death has an interesting strategy.   Sign a bunch of mediocre pitchers and no hit/good field position players.   Put them in a pitcher's park and lose an assload of 2-1 games.  Then point out how one of those mediocre pitchers shines for him.  He only wins 70 games but one of his 6 turd pitchers will produce some good numbers.  And death hangs his hat on that.

It is much easier to find success from pitchers with high control and relatively low splits than it is from pitchers with high splits and relatively low control.

Pitches are great; splits are great. Control is the only thing I view as a necessity, largely because the higher control pitchers will outperform their consensus expectations far more often than the lower control guys will.

Are there exceptions to that general rule? Of course. But the good productive seasons from the low control guys are less common, and when things go bad, the bad seasons from those guys are generally *much* worse than what you'd get if you focus on control at the expense of splits.

I disagree- I have been disappointed by so many high control guys that I barely even pay the rating any regard anymore.

Posted by deanod on 9/14/2010 2:04:00 AM (view original):
I disagree- I have been disappointed by so many high control guys that I barely even pay the rating any regard anymore.

Clicking on your username, I see that you have considerable success in HBD, so I was surprised by this statement. I was interested on how you were able to achieve such success ignoring what I believe to be the most important rating for pitchers, so I went to check your teams to see what sort of low control pitchers you were getting such good returns with.

Toronto Irrelevants (Team ERA 3.58)
Pitchers in order of IP highest to lowest
Name of pitcher with 25+ IP (Control Rating)

Tom Wells (90)
Andres Perez (87)
Will Rowan (91)
Marc Nelson (79)
Dan Wagner (86)
Bruce Smith (78)
Roger Farley (65)
Craig Ducati (91)
Santiago Flores (79)
Pedro Gabriel (86)
Larry Harper (74)

Cincinnati Reds (Team ERA 3.57)
Pitchers in order of IP highest to lowest
Name of pitcher (Control Rating)

Carlos Olivares (82)
Alex Herrera (86)
Alex Jones (85)
Glenn Campbell (86)
Jose Alvarez (68)
Stu Van Poppel (83)
Orlando Perez (68)
Louie Cela (91)
Billy Priest (86)
Lance Jennings (89)
Brendan Ludwick (89)

Las Vegas Ballers (Team ERA 3.92)
Pitchers in order of IP highest to lowest
Name of pitcher with 25+ IP (Control Rating)

David Sanchez (88)
Francisco Armas (78)
Eddie Thomas (86)
Santos Martinez (83)
Sean McInerney (73)
John Ashley (79)
Max Almonte (82)
Tom Sprague (79)
Dusty Brock (81)
Art Hall (79)
Tommy Gibbons (84)
Placido Olivares (80)
Jose Armas (78)

If you "barely even pay the [control] rating any regard anymore", then you've managed to - by pure luck - accumulate 3 complete staffs full of good control pitchers who are performing exceptionally well. For those of us without such luck, we can only hope to recreate that success by looking *at* control and trying to accumulate such high-control pitchers.

Good productive seasons from low control pitchers could be less common because few people use them.   And, of course, you have to determine "low control".

After your exercise with deano's teams, I did a quick check of mine.   I'm not a "must have 70 control" guy.   I put no more emphasis on control than I do pitches.  Maybe less(I'll use a pitcher with 42 control but ignore a pitcher whose 2nd best pitch is 42).   But I don't have a staff of 48-55 control pitchers either.   I've got a few sprinkled in but I only have 9 below 70 on my three currently active teams.

Posted by MikeT23 on 9/14/2010 6:54:00 AM (view original):
Good productive seasons from low control pitchers could be less common because few people use them.   And, of course, you have to determine "low control".

After your exercise with deano's teams, I did a quick check of mine.   I'm not a "must have 70 control" guy.   I put no more emphasis on control than I do pitches.  Maybe less(I'll use a pitcher with 42 control but ignore a pitcher whose 2nd best pitch is 42).   But I don't have a staff of 48-55 control pitchers either.   I've got a few sprinkled in but I only have 9 below 70 on my three currently active teams.

