SIERA Topic

I just had a debate with someone about Zach Britton and he used SIERA to show that Britton is only the 5th best reliever in baseball this season - despite the fact one of the pitchers ahead of him only has 16 IP, and Britton is leading all relievers in H/9, WHIP and ERA.

Generally speaking, a formula like SIERA is another reason why sabergeeks infuriate me. It heavily weights Ks and essentially writes off outs in play as luck. A pitcher's job is to limit baserunners and runs. It's clear that Britton is the best reliever in baseball this year, but the saber crowd needs to go find some complex formula to illustrate why he's NOT the best in baseball.

Mariano Rivera was the best closer ever - yet he rarely led in SIERA (if he did at all) and never topped 10 K/9. According to a metric like this, a lot of relievers were more effective than him. How do people defend that?

And for everyone's reference, the convoluted formula used to calculate SIERA is as follows:

6.145 - 16.986*(SO/PA) + 11.434*(BB/PA) - 1.858*((GB-FB-PU)/PA) + 7.653*((SO/PA)^2) +/- 6.664*(((GB-FB-PU)/PA)^2) + 10.130*(SO/PA)*((GB-FB-PU)/PA) - 5.195*(BB/PA)*((GB-FB-PU)/PA)
8/16/2016 1:27 PM (edited)
Ruben Sierra still thinks he got robbed of the 1989 MVP award.
8/16/2016 3:04 PM
he did. F' yount

Greenwell still ******* about '88.
8/18/2016 9:20 PM
greenwell was a Red Sox. they all whine.
8/19/2016 2:26 PM
8/19/2016 2:55 PM
Posted by Jtpsops on 8/16/2016 1:27:00 PM (view original):
I just had a debate with someone about Zach Britton and he used SIERA to show that Britton is only the 5th best reliever in baseball this season - despite the fact one of the pitchers ahead of him only has 16 IP, and Britton is leading all relievers in H/9, WHIP and ERA.

Generally speaking, a formula like SIERA is another reason why sabergeeks infuriate me. It heavily weights Ks and essentially writes off outs in play as luck. A pitcher's job is to limit baserunners and runs. It's clear that Britton is the best reliever in baseball this year, but the saber crowd needs to go find some complex formula to illustrate why he's NOT the best in baseball.

Mariano Rivera was the best closer ever - yet he rarely led in SIERA (if he did at all) and never topped 10 K/9. According to a metric like this, a lot of relievers were more effective than him. How do people defend that?

And for everyone's reference, the convoluted formula used to calculate SIERA is as follows:

6.145 - 16.986*(SO/PA) + 11.434*(BB/PA) - 1.858*((GB-FB-PU)/PA) + 7.653*((SO/PA)^2) +/- 6.664*(((GB-FB-PU)/PA)^2) + 10.130*(SO/PA)*((GB-FB-PU)/PA) - 5.195*(BB/PA)*((GB-FB-PU)/PA)
I think Britton has been awesome and think it's probably disingenuous for someone to downplay how good he has been by using SIERRA.

