After ranking our Top 20 hitters of 2013 here and here, we’re back with two lists of pitchers.

Once again, this is just our “camera angle.”  We do not purport to have rendered all other baseball analysis obsolete, nor do we claim to “prove” that one player is better than another.  We are simply pointing out the interesting results that one gets when one examines the overlap of certain “non-random” results.

The philosophical background is here and here, and expounded upon here.

Relief pitchers are difficult to measure for a variety of reasons.  First, they don’t face a huge number of batters, so there isn’t as much data (some would call this “small sample size”; I don’t but that’s just me; I call it “small amount of data”).  Second, since the manager selects when they go into the game, they are more likely to pitch in situations that are favorable to their strengths.

So it’s not surprising that relief pitchers generally rank much higher than starters on our metrics, and these results don’t necessarily indicate that these pitchers would have the same level of success pitching as starters.

The minimum number of batters faced for ranking is 200.

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10. Glen Perkins, Minnesota Twins

Full article at Mariner Brainstorm: here.