No question that - in terms of the raw number of "productive seasons" - there are more from "non low control pitchers" than from "low control pitchers" (however you define low control), largely due to the fact that low control pitchers are often not given the full opportunity (by owners such as myself).

That's a little bit different then saying the low control is less likely to produce a productive season - which is what I am saying, based on my own experience. 

It's interesting that, even with owners who admittedly don't place nearly the same emphasis on control that I do, most successful squads have higher control pitchers rather than lower control ones.

It is possible that, on some level, even those who don't focus on control recognize it's relative value and (perhaps inadvertently) tend to accumulate those types of pitchers?

FWIW, I have 5 pitchers with under 70 control currently on my 4 ML rosters, but two are on a S2 team that isn't made up of all "my type" of pitchers yet, and a third is a late-season FA addition whose job is just to eat meaningless innings.

In my experience, low control guys tend to be a little more erratic(somewhat like real life).   Using the guy I posted earlier as an example, http://www.whatifsports.com/HBD/Pages/Popups/PlayerProfile.aspx?pid=2487550, I expect him to the 1.50 WHIP, 4.50 ERA guy.   I can live with that from a SP4/5 or LR.  In his first full season, he was better than that.   However, his career numbers are too high with the ERA.   The difference between his first full season and this year is homers.  His OAV/OBP are consistent.   But, if you're going to walk people, you can't give up homers.  So, when he hits Arb2, I'll throw the ratings out the window and look at his numbers.   He'll have pitched for me for 4 full seasons.    If he's 1.5/4.5, I'll keep him.  If he's not, I'll cut him loose.   His ratings won't have changed but I'll go by his results simply because I don't "trust" the low control guys like I do the other pitchers(who are largely kept/released based on ratings).

In short, if they don't produce, they aren't kept.  That's why I think you see less low control pitchers on teams that say "I don't care that much about control".    I've long said that most of us look at a "negative" rating and then look for a reason to cut a guy loose.     I do the same thing with pitchers who have pitches of 72/65/38.   I wait until they don't produce to say "I knew it" and then let them go.

Posted by MikeT23 on 9/13/2010 7:29:00 PM (view original):
death has an interesting strategy.   Sign a bunch of mediocre pitchers and no hit/good field position players.   Put them in a pitcher's park and lose an assload of 2-1 games.  Then point out how one of those mediocre pitchers shines for him.  He only wins 70 games but one of his 6 turd pitchers will produce some good numbers.  And death hangs his hat on that.

NEVER won less than 74 with a team that wasn't an abandoned babysit job, you fat bastard.

You only average 74 wins a season.  STFU.

Record

1480-1760 (0.457)

Playoff Record

18-17

Division Titles

1

Championships

0

Saviour of the abandoned franchise!
Never scared to the hit to the record!
A measly 1 to 4 bucks for this public service!

ACKNOWLEDGE!

I don't believe you've ever taken an abandoned team.

Part of the problem with my ML pitching staffs is that they are most builtly on FA's with multiple seasons of performances that I will pay much higher regard than ratings.  So maybe by looking for performance driven players I'm inadvertently filtering out the low control guys who look good but perform like crap, but at the same time I never recall seeing many guys with controls in the 50's and splits/pitches to my liking.

So it mostly manifests itself in drafting/IFA signings, where I really don't care very much whether a guy projects to a 70 or 95 control (whereas this gap is huge for stuff like splits and P1 IMO), and I often will target a guy with control in the 50's or 60's who might be a good late slot value in the draft or under market value in IFA.

So what you're saying is, despite evidence in your FA signings that what you draft and sign for IFAs is crap, you still do it anyway?

Posted by deathinahole on 9/14/2010 10:51:00 AM (view original):
Saviour of the abandoned franchise!
Never scared to the hit to the record!
A measly 1 to 4 bucks for this public service!

ACKNOWLEDGE!

On that note, it'd be neat if they were able to put something on your history that showed which teams you took over mid-season.  I've got plenty of seasons (6 if my memory serves me correctly) that are a result of taking over an abandoned team, so my record will drop below .500 once Spahn rolls.  I don't care too much about my record, so it's not that big of a deal (and I like helping out worlds that have an abandoned team), but it'd be nice if there were a way to differentiate the two.

The chicks love us anyway.