Bulls Pitching

The Bulls ought to be in Columbus, Ohio by now and possibly getting in a nap before game time. We are exactly seven times through the starting rotation, so let’s take a look at our pitching.

The top chart is the cumulative Fielding Independent Pitching and ERA numbers for the team as a whole. The last 20 games are plotted. Also plotted is a trend line for the FIP. I’m hoping that the statisticians among you don’t go nuts at plotting what amounts to a trend of a trend. But it does help illustrate the fact that our pitching has not been all that great the last 20 games. We have won 9 and lost 11 of those games and certainly the pitching contributed. On the other hand, you can see a distinct tick downwards that started before our last two wins. That’s a very good sign.

The second chart shows the individual pitchers’ FIP along with the team FIP. Easy to see why the Heath’s (Phillips and Rollins) are a concern. Otherwise, we know (hope) that Aneury Rodriguez is improving among the starters and similarly that De Los Santos may be settling down. Please note that the sample size, especially for relievers, is very small, so these numbers aren’t very useful except as a snapshot of where we are at the moment.

An oddity is that only four saves have been recorded. That’s because we have had very few close games. Only 7 1-run games, and we lost 5 of those. Another indicator of pitching performance is shutouts. We’ve only had one of those, a Rodriguez, De Los Santos, Thayer game back on April 20th.

The last chart is a sorted graph of strikeout to walks ratios. That's just for the heck of it since over at RaysProspects they just put up a table of similar data and we thought they might like to see what it looked like in a picture, at least for the Bulls.

Much more useful, except that we’ll never hear them, would be the opinions of Xavier Hernandez or Charlie Montoyo. Too bad we won’t hear anything but cliches from them. Actually, I don’t recall X. ever speaking on the record about anything.