Well this dovetails nicely with a post I authored a couple weeks ago -- then said, 'nah' and hit delete... : )
Sandy has mentioned before how he likes to look at a guy's career minor league line in evaluating prospects. And the interesting thing when you look at Fister is, his AAA line was impressive but NOT particularly flukish. Career minor leagues, 2.2 BB/9 and 6.6 K/9.
So, using my shotgun application of bastardized sabermetric concepts ;), I then looked up MLB starting pitchers who have a similar BB/9 and K/9 profile. Some guys putting up similar lines: Carl Pavano, Randy Wolf, Jason Hamel, James Shields, Cliff Lee. There aren't that many, because there just aren't that many pitchers with that kind of control.
If you assume Fister's control stays, but he k's fewer batters in MLB, a few comps (on those stats alone, of course) are Nick Blackburn, Zach Duke, and, ahem, Joel Piniero.
Anyway, in the broad since of finding statistical parallels, Fister's performance to date kinda indicates an extreme upside of Cliff Lee, which I guess is saying something similar to a poor man's Maddux. Most likely, of course, he'll be in the Joel Piniero mold, with a promising year or three before splattering on the windshield. : )
Q. Did Fister show extreme talent in his AAA statistics?
A. For some reason, we have been underselling what Fister did at AAA -- run a 7.2 control ratio.
Show me any AAA pitcher, anywhere, who can repeat a 0+ BB rate indefinitely, while fanning 6, 7 batters a game, and I will be extremely interested in him.
Easy for me to say in retrospect. I wasn't waving the pom-poms in June, any more than anybody else. :- )
Though when Doogie got called up, we did manage to get an optimistic "template" POTD up before the nuke went off.
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Q. Template?
A. Okay, if you insist.
To get a feel for Fister's overmatch of AAA, despite the moderate K's, look at Greg Maddux' K/BB's in his glory years.
1991-93 -- 6.6 k, 2.0 bb -- great pitcher
1994-97 -- 6.8k, 0+ bb -- incredible 1+ ERA's
What was Mad Dog doing in 1994-97? Throwing all four of his pitches onto the black every single pitch. Batters didn't necessarily miss the pitches a ton, but they weren't going to do a single thing with them.
Mad Dog is the reductio ad absurdum that reminds the sabermetrician that there IS such a thing as a "pitcher's pitch." Maddux threw approximately 1 billion of them in the 90's. The result? Moderate K's, no walks, and 2.00 ERA's.
Fister was extremely impressive in AAA. He ran a Greg Maddux TTO line.
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Q. How'd we underestimate his AAA performance?
A. Sabermetrics, these days, involves almost as much judgment and pattern recognition as it does math. Thanks to all of the wonderful sites like Fangraphs, Brooks, Hardball Times, MLB.com and others, everybody has the data at their fingertips.
It's intuition half of the time. The statistics look backwards -- but we have zero interest in what happened yesterday. We're trying to guess at what will happen tomorrow.
The subtext persists, that to predict a pitcher, all you have to do is plot his trends forward in a smooth arc. NO WAY, JOSE. Pitchers learn new pitches, they correct mechanics, they gain command, they evolve.
It is not as simple as "no evidence exists that Pitcher X will do well at the next level." The evidence might be simply that he throws a crackling curve ball, like Luke French does.
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Q. The "intuition" being guided by?
A. Bill James says that he looks at two things first: he "starts with the strikeout to walk ratio."
Supposing that you had valued K/BB more than you valued S%. What would your expectation of Fister have been then? Doogie's K/BB was an insane 7.2 -- far better than Felix Hernandez' would be in AAA.
We get distracted by new stats. Control ratio is the big stat.
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Q. He looks at K/BB first? What does he look at second?
A. "Something out of alignment in the statistics."
There was something out of alignment in Doogie's statistics in AAA: his BB/9. That was wayyyyyyyyyyy "out of alignment." In his favor.
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Q. Meaning what for now?
A. We've seen Fister for three games, and in those three games he actually has looked a little bit like a poor man's Greg Maddux.
Jeter, after the Yankee game, summed it up along the lines of, "His fastball moves a lot, he changed speeds, he has good control. He just pitched a good game against us."
Which is pretty much how a postgame quote would have gone in Maddux' early years.
.................
As always, we remind that there are different strata of abilities within a template. Kershaw and CC Sabathia and Matt Thornton pitch in the Sandy Koufax template.
But Doogie has been pitching very well in the Greg Maddux template, and his results in AAA and the AL haven't been an accident.
Cheers,
Dr D
Comments
Well, I mean if his sub 1 BB/9 was really due to improved skill in '09 then it would really be interesting. Its more likely a short term blip though (his Strike% was very good but not Raffy Betancourt '07 territory in AAA), and maybe hes more of a 2 BB/9 guy.
His results in AAA were good, but they weren't amazing. Giving credit for the miniscule BB/9 he was a 3.65 FIP guy in AAA. Good, not awesome.
What IS amazing is that his skill set so far hasn't suffered much of any decline in the jump from AAA to MLB, and his SwS% has actually improved (my theory is that hes throwing his changeup more often in MLB). Perhaps hes just one of those guys that rarely misses down the middle. Thats what we're going to find out.
...even assuming his career minor league 2.2 BB/9 is the norm (and I think that's the best assumption), he's a 6 K, 2BB, 1 HR control type pitcher. There are lots of those who go on to run 10 years of 3.5 to 4.5 ERAs moving up and down depending on the quality of the defense behind them and the luck of when their HRs get hit.
Ya, that was the type of pitcher he was in the minors, and if he can bring that over directly to the majors than hes going to be pretty valuable.
So far in the big leagues hes been able to bring that skill set over. Hes becoming interesting as long as the command stays consistent. We'll see.
except maybe to make a front-pager out of that...
Thanks for the list of players to comp to bro'.
Not sure whether 6.6 / 2.2 actually *is* Fister's current profile, or how much he has evolved very recently. His TTO could level in at 5.5/1.2/1.1 or 6.0/3.0/1.3 or something disastrous or... who knows.
Last two starts, which I take as representative, it's been what, 5.5 / 0.5 / 0.5. Of course a wild game here and there brings up the 0.5 BB's even if that's his usual, on a good day.