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When I am searching for waiver wire help or evaluating talent amongst [tag]starting pitchers[/tag], I like to look at some of the things that pitchers have complete control over. When the pitcher throws the ball, for the most part, if it misses the batters bat, the pitcher has almost total control of the outcome of that play. A strike or a ball are the outcomes I am speaking of there. If the ball is hit into play, the pitcher doesn’t have too much control over the outcome of the play anymore; unless the ball goes over the fence for a home run.

So, instead of looking at ERA and WHIP to evaluate starting pitchers, I like to use the ratios K/9 and BB/9. If a pitcher has a high K/9 and a low BB/9 and isn’t giving up very many home runs, there is a good chance he is performing pretty well.

I’m going to list the top 10 starting pitchers in [tag]K/9[/tag] and [tag]BB/9[/tag] here. These numbers will mean more as the season gets a little older, and it’s pretty useless to add HR/9 right now; but this may prove point here.

Now, Ted Lilly is on both lists (which is good for him). That means there are 19 players here to look at. 11 of those 19 have ERA’s under 3.00. Eight of the 19 have ERA’s below 2.50.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 18th, 2007 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Starting Pitchers, Statistics. 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.