Crooked Pitch

Roy Oswalt has been a dissapointment, whether you’re an Astros fan or frustrated fantasy owner. His current 5-6 record, 5.06 ERA, 1.40 WHIP have vastly underperformed even the most conservative projections. The obvious difference in Roy’s performance this year has been his unprecedented (in terms of his career) 17 HR allowed through 14 starts. Per Derek Carty’s article at the Hardball Times, Roy Oswalt has been the unluckiest pitcher, to date, it terms of HR/FB.

Since, April 16th, Evan, my co-writer, and I have been utilizing Roy Oswalt’s pitch/fx data in order to grasp at what it is that has made him so crushable. Both of us were convinced that stat-geeks latest tool, pitch/fx would shed light on Roy’s struggles. Our first stab at the data lead us to believe it was an ineffective curve ball that was ailing him — it has since returned to it’s 2007 level in terms of break (see full article for fancy charts that prove this). The next stab lead us to conclude that it was his constricted release point — stemming, most likely, from a desire not to tip his pitches — that was causing him to lose a little bit of life on all his pitches, but especially his slider. I went so far as to credit this for his HR spike.

I thought I’d discovered the problem,I was wrong. Another Astros blogger mentioned that she felt it was fastballs that were getting crushed, not “hanging-sliders.” So I enlisted the help of the incredible Josh Kalk for better pitch/fx data. With his help, I was able to isolate Roy’s 14 HR pitches (all that he’d given up at the time of my solicitation) with just about every possible piece of information about them. I narrowed it down to the information I felt was pertinent or possible explanatory. Here are the results:

The only thing that most of the pitches had in common, besides being fastballs, where that men were on base. The full article has a more detailed analysis, but there really isn’t anything about these pitches that screams “SOMETHING’S WRONG”. I was a little disapointed to not have been the genius who uncovered what was wrong with Roy Oswalt, but there was even better news: Roy Oswalts struggles, again per Derek Carty’s article can, seemingly, only be attributed to luck at this point. Therefore, given what statistics tells us about the law of averages, from here on out, we can only expect Roy Oswalt’s HR/FB numbers to return to his career level; which have never exceed 12% and average around 9%. Carty corrected Roy’s ERA to reflect a league average HR/FB rate of 11% (i.e. higher than what we should expect of Oswalt) and got a 4.08 ERA. Therefore, discerning fantasy owners could venture a gamble at a low buy Roy Oswalt and expect a return of a sub 4.00 ERA — this seems especially likely in light of his 6.99 K/9 and a 3.29 K/BB.