That being said, if you were trying to answer a different question...maybe, "how good will Britton be next year?" it makes sense to look at things like his almost 90% strand rate (kinda high, probably a little lucky), his walk rate (kinda high for an elite reliever), his strikeout rate (low for an elite reliever, but not his weapon, groundballs are), and his BABIP (low especially because he gets so many outs on groundballs) and think that maybe things regress for him going forward.
8/19/2016 3:18 PM (edited)
I think it's fair to say that the last 2 seasons are probably a fairer representation of Britton's talent level than this season. But if he regresses to a high-1s ERA I think I can live with that.
8/20/2016 12:05 AM
With regards to the BABIP, it's worth pointing out that his BIS hard-hit rate is only 14.9%. The next-closest number to that is Jeremy Jeffress' at 18.1%, and nobody else with at least 40 IP is below 20%. In other words, with a single exception, the best pitchers (SP and RP) in the league are giving up better than 35% more hard-hit balls than Britton. That does tend to keep your BABIP low. Of course, the big caveat is that the hard-hit formula is proprietary and not based exclusively on exit velocity. If BIS considers groundballs to be automatically "softer hit," that would make Britton's numbers in these metrics very good without actually meaning a whole lot. But you could also see why hitters would have a hard time barrelling up his fastball.
8/20/2016 5:05 AM
Let G be the category of non-abelian semi-spectral group-topoi, and let F be the derived cohomology functor associated to the semi-stable simplicial bundles over the generic co-frame complex B of the universal stack fibered over the Mori dream space by twisted copies of hyper-Kaehler Cayley graphs of the derived fundamental groups (twisted in the usual way by the discrete Laplace-Beltrami operator) of the universal cover of the schemification of the category G.
8/20/2016 5:26 AM
Posted by dahsdebater on 8/20/2016 5:05:00 AM (view original):
With regards to the BABIP, it's worth pointing out that his BIS hard-hit rate is only 14.9%. The next-closest number to that is Jeremy Jeffress' at 18.1%, and nobody else with at least 40 IP is below 20%. In other words, with a single exception, the best pitchers (SP and RP) in the league are giving up better than 35% more hard-hit balls than Britton. That does tend to keep your BABIP low. Of course, the big caveat is that the hard-hit formula is proprietary and not based exclusively on exit velocity. If BIS considers groundballs to be automatically "softer hit," that would make Britton's numbers in these metrics very good without actually meaning a whole lot. But you could also see why hitters would have a hard time barrelling up his fastball.
Or it's just crazy good luck.
8/20/2016 10:14 AM
Posted by bronxcheer on 8/20/2016 5:26:00 AM (view original):
Let G be the category of non-abelian semi-spectral group-topoi, and let F be the derived cohomology functor associated to the semi-stable simplicial bundles over the generic co-frame complex B of the universal stack fibered over the Mori dream space by twisted copies of hyper-Kaehler Cayley graphs of the derived fundamental groups (twisted in the usual way by the discrete Laplace-Beltrami operator) of the universal cover of the schemification of the category G.
I'm still cracking up about this.
8/20/2016 11:32 AM
Posted by bad_luck on 8/20/2016 10:14:00 AM (view original):
Posted by dahsdebater on 8/20/2016 5:05:00 AM (view original):
With regards to the BABIP, it's worth pointing out that his BIS hard-hit rate is only 14.9%. The next-closest number to that is Jeremy Jeffress' at 18.1%, and nobody else with at least 40 IP is below 20%. In other words, with a single exception, the best pitchers (SP and RP) in the league are giving up better than 35% more hard-hit balls than Britton. That does tend to keep your BABIP low. Of course, the big caveat is that the hard-hit formula is proprietary and not based exclusively on exit velocity. If BIS considers groundballs to be automatically "softer hit," that would make Britton's numbers in these metrics very good without actually meaning a whole lot. But you could also see why hitters would have a hard time barrelling up his fastball.
Or it's just crazy good luck.
Maybe. Are you arguing that you don't give up fewer hits when nobody hits the ball hard against you?
8/20/2016 9:45 PM
Not at all. I just don't know if inducing weak contact at that rate is a skill that Britton developed this year or if it's just a fluke.
8/21/2016 12:35 AM
This is one of my issues though - the saber crowd seems to write off anything they don't like as luck.

I get that a K is better than a ball in play if you're a pitcher. But the high K pitchers are getting hit more than Britton this year. Miller's having a great year, but is still allowing more hits than Britton. You would probably say Miller has been unlucky in some capacity when really, hitters are just finding a way to put better swings on his pitches overall than they are on Britton's pitches.

Britton throws one of the best pitches in the majors that is designed to induce swings and misses or weak contact. And it accomplishes just that. So I don't see how that's luck, especially if a pitcher has a semi-competent infield defense behind him.
8/22/2016 1:40 PM
Yep, it doesn't make sense then it has to be luck.Pitching to contact is a learned skill. If a pitcher is good at it, it ain't luck.

For a setup or closer, a K is better. Therefore stats tend to be skewed toward the guys that have high K/9 figures. In reality, it shouldn't matter 'how' they get the outs, just as so long as they get them. Shouldn't it be all about results?? The only stat that REALLY matters is the all mighty Win. You don't get extra points for pretty.

Britton this year is getting results this season.
8/22/2016 2:48 PM
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