I like pitchers who have a good k/9 ratio. I've noticed that old time pitchers who normalize better for k/9 still don't seem to actually produce good k/9 numbers during play. For instance Chick Robitaille who I want to say has a real k/9 of around 4 and who normalizes at around 5.5 still only produces about 3 k/9 during play based on his performance history. Where as the modern pitchers you seem to get closer to their actual k/9 in performance. I'm sure someone has researched this before...wondering what the reason may be.

Ya, I noticed that too. One of Dizzy Dean's years he had a 15 K/9 # but had a 3 K/9 in my league and his actual K/9 is like 6. I noticed that BB/9# is pretty accurate though.

Could possibly be due to many of the hitters GM's draft do not have high K rates but they have high BB rates which affeccts pitchers performance.

Redsox - I had thought of that and you're probably right. I still find it odd tho that the modern pitchers still tend to have higher performance K/9 in comparison.

I've had pretty good results with the higher priced deadball pitchers. Pete Alexander comes to mind. Haven't really paid too much attention to it overall though. I keep my saved stat spreadsheets on my work computer so I'll look into my experience with it then because now I'm interested.

Posted by d_rock97 on 9/6/2015 4:29:00 PM (view original):
Ya, I noticed that too. One of Dizzy Dean's years he had a 15 K/9 # but had a 3 K/9 in my league and his actual K/9 is like 6. I noticed that BB/9# is pretty accurate though.

I'm pretty sure you mean Dazzy Vance.

FWIW, I just looked him up, and in his 140+ uses in the performance history that Vance averages 8.08 K/9.  It's certainly not his # number, but it IS slightly better than his real-life K/9 of ~7.55.

Yeah, it seems like the old time starters do pretty good with the k/9 performance...but not the guys with few innings pitched.

Unless you have very bad defense, does it matter how good your K rates are?

Nope.  They cost pitches.

Agreed.  In general I prefer low-K pitchers.

It is one of the (few but very important, in my opinion) flaws in the WIS algorithm that K is determined after the PA is already determined to be an out.

In other words, strikeouts do not prevent hits at all, except in the relatively rare occurrence that bad range turns an out into a hit.

It would be more realistic if the K determination happened prior to the out/hit determination, but it doesn't.  So strikeouts cost you (a) pitches (b) salary, to the extent that K-rate factors into salary at all.  Unless I have a very porous defense, I think $ is better spent elsewhere.

As far as deadball pitchers go, it appears that the more "realistic" K/9 numbers are only attained by dominant pitchers with the lowest ERC#s. This shows itself both in SPs and RPs in my data. Some examples...

'14 Dutch Leonard: 7.93 K/9#
Observed at 80M: 6.42 K/9
Observed at 147M: 5.34 K/9

'13 Walter Johnson: 7.15 K/9#
Observed at 147M: 5.63 K/9
Observed at 120M: 5.89 K/9

'15 Tim McCabe: 3.93 K/9#
Observed at 80M: 4.01 K/9
Observed at 120M: 3.57 K/9


Worth noting that the RPs numbers can, of course, vary more because of the smaller sample size that they provide. Regardless, the numbers still do not equal their real life K/9#, but neither do those of the modern pitchers I have data on. A quick example...

'95 Greg Maddux: 5.97 K/9#
Observed at 147M: 5.62 K/9

'13 Clayton Kershaw: 6.06 K/9#
Observed at 120M: 5.5 K/9

'68 Luis Tiant: 7.31 K/9#
Observed at 120M: 7.11 K/9


While even the elite deadball pitchers do not come quite as close to their K/9#, the non-elites, second-tiers, whatever you want to call them, perform much worse. Examples...

'06 Doc White: 4.27 K/9#
Observed at 80M: 2.1 K/9

'02 Bill Bernhard: 2.69 K/9#
Observed at 120M: 1.48 K/9
Observed at 80M: 1.86 K/9

'09 Harry Krause: 6.55 K/9#
Observed at 80M: 3.32 K/9

'06 Jack Pfiester: 6.36 K/9#
Observed at 80M: 3.49 K/9


As with anything else, there are also outliers even among the elite...

'08 Addie Joss: 3.82 K/9#
Observed at 80M: 1.77 K/9
Observed at 120M: 2.42 K/9

Keep in mind that the # numbers are not used anywhere in any calculation to determine the outcome of a PA, that we know of.  # numbers compare the batter or pitcher in part to the historical average, but historical averages do not affect individual PA.  They're a guide only, to show how a player's performance may be influenced in the long term by facing a fairly evenly distributed sample of opposing players from 1885-2014.  But as we all know, opposition is never evenly distributed across the historical spectrum.  Only the hitter and pitcher performance relative to their own league and season (the + stats) determine how heavily each stat is weighted in a PA calculation. 

K/9 is not likely even the figure used in determining the pitcher's contribution towards the calculation of a K.  In each pitcher's pop-up Draft Profile, in the Advanced Stats section there is K/100AB.  That's the figure that would probably be used in the calculation.  I assume that, similar to OAV, it is weighted by the pitcher's performance relative to his league and season (that would mean there's a K/100AB+ that is used to determine the pitcher's final K/100AB figure for the purposes of determining a K in an individual AB).

Given when in the decision tree strikeouts occur, it is almost certain that the true number used to determine strikeouts is some normalized k/out number.  Basically the same thing as for any other stats - we see HR/9 or HR/100 numbers, but really, the sim engine uses HR/hit.

Posted by dahsdebater on 9/8/2015 11:21:00 AM (view original):
Given when in the decision tree strikeouts occur, it is almost certain that the true number used to determine strikeouts is some normalized k/out number.  Basically the same thing as for any other stats - we see HR/9 or HR/100 numbers, but really, the sim engine uses HR/hit.

This is exactly correct based on my understanding (from the presentation Paul Bessire gave when he was at WIS in 2009).  It's always possible things have changed, but I doubt it.

And to reiterate my earlier point, it is a mistake to assume that high strikeout pitchers will allow fewer hits, all else being equal.  They will not.  Hits are a function of the pitcher's raw and normalized OAV.  Given two pitchers with the same raw and normalized OAV, the one with higher K rates (using whatever metric one chooses) will not allow fewer hits.