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IcebreakerX, who is an NPB super-analyst and who has his own take on the matter, axs innocently ...

Doc, what's the best way to view the fact that that Tanaka's numbers have fallen across the board this season. BB/9 up, K/9 & K/BB down 2 years in a row. Also, as a league, the NPB has had a distinct offensive downturn the last three years, especially after the introduction of a less-bouncy ball (since reduced in less-bounciness). This makes me less excited about his numbers in general. However, he has done great at the WBC with the MLB ball, so there is that.

At the same time, I'm a fan of his talent but am lukewarm on his future. He's got a lot of millage on his arm and he's not a physical specimen like Darvish. He's more of a Matsuzaka meatball.

- See more at: http://seattlesportsinsider.com/article/masahiro-tanaka-video-analysis-g...

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Pitching Trendlines 101

The best way to view the trend is that --- > when you fan 9.6 batters, walk 1.0, and allow 0.3, there is nowhere to go but down.

Speaking as a guy who browses a lot of BaseballHQ Forecaster trendlines -- sets of K/BB/HR lines, across a number of years -- I can tell you that these would be two different situations:

When you are talking about outliers ... you see their strat-o-spheric numbers bounce up and down.  If the number bounces down a bit, three years in a row, and ... it's still gasp-inducing?  Then nobody worries about it.  They still pay $40 on draft day.

An example ... Greg Maddux peaked in 1995.  He went 19-2, 1.63, and his three true outcomes were 7.8 / 0.9 / 0.3.  There wasn't anywhere to go.  His "trend" was down in 1996 and 1997, but ... Mad Dog still had a few miles left in him.

Another quick example ... Max Scherzer was trending down, on swings-and-misses, for four years.  But it didn't mean that he was losing his stuff ... let's look at the first four years' worth of "trends":

What's next here?  What would you plot for Scherzer on this "trendline"?  

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The basic idea:  Scherzer is fanning TONS and TONS of guys.  He can drop from 10, to 8, for a lot of reasons -- the most likely reason being that he is choosing to strike out fewer guys.  He's throwing a pitch down in the zone rather than up in the zone.  But he's got oodles of whiffs in the tank when he wants them...

The BASIC lesson learned is that --- > when staggeringly great pitchers are bouncing around in the ozone layers, those meteorological readings aren't really "trends."  They're trends when they are occurring in more normal contexts.  

If Ichiro hits .363 one year, and .349 the next, and then .339, that's not really a trend.  Except that he's flying along as the best hitter in the league every year (the trend is flat).

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That said ....

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