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Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Does C.C. Sabathia’s Previous Workload Make Him a Big Risk?

On a pure talent basis, C.C. Sabathia is probably the crown jewel of this offseason’s free agent market.  Sabathia won the AL Cy Young in 2007 and then arguably pitched even better in 2008.  At age 28, he appears to still be in his prime.  Because of this, he’s expected to get a record contract from someone this year.  Signing any pitcher to a long-term contract is a risk, but does Sabathia’s prior workload make him more of one? 

Over the last three seasons, Sabathia has thrown 686.7 innings, an average of 229 per season.  To see how risky that workload might be,I looked at all pitchers who threw a total of 600 innings from ages 25-27.  I’m only looking at seasons from 1954 on since the game has changed significantly from its early days. 

I got a list of 176 pitchers, including Sabathia, Dan Haren, Joe Blanton, and Carlos Zambrano.  Removing them since they have not yet had their age 28 season gives us a control group of 172 pitchers.  I’m not going to list them all here, but I’ve uploaded my spreadsheet for anyone who wants to look at it.  The group includes lots of Hall of Famers like Steve Carlton, Nolan Ryan, Jim Palmer, Tom Seaver, and Greg Maddux, as well as below average pitchers like Mike Maroth.

I’m looking at two things here primarily.
1) How many of these pitchers dropped out of the league over the next seven seasons (ages 28-34), which I’m generally assuming is due to injury.
2) How did these pitchers perform over ages 28-34 compared to their ages 25-27 seasons, since most estimates of a Sabathia contract assume 6-7 years.

First up, here’s the average performance of the 172 pitchers who threw at least 600 innings over their ages 25-27 seasons.

OOL: Out of league
CERA: Component ERA
FIP: Fielding independent pitching
HR/BF: HRs per batters faced
BB/BF: BBs per batters faced
K/BF: Ks per batters faced

So what does this table tell us?  This selected group averaged 229 innings over their ages 25-27 seasons, with good peripherals and generally good performance.  Now let’s look at the collective group’s performance in their age 28 season.

Age 28

Two of the selected pitchers were out of the league in their age 28 season.  We can also see that after averaging 224 innings in their ages 25-27 seasons, the remaining 170 pitchers managed just 24 fewer innings on average.  Their ERA, RA, FIP and component ERAs all climbed some, and their HR rate and K rate got worse, although their BB rate improved slightly.

Age 29




Another year older, and another bit of decline.  We lose five more pitchers, although Alex Fernandez returned from a missed age 28 season so we actually show four pitchers gone.  Those that did not end up out of the league averaged 16 fewer innings.  Peripherals remained fairly steady compared to their age 28 seasons though.

Age 30




Another 11 casualties, but not as much of a decline in those that remained in the league, with only an average innings decrease of six, and with slightly better peripheral performances than age 29.

Age 31




Another 16 pitchers are out of the league by this point, but again a small decline for those that were still pitching.

Age 32




We see another nine pitchers gone, but those that are still pitching actually see a tiny uptick in their average innings pitched, albeit with a slightly lesser quality.

Age 33




This is the biggest single loss of pitchers from this group, with 16 out of the league at age 33.  Performance is generally the same as in age 32 for the non-attrited.

Age 34




This is the last year I’m looking at, and we can see a pretty substantial dropoff here.  Nine more pitchers drop out, and those that didn’t pitched fifteen fewer innings on average.

Average




On average, these pitchers who did not drop out of the league pitched 1281 innings over their ages 28-34 seasons, an average of 183 innings per season.  Their ERAs rose from 3.43 over ages 25-27 to 3.70 for ages 28-34, with a similar rise in their component ERAs and other peripherals.

In terms of wins above replacement which would factor in both rate performance and innings pitched, here’s how it would break down.

Now, durability is one of the selling points for Sabathia, although the higher innings total related to it are what has caused so many people to be concerned about signing him, so what if we look at the same data, but set the innings cutoff higher?  Here’s how it looks if we look at pitchers who threw at least 660 innings in their ages 25-27 season instead.  Now we have a group of 99 pitchers excluding Sabathia.

Here’s how this group did from ages 25-27.

We can see that this group averaged 246 innings instead of the 229 innings the larger group averaged, so they were obviously durable, right?

Age 28

We lose five pitchers again, one being the aforementioned Alex Fernandez, who will return in his age 29 season.  We also see a decrease of about 26 innings and a rise in RA, ERA, CERA and FIP.  So yeah, that durability thing....

Age 29

Looks like everyone that made it through age 28 survived age 29, with Fernandez’s return boosting the count back up to 95.  Age 28 and age 29 performance are for the most part indistinguishable on a rate basis, but again we see an innings drop, this time 16 innings on average.

Age 30




Six pitchers down, 14 innings down.  I’m seeing a trend here, and I’m not particularly liking it.

Age 31




Say bye bye to another 13 pitchers, and another 15 innings.  We also see the fairly consistent rate performance over ages 28-30 beginning to degrade a tiny bit.

Age 32

Age 32 sees a bit of stabilization in both the attrition rate (only six pitchers lost) and the innings pitches (only two lost).

Age 33

Age 33 we lose a bunch of pitchers, fifteen in total, but the ones who survive pitch more innings than on average with the same basic quality as at age 32.

Age 34




Seven more pitchers gone, and RA and ERA spike up a little, although CERA and FIP remain pretty stable.  Innings drop a little bit, but not that much.

Average

On average, these pitchers who did not drop out of the league pitched 1323 innings over their ages 28-34 seasons, an average of 189 innings per season.  Their ERAs rose from 3.30 over ages 25-27 to 3.49 for ages 28-34, which is better than the larger group, although there’s some selection bias in here (better pitchers will pitch more innings).

And the WAR breakdown.

So in the first, larger sample, 48% of the pitchers from the age 25-27 sample were still pitching at age 34.  The ones who survived were pitching 167 innings a season at age 34 compared to 229 innings over ages 25-27, which is 27% fewer.  RA at age 34 was 10% worse than it was at ages 25-27, ERA was 12% worse, CERA was 9% worse, and FIP was 4% worse.

In the second sample of the seemingly more durable pitchers, 48 of 99 made it to age 34.  That’s 48%, which seems familiar for some reason.  They went from 246 innings a season to 178 innings, a 28% reduction.  However, it’s worth noting that that’s 11 more innings than the larger group, which is a positive indicator for durability I suppose.  We see a similar degradation in RA, ERA, CERA and FIP, which makes sense.

That’s for the guys who stayed healthy.  So you should expect a decrease of around .3 wins per season even if a pitcher stays healthy.

There’s a fair amount of overlap in both groups, so keep that in mind.

This doesn’t really bode well for a long-term contract for any pitcher, no matter how good they may appear to be at the time, but I think that’s common sense.  Pitchers get hurt.  Pitching is an unnatural activity. 

Looking at these numbers doesn’t make it look like we should expect 250 innings a year over the next six or seven years for Sabathia, although all pitchers are different, but I’ll look at C.C.’s specific projection over the next day or two.