pitcher surrendering runs is only half the equation. His offense needs to score runs, too. But when you take into account a pitcher’s defense, he controls less than half the result. How much is still debated.

But necessity is the mother of all invention. Until the 2001 publication of an article by Voros McCracken, it was assumed pitchers could control whether a ball put in play would turn into a hit or an out. It was a skill good pitchers had and journeymen lacked.

McCracken trashed that assumption with a new stat, batting average on balls in play (BABIP).

If that assumption were true, the top pitchers would have consistently lower BABIP than the dredges of the league. McCracken’s results showed the opposite, and even the sabermetric community set out to prove him wrong.

Turns out they couldn’t.

As Keith Woolner and Dayn Perry wrote in “Baseball Between the Numbers,”

…in 2005, perennial Cy Young candidate Roy Oswalt had a .310 BABIP. Devil Ray Doug Waechter had a .308. Gopher-ball generator Eric Milton posted a .317, front-line starter John Lackey a .328. The mediocre Scott Elarton had a .274 BABIP, while budding star Jake Peavy had a .281.”

And it wasn’t just a list of one-year flukes. All-stars and no-names were scattered throughout the list together, and this “skill” would be there one year and disappear the next.

Baseball Prospectus studied every pitcher from 1972 to 2004 who faced 500 batters in consecutive seasons, and only one stat showed more random fluctuations than BABIP. And that was win-loss record. ERA was third on that list.

The conclusion? It’s overstating it to say that a pitcher has no control over a batted ball becoming a hit. But it’s so little that it’s statistically irrelevant.

That brings us back to Doyle. As you can see from the table above, Doyle’s stats from last year to this are similar — except for ERA and BABIP.

So look for those two stats to return to the average and Doyle to continue his mastery of the Pioneer League. And for those who worship ERA to be dumbfounded by his dominance.

Terry Doyle

Great Falls pitcher Terry Doyle has been a dominant pitcher in his first two seasons. You’d never know that though from looking at his ERA.

Year Team G W L IP TBF H HR R ER BB K ERA BB/PA K/PA BABIP FIP
2008 Bristol 10 1 2 21.0 88 22 0 10 4 2 25 1.71 2.3% 28.4% .367 1.70
2009 Great Falls 4 1 1 20.2 90 22 0 12 12 6 34 5.22 6.7% 37.8% .468 2.25