Kenley Jansen..

54 IP, 1.04 WHIP, 16.1 K/9

Al Alburquerque

43 IP, 1.15 WHIP, .142 OAV, 0.00 HR/9, 13.9 K/9

Mike Adams' split season with the '11 Padres gives him the 2 best ERC# seasons of all time.

Jose Bautista 2011 is an A/A+ at 3B with a damn good 3.95 RRF. That makes him one of the 2 or 3 best 3Bs of all time and his 9.2mil salary reflects it.

I'm surprised by all the 200 inning pitchers with amazing ERC#'s.  Since 2001, 6 of the top 7 ERC#'s for 200+ inning pitchers are from 2011 (Verlander, Kershaw, Weaver, Hamels, Halladay, Cain).  

Going back to the start of the live ball era (1920 on) those 6 pitchers are all in the top 19 in ERC#.

Can that be right?

The first thing I saw was that Mike Napoli stole 4 bases!  

Doug Fister might be come  a high cap cookie with his 70 IP, .84 WHIP and .4 hr/9#.

All the guys above him in WHIP have the dreaded 1ip/g or less.

Posted by crazystengel on 10/3/2011 1:28:00 PM (view original):
I'm surprised by all the 200 inning pitchers with amazing ERC#'s.  Since 2001, 6 of the top 7 ERC#'s for 200+ inning pitchers are from 2011 (Verlander, Kershaw, Weaver, Hamels, Halladay, Cain).  

Going back to the start of the live ball era (1920 on) those 6 pitchers are all in the top 19 in ERC#.

Can that be right?

I don't think it is. I posted the top 10 ERC# pitchers in the post above.

Kershaw has a .212 oav#, a 2.13bb# and a 156 HR/9+
Koufax has a WORSE ERC# with a .186 oav#, 2.02bb# and 116 HR/9+, and Unit has a worse ERC# with better numbers in all 3 categories (OAV, HR9+ and BB#)

Yeah, I can't help but think some of these ERC#'s are wrong.  Verlander and Kershaw are both top ten all-time with a minimum of 200 innings, Weaver and Hamels top 20.  Verlander had one of the best seasons of the last 10 years but not THAT good.

On top of that, there are 8 seasons in the sim with a sub-1.00 ERC#, half of them are 2011 pitchers.  The others are '09 Mike Adams, Milacki, Eck and Gagne.


edit: forget Joey Bats, teammate Brett Lawrie has a new sim-best 4.65 RRF at 3B.

The ERC #s appear to jive.  Was it that dominant of a pitching season for the elite pitchers versus the league average?  As a Reds' fan, I certainly wasn't aware of this as our hitting and pitching stunk.

2011 Verlander
ERC:  1.44
ERC+: 273.97
ERC#:  1.422

65 Koufax
ERC: 1.56
ERC+: 220
ERC#: 1.67

2004 Johnson
ERC: 1.82
ERC+: 236
ERC#: 1.70

The + numbers are how the player fared vs the league average. Here, you can see Verlander was better than Koufax and Johnson compared to their league average. This carries through to the ERC# numbers.

These other guys:  Weaver, Kershaw, Hamels -- they all had phenomenal seasons compared to the league average, too.

Numbers, while surprising, appear to be accurate.

good stuff Tom, thanks for checking.

I'm curious where the ERC numbers are coming from.  Without doing a rigorous search/comparison, the ERC numbers on ESPN.com are nearly identical to those on WIS at least as far back as 2006.  For the most part they're within 0.10 of each other.  But 2011, ESPN shows Justin Verlander, for example, at 1.92, WIS has him at 1.44.  ESPN has Kershaw at 2.01 vs. 1.50 for WIS.  Weaver 2.27/1.71, Hamels 2.25/1.68.  Why are the other years so similar but 2011 so starkly different?

Sergio Romo is just amazing.  One of the highest $/IP in the database!

Maybe WIS regarded this year as a super "pitchers" year.  Runs were down alot this year but wouldnt that bring the ERC#'s up a little? Maybe WIS wanted to stir up interest? I wonder why the difference too between WIF and ESPN? Weaver seems like a pretty good buy, Verlander was pretty awesome this year.

I just did a search for pitchers, 1885-2010, with an ERC# of 1.50 or under -- in those 126 seasons there were 107 (an average of .85 per season).

In 2011, there are 31 pitchers with an ERC# of 1.50 or under. 

Now, 7 of those 31 belong to 2 pitchers with split seasons, but even subtracting the 5 "extra" seasons of those 2 pitchers that's 26 pitchers with ERC#'s of 1.50 or under.

So out of 127 MLB seasons, 26 of the top 133 ERC#'s -- 19.5% -- came from 2011?

Of course nearly all of those pitchers were relievers with fewer than 80 innings pitched.  So let's expand it a bit.  Let's look at only 200 inning or more pitchers with ERC#'s of 2.00 or under:

From 1885-2010, there were 77 200-inning pitchers with ERC#'s of 2.00 or under (an average of .61 a season).

In 2011, there are 11 200-inning pitchers with ERC#'s of 2.00 or under.

So out of 127 MLB seasons, 11 of the top 88 ERC#'s for 200 inning pitchers -- 12.5% -- came from 2011?

I don't know, but that seems off to me...