Last night, Carl Pavano put up a dominant outing for the Minnesota Twins against his former team, the New York Yankees, in what ultimately turned into a loss. Pavano was excellent, turning in nine strikeouts in seven innings while not allowing a walk. His two mistakes, a fastball to Alex Rodriguez followed shortly by one to Jorge Posada, ultimately spelled the end of his and the Twins’ season, as Yankees starter Andy Pettitte was equally impressive in getting the win. While this outing surprised everyone in terms of excellent quality, but it should not surprise us as much as his numbers and his career would tell us.

Now, peripherally, perhaps our class would say that Pavano’s 5.10 ERA would be a stretch to call anything but bad, and if you were to compare it to the American League average ERA of 4.44, you would probably be correct. However, if you checked out the reading in the glossary about defense-independent pitching, you’d know that pitchers rarely have good control over their balls in play, and Pavano has not had the best of luck, with a BABIP of .330 that is still decently above his career line of .308. If you just looked at that ERA and those hits allowed, you would say that Pavano was struggling. Let’s look at the aspects of a pitcher that he can better control and see how well Pavano is stacking up. We can see a clue as to Pavano being decent in his WHIP (Walks plus Hits per Innings Pitched). I don’t endorse WHIP because it counts hits as something a pitcher can control, and while I’m sure to some degree pitchers can control their hits (pitchers do have a measure of control over home runs and I’m sure less control over their hits in general), it isn’t nearly as controllable as walks. Pavano’s WHIP on the season is 1.37, right in line with a career 1.39 WHIP. How was this accomplished? Pavano is walking batters at a 4.6% clip (UIBB% of 4.4%), which stands as the fifth lowest walk rate in the majors this season, behind Joel Pineiro, Roy Halladay, Dan Haren, and Cliff Lee. That’s some pretty exclusive company to have.

In addition to the low walk rate, the second lowest rate Pavano has posted in his career, he’s also struck out hitters at his second highest career rate, at 17.2%. Combining a low walk rate and a high strikeout rate has resulted in a renaissance campaign for Pavano, the type of season he had not had since he was a member of the Florida Marlins and a season the Yankees were hoping he would deliver when he signed that four year, $39.95M contract in the 2005 offseason. Four injury-riddled years later and Pavano has put up a 4.00 FIP and a 4.54 tRA as calculated by StatCorner.

What do Pavano’s pitches look like? I grabbed all of his Pitch f/x data for the season and checked it out myself. Let’s start off with a horizontal vs. vertical movement chart.

Click on there and check out the full version. What you’ll see in the blob over Pavano’s picture are the pitches he threw broken down into their movement components. This is typically an easy way to visualize a pitcher’s pitches, as different pitches have general horizontal/vertical break combinations that are easily viewed in the coordinate plane. For example, sliders are typically neutral breaking pitches from release to plate; while there is obvious movement in flight, the pitch in general ends up where you would expect gravity to take it. As a result, pitches in the neutral (0,0) area or around that region that are of a certain speed tend to be classified as sliders. On the other hand, fastballs are “straight” from release to plate, and as a result are doing a bit of gravity defying. In the coordinate system, they appear to have “rise,” or high positive vertical break. We’ll have more on Pitch f/x analysis in a future glossary.

In Pavano’s chart, you can see some general trends, though the separation of movement is not terribly strong, in part due to the nature of his pitches and in part due to the nature of the graph (i.e. it does not contain velocity information). In general, however, you can see that Pavano has a typical high-rising four-seamer, complemented with his changeup that has significantly better drop (the difference between the cluster of vertical break is around three inches) and a slider-type offering with similar dip to the change and more movement away from the right handers (all Pitch f/x graphs, unless otherwise noted, are from the catcher perspective, so righties are on the left side of the graph, lefties on the right side).

Pavano’s pitch distribution appears to be something along the lines of 56.3% fastball, 29.7% changeup, 13.1% slider, with the remainder being classified here as “cutters,” though it’s questionable whether this pitch actually exists. Still, we get the idea of the general distribution: Pavano likes to use his fastball, presumably to get strikes, since it appears he does not walk a lot of hitters, and uses either the changeup or slider to punch out hitters, depending on situation and handedness.

When we look a bit more into the numbers afforded to us by Pitch f/x, we can see some more characterization about the type of pitcher Pavano has been this season. Here, I detail Pavano’s “watch%,” measured as called strikes/pitches taken. You can see in the location chart, however, that this is generally only an approximation (though it is what was actually called by the umpires). We know umpires don’t often adhere to the rules for the zone as mentioned in the rulebook, and one of the primary places where they consistently are wrong is in the outside part of the zone against left-handers. Without going into a lefty-righty split, I can tell you that those left-side called strikes that are outside the delineated zone are almost entirely to left-handed hitters.

In any case, what we can garner from this is that Pavano has mostly had a consistent zone, not getting terribly squeezed by the umps as a whole. Looking at the watch rates for his individual pitches, not including his “cutter,” you can see very little difference between the watch% of each pitch. In general, Pavano is placing his stuff and hitters are laying off of it at about an equal rate for each pitch.

As you can see from the location chart, Pavano isn’t the most adept pitcher at missing bats; his 17.2% strikeout rate is actually a tad below the American League average for the year. He doesn’t induce a whole lot of whiffs, though he gets them primarily low with his breaking stuff. He also does a solid job inducing outside zone swings (31.6% according to FanGraphs). His fastball is not efficient at whiffing at all, getting only 9.6% whiffs on the year, but this is what you would expect given an average fastball velocity in the low 90’s. The slider and changeup seem equally impressive at missing bats, as both are around 27% missed swings.

Looking at Pitch f/x and his peripherals, you would have to think that Pavano has pitched average and has been a victim of poor timing or poor defense (behind him played the Twins and the Cleveland Indians, who posted team bUZR’s of -36.2 and -33.4 runs respectively). Pavano does a decent job keeping the ball on the ground (43% this year, 44.7% career), is likely to do an average job of keeping balls in the park (10.7% HR/FB% this year, 10.2% career), and does an excellent job of being a strike-thrower and limiting walks. This year he’ll be a free agent again after signing an incentive laden deal with the Indians, and he will benefit from a weak starting pitching class this offseason. Pavano likely needs assistance from his defense because he doesn’t miss a lot of bats, so signing him isn’t a perfect move for everyone. However, pitchers with ERA’s above 5 who also happen to be worth 3.7 WAR on the season are often undervalued, and a lucky team who signs him to a short-term deal and puts a decent defense behind him may get lucky and pick up a solid starter for far less than his free agent money will pay.

Required Reading:

Here’s the first of our biweekly “reading assignments.” Make sure you check out these articles.

1. Here’s my instant analysis on the duel between Pavano and Pettitte over at Beyond the Box Score.

2. Kincaid offers us a two-part primer on FIP (Part 1 and Part 2). If you ever thought to yourself whether those coefficients were “bogus,” this is for you.

3. Here’s one of BtB colleague Jack Moore’s opening pieces over at FanGraphs, showing the correlation between batting average and wOBA.

Tweet This Post

This entry was posted on Monday, October 12th, 2009 at 3:43 pm and is filed under Player Profile. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.