He’s learning,. He’s making some mistakes. It’s kind of painful at times. Adam had a tough night.

– Tony La Russa

I really don’t know what to say. I was embarrassed, I know that. My delivery was horrible today, and I’m pretty sure when I watch the tape back, [I'll see that] my mound presence was, too.

– Adam Wainwright

Along with the other bete noir of the team’s pitching staff, Kip Wells, Adam Wainwright is hurting himself with walks (among other things). After walking four Dodger batters yesterday — three of whom scored — Wainwright’s BB/G has now ballooned to 4.0 (Wells’s is 4.1). And not only is Wainwright giving up free passes (presumably because he doesn’t have command of his pitches right now and not because of injury), he’s giving them up in costly situations. We briefly noted the concept of weighted walks last week, so let’s continue to use that metric to review Wainwright’s walks last night:

We’ve discovered that the WPA impact from an average walk is about -.26, or, in the parlance of our weighted walks stat, 1.26. So, with an average adjBB last night of 1.30, Wainwright compounded the problems for himself (and the Cardinals) by giving up "bad" walks. On the year, he’s slightly worse than average at 1.27.

Wells, who starts tonight, has also given up his share of walks — 22 on the year. The cold comfort for Wells is that at least he’s not walking batters in bad situations, or at least as bad as they usually are: His season average adjBB is 1.21, well below that 1.26 average.

Let’s take the exercise a step further and apply weighted walks to the helpful rate stats of K/BB and BB/G. We’ll apply a factor that represents how much better or worse than average a pitcher’s weighted walks are. So, using .26 as average, Wells’s walks will be multiplied by 80.8% (which is .21 divided by .26), while Wainwright’s total is multiplied by 103.8% (.27/.26). We’ll throw in the Cardinals’ other two main starters for comparison — let’s start with their unadjusted stats:

And now the translated numbers, using the avg. adjBB for each pitcher:

The only effect that the translated numbers have on BB/9 rankings is Iron Cap trading places with Looper, though Wells improves considerably in all categories. Obviously, while adjusting stats for the impact of walks nuances them in a potentially useful way, it’s less important than the walks themselves. The bottom line is that Wainwright and Wells are going to have to reduce their walk rates and lessen the gap between the starters who are walk-plagued and those who aren’t. In three career starts vs. the Dodgers, Wells has a 2.95 BB/9, which is down a bit from his career rate of 4.09. That may not be much to hang your hat of hope upon, but it’s something.

This entry was posted by Pip on Wednesday, May 16th, 2007 at 12:03 pm and is filed under analